The great pyramid passages and chambers

delivered the Israelites from Egypt by his mighty hand and outstretched arm. But they were not yet prepared to be God's people. Because of the hardness of their hearts, they were not permitted to enter the land of promise for forty years. Then, after six years spent in conquering the Canaanites, they divided the promised land among them by lot, and God set Judges over them for a period of 450 years.

37 During all this time, God did not make good his promise of blessing the other nations of the world through the seed of Abraham. Though many great leaders, such as Moses and Joshua, arose and freed the Israelites from bondage, none of them proved to be the promised deliverer. At length the nation desired a king, and God gave them Saul, and later, David, ‘'a man after God's own heart,” and then followed the glorious reign of King Solomon in whose time the great temple was set up.

38 Surely it seemed as if God would now bring to pass his promise to bless through Abraham's seed all the families of the earth! But not so. Evidently the time had not yet come. The Israelites were not in a fit state, mentally and morally, to rule and bless the world. They lapsed time and again into idolatry and all manner of iniquity, till finally, six centuries before the birth of Christ, God permitted Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, to destroy Jerusalem, carry the Israelites with Zedekiah, the last of their kings, captive to Babylon, and lay waste the holy land. Seventy years passed, and the whole of that wicked generation died. Then in the fulness of time, in fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy (44:28; 45: 1—4), Cyrus, king of Persia, overthrew Babylon, and issued a decree permitting those Israelites who had faith in God and his promises to return and build the temple—See Jer. 25:11, 12; 2 Chron. 36:11-23. From that time a reformation movement went on in the Jewish house under the successive leadership of Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah.

39 Before this, God had promised through the prophet Daniel that “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem [this was the commission given in 454 B.C. by Artaxerxes, king of Persia, to Nehemiah] unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks,” that is to say, 69 weeks of years = 483 years. “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week,” the 70th week. Thus God promised a period of 70 weeks (490 years) of continued favour to the Israelites, to end in 36 A.D.—See Dan. 9: 24-27. It was doubtless in consequence of this that, when the Messiah did come, all men were in expectation—Luke 3:15. But they looked for a mighty king, statesman and general, who would deliver them from their Roman bondage, and make them the foremost nation on earth,—a method of blessing very different from that purposed by God. They were, accordingly, much disappointed with the meek and lowly Jesus. They could not understand him nor his message, and so they despised and rejected him. Yet he fulfilled in their sight the prophecies which had been written concerning him. As he himself said: ‘t The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good tidings preached to them "—Matt. 11:5. One might have expected that their hearts would have been touched with these manifestations of the love and power of God through Christ, but both Jews and Gentiles had become so degraded that they reviled and finally crucified the Holy One. And when the disciples who had gladly forsaken all to follow Jesus, manifested the same loving disposition as their Master, and tried to convey to others the blessing which

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