Subject: What Is The Restoration?
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 23:41:33 +0000
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"

From:          Sharon Harrison
To:            heb_roots_chr@geocities.com
Subject:       What Is The Restoration?

What Is The Restoration?

When they therefore were come together, they asked of Him, saying, Lord,
wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?  And He said
to them, it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the
Father hath put in his own power." 
Acts 1:6-7

Recently, a friend sent me some texts of messages she had received, and
asked me my opinion of them.  In one of these messages, the writer
attempted to explain the restoration spoken of in this passage in Acts.
He explained the passage in this way:

"Then comes the end of all time and all flesh as now the complete
restoration has come and the purpose for which man was created - to
take the place of the angels that fell (Lucifer and the demons) and
worship will be restored back into the eternal kingdom of God.Here is
the clear purpose and intent of God. He made man to fill the place
vacated by angels that left their place in the eternal kingdom of God."

This writer obviously believes the restoration spoken of here is
referring to the angels who at one time worshipped God, but then fell by
disobedience and became Satan and his forces of evil. In his view, God
then decided to save mankind and "restore" the original angel worship by
human worship.  I hear different versions of this in different groups
and denominations today. No one seems to have a clue regarding the
"restoration."  Here, the writer seems to be saying that the original
purposes of God just didn't pan out the way He thought in Plan A, so He
came up with Plan B.  Another stanza to this same song is that God
brought His salvation through the law to the Jews, but that didn't work,
so He had to come up with something else.  Wait a minute!  Either God is
Sovereign (in COMPLETE control of all things, or He is not.....He can't
be semi-sovereign!  God's plan was ordained BEFORE the creation of the
universe and it has never changed.  Revelation 13:8 speaks of Yeshua as
the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."  Eph. 1:4 says, "just
as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world..."  I Peter
1:20 tells us, "He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the
world, but was manifest in these last times for you."  God's plan has
always been the same:  He would create this world and from it, He would
call out a people for His glory and honor. In the Old Testament this
people understood the blood sacrifices were a picture of the atonement
of the Messiah and they looked foward in faith to His coming.  Believers
today see the atonement of Yeshua Messiah in the past and know that it
covers their sin.  

We all have an errant tendency to try to "create" a god in our own image
and likeness, one we can understand.  I call this the "god in a box 
syndrome." We have
a desire to fashion a god that we can logically understand.  However,
the true God has absolutely no limitations and cannot be fathomed by
mere mankind.  The more we learn about Him in scripture, the more we
know that He is beyond our grasp of understanding.  We, like Job, must
just bow before Him in complete wonder and adoration.  "Then Job replied
to the Lord: 'I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be
thwarted......surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too
wonderful for me to know." Job 42:2-3  Actually, a god that I can
completely understand would not be much of a god at all!

This awesome God of the universe, as we have seen above, chose a people
who would serve Him even before the foundation of the world. The Book of
Genesis shows us the godly line and how God chose a people.  There were
times when those who responded to Him were not many in number.  There
were only eight people aboard the ark, but He has always kept a remnant
for Himself.  That line came down through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and
then through their descendents, the children of Israel. The new covenant
very clearly ONLY pertains to these two houses of Israel.  Read Jeremiah
31:31  "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a
new covenant with the HOUSE OF ISRAEL and with the HOUSE OF JUDAH  -- 
not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day
that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My
covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the
LORD."  This is the reason many church men came up with the idea of
replacement theology.  They read this passage and knew that they either
had to be Israel or the New Covenant was not for them, so they
erroneously assumed that the New Testament church had replaced Israel.
What they didn't realize is that every true believer must also be a
descendent of Abraham from one tribe or another or like, Ruth in the Old
Testament, a gentile grafted into Israel.  Now I cannot look around me
and pick out who is a descendent of Abraham and who is not.  But God
can!

I have studied the restoration spoken of in this Acts passage to some
extent and have come to the conclusion that one cannot understand this
by reading only the New Testament.  It was Jewish disciples who asked
this question and Yeshua knew exactly to what they were referring.  To
find the answer, one must go back to many prophetic scriptures in the
Old Testament. Here is an incomplete list:

Deut. 30:1-6; Ezekiel 11:16-17; Ezekiel 28:25-26; Ezekiel 20:34-42;
Ezekiel 34:11-16; Obadiah 15-18; Isaiah 45:22-25; Isaiah 66:18-24;
Neh.1:9; Zech. 10:8-10; Jer. 31:7-9; Jer. 50:4-5, 19-20; Amos 9:9-15;
Micah 2:12-13; Joel 3:1-7; Hosea 14; Zech. 10:8-10; and especially the
whole chapter of Ezekiel 37

I have many more marked in my Bible.  All of these passages speak of the
time when ALL the tribes of Israel will come back together to the land
promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  The disciples thought Yeshua was
going to do this at His first coming. They were confused when He said He
was going away for a time.  Why did they think that?  Because many of
the scriptures relating to the Messiah in the Old Testament speak of Him
in both His role of Suffering Servant and His role of Reigning King. 
Isaiah 9:6 speaks of his birth as a baby on this earth, but also His
rule as King of the whole earth.  "For unto us a child is born, to us a
son is given, AND the government will be upon His shoulders...."  The
early readers of this passage had no way of seeing a huge time gap
between the two parts divided by the word AND.  There are many passages
like this where the prophets looked at the future Messiah and saw both
His first coming and His second coming and put the two together.  The
disciples thought since the Messiah had completed the redemption part of
His plan, He would surely now complete the restoration part of His
plan.  They did not realize that it would be over 2000 years before He
would bring all the tribes of Israel which had been "swallowed up" among
the nations according to Hosea 8:8 return them to a love of the Jewish
Messiah and the truth of the Torah.

