Philip Mauro

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Philip Mauro

(1922)

From His Works, The Hope of Israel The Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation

The Significance of A.D.70 "It is greatly to be regretted that those who, in our day, give themselves to the study and exposition of prophecy, seem not to be aware of the immense significance of the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, which was accompanied by the extinction of Jewish national existence, and the dispersion of the Jewish people among all the nations.

The failure to recognize the significance of that event, and the vast amount of prophecy which it fulfilled, has been the cause of great confusion, for the necessary consequence of missing the past fulfilment of predicted events is to leave on our hands a mass of prophecies for which we must needs contrive fulfilments in the future.

The harmful results are two fold; for first, we are thus deprived of the evidential value, and the support to the faith, of those remarkable fulfilments of prophecy which are so clearly presented to us in authentic contemporary histories; and second, our vision of things to come is greatly obscured and confused by the transference to the future of predicted events which, in fact, have already happened, and whereof complete records have been preserved for our information."

"Yet, in the face of all this, we have today a widely held scheme of prophetic interpretation, which has for its very cornerstone the idea that, when God's time to remember His promised mercies to Israel shall at last have come, He will gather them into their ancient land again, only to pour upon them calamities and distresses far exceeding even the horrors which attended the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This is, we are convinced, an error of such magnitude as to derange the whole program of unfulfilled prophecy."

On Matthew 24:34 "The Lord's own predictions and warnings concerning that event, which was then close at hand, were most explicit. And not only so, but He plainly said that "all these things shall come upon this generation." Besides all that, He specified the very sins for which that generation was to be thus punished beyond anything known before, or that should be thereafter, thus making it a simple impossibility that the "tribulation" and "vengeance" which He predicted could fall upon any subsequent generation."

On Jeremiah 31:35-37 "But even if we disregard the context and confine our attention to the verses quoted in the article we are reviewing, it is plain that they contain no prediction that the earthly Israel is to be "restored as a nation." The promise they contain is that Israel should never cease from being a nation.

Now it is easy to see the fulfilment of this promise in Christ and His redeemed people; for "Israel" is perpetuated in that "peculiar people" (Tit. 2:14, I Pet. 2:9) just as David's line is maintained and perpetuated in Jesus Christ the Son of David risen from the dead (see also Mat. 21:43, where our Lord speaks of the new "nation").

But it is simply an impossibility that the prophecy that the seed of Israel should never "cease from being a nation" should apply to the natural seed of Jacob; for they have ceased from being a nation since the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70." ( The Hope of Israel, What Is It? - CHAPTER XIX)

On the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9:24 "We understand that the sense in which the death of Christ made an end of sins was that thereby he made a perfect atonement for sins, as written in Hebrews 1:3, 'when He had by Himself purged our sin,' and in many like passages." (The Seventy Week, p 47)

On the Forty Years and That Generation "Yet the predicted judgment did not immediately follow; for Christ prayed for His murderers in His dying hour, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Lu. 23:34). In answer to that prayer the full probationary period of forty years (A.D. 30 to A.D. 70) was added to their national existence, during which time repentance and remission of sins was preached to them in the Name of the crucified and risen One, and tens of thousands of Jews were saved. " (Seventy Weeks, ch. 5)

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