That word, "swallowed" is very interesting in the original Hebrew.  It
is the Strong's word number 1104  bala` (baw-lah') meaning "to make away
with (specifically by swallowing)."  Angus Wooten in an article in the
Messianic Herald give us this insight:

"This word, bala, has the connotation of someone eating a piece of food,
and having it become a part of their body.  For example, today, try to
find or identify in your body, the food you ate last week.  Even so,
Ephraim was destined to be punished by being swallowed up by the Gentile
nations, and so to become an indistinguishable part of them."

The restoration spoken of in Acts pertains to the two houses of Israel:
Ephraim and Judah, who after the death of Solomon were constantly
fighting one another.  Ephraim, the northern kingdom, was taken into
captivity over a long period of time by the Assyrians and completely
assimilated by them.  They became the "melo ha goyim" (in Hebrew, "the
fullness of the gentiles") that was prophesied by Jacob to Joseph's son,
Ephraim, in Genesis 48:19 . The New International Version renders this:
"....and his descendants will become a group of nations."  They were
virtually dispersed all over the world, and today no one knows who they
are....but God does!  Paul speaks of this same restoration in Romans
11:25 ".....Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full
number of the Gentiles (the melo ha goyim) has come in.  And so ALL
Israel will be saved..."  Why will ALL Israel be saved? Because the
Sovereign King of the Universe has decreed that there is going to come a
day when He will gather up all of Israel - all twelve tribes - from one
end of this world to the other.  When He does that, He will restore the
kingdom to Israel and Yeshua, the Messiah, will sit upon the throne of
David in Jerusalem and rule over the whole earth for a thousand years.

"But wait!" I hear you say, "Do you mean if I am a true believer, then I
am part of one of the twelve tribes of Israel?"  The prophet, Hosea,
outlines the whole scenario for us. Hosea was a prophet to the northern
kingdom, often called either Israel or Ephraim in scripture. The
southern kingdom was called Judah and consisted of the tribes of Judah,
Benjamin and most of the Levitical priesthood.  After a period of exile
in Babylon, from 605 B.C. to 536 B.C., these people returned to the land
of Israel, reestablishing and maintaining temple worship and sacrifice
until 70 A.D. when Titus invaded the land and destroyed the temple.  The
northern kingdom, which we shall call Ephraim, was completely
assimilated by the Assyrians in 722 B.C., long before Judah was taken
captive into Babylon and are now sometimes called the "lost tribes of
Israel." Hosea was given a special message for these people.

Hosea was told by God to take an adulteress wife which symbolized the
spiritual adultery manifested by the northern tribes who consistently
tried to be like the Gentile pagan nations around them, taking on their
characteristics and worship of idols.  Hosea's wife bore him three
children, all of which were named by God to represent the plan God had
for this people.  The first was a son named Jezreel whose name means
"God scatters."  The Lord was telling Hosea that He was going to
scattered these tribes of Israel over the whole world.  The prophets
foretold this in other scripture, like Zechariah 10:9, "Though I scatter
them among the peoples, yet in distant lands they will remember me." 
The second child was a daughter which God called Lo-Ruhamah, the meaning
of which is "no mercy."  The third was a son.  "Then the Lord said,
"Call him Lo-Ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God." 
This sounds like God is totally rejecting these northern tribes from
ever being the people of God.  But no!  In the very next verse, God says
something amazing.  ".....In the place where it was said to them, 'You
are not my people,' they will be called 'sons of the living God.'  The
people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited and they will
appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be
the day of Jezreel."  Hosea 1:10-11.  Again in Hosea 2:23, God says, "I
will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I
called "Not my loved one.  I will say to those called 'Not my people,'
'You are my people'; and they will say, 'You are my God.'"  So we see
that although the northern kingdom, Ephraim, was rejected for a time,
God promised that He would bring her back and restore her to Himself. 
Paul plainly tells us that these verses are about the Gentiles who would
come to faith in the Messiah in Romans 9:23-25, "....he did this to make
the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he
prepared in advance for glory --- even us, whom he also called, not only
from the Jews but also from the Gentiles.  As he says in Hosea: I will
call them 'my people' who are not my people; and I will call her 'my
loved one' who is not my loved one."  Peter also speaks to this in I
Peter 2:9-10, "But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy
nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of
Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.  Once you
were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not
received mercy, but now you have received mercy."  So you tell me.  If
you are a believer, are you Israel or are you not?

Sharon Harrison

>From Eddie:
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       Thank you Sharon. This is all spelled out scripture by 
scripture in greater detail from Abraham to the restoration of the 
two houses in my book,  "Who is the Bride of Christ?" in Chapter 13 
entitled, "God's Covenant  with Abraham". It is located at:

 http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/2175/bridch13.html

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