OPINION: Ashley Church
There is something about Israel that feels bigger than politics and bigger than the events of the moment.
You might support Israel or oppose it. You might understand it well or badly. You might see the current conflict through the lens of security, terrorism, diplomacy, ideology or humanitarian concern. But whatever view you take, Israel doesn’t feel like just another country caught in just another war.
Because it isn’t.
One of the great mistakes of our age is to imagine that Israel’s story began on 7 October 2023, or in 1967, or in 1948. It didn’t. Israel’s story reaches back millennia. It is the story of a people who have known triumph and heartbreak, kingdom and exile, survival and near destruction. They have been hated, scattered, dismissed and repeatedly told that their story was over.
And yet it never was.
That matters because events only make sense in context, and context usually comes with the passage of time.
That’s a problem for us in the 21st century because everything is compressed into the events of the moment. We interpret the world through social media and the latest news headlines. We mistake the immediate for the important. We base our worldview on the issues of the day as we see them.
But time changes perspective – and sometimes it reveals patterns that are invisible at close range.
I have certainly found that in my own life. Like most people who have lived long enough, I can see the fullness of my life through a much longer lens than I could when I was young. The consequences of things that I did in my twenties and thirties played out decades later in my forties and fifties – mistakes, failures, and regrets, as well as successes and highlights – they all eventually come full circle and, if we’re open to it, God uses them to shape us. Some lessons are encouraging. Some are painful. Some are corrective – but, mostly, their lessons only made sense with time.
That is one reason the Bible’s language about time has come to mean more to me as I have grown older. Ecclesiastes says, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” That is not just poetry. It is how life works. There are seasons in the lives of individuals, and there are seasons in the affairs of nations and peoples as well.
And nowhere is that more obvious than in the history of the Jewish people.
What most of us see played out over a lifetime, the Jewish people have lived out over more than 3,000 years. They are not just another nation passing through history. They are central to the story of humanity because they are central to the purposes of God – a reality which explains why Israel continues to command such extraordinary attention from the world.
Their significance was never dependent on numbers, military strength or international approval. In fact, in purely human terms, the Jews should have disappeared long ago along with dozens of other peoples, kingdoms and cultures which have been absorbed, erased and forgotten.
But the Jewish people were preserved for a reason. Israel’s place in history is not accidental and once that is understood, modern events look very different.
You are not looking at a small nation caught in a regional dispute. You are looking at a people whose history carries prophetic significance, and whose continued existence points to something much bigger than war, diplomacy or headlines.
That’s why the events of recent years matter so much. Not because they are unprecedented – the Jewish story has always involved conflict, pressure, hatred and survival – but because they are another chapter in the long record of God’s dealings with a people He has never abandoned.
The world looks at Israel in fragments. One war at a time. One attack at a time. One government at a time. One crisis at a time. But Israel can’t be understood in fragments. Its significance lies in continuity – not just the last two years, or the last twenty, but over the long sweep of history.
Bible Prophecy, properly understood, is not a series of isolated predictions. It is about the consistency of God’s purpose across centuries. It is about the fact that history is not wandering aimlessly, and that Israel is not at the centre of the story by coincidence.
That’s the central theme at the heart of my book, Prophecy Shock. It looks back over more than two and a half thousand years of Jewish history to reveal the pattern, and the unmistakable evidence of God’s hand in history – passing through events in the recent past to arrive at where we are today. And the result? What looks chaotic up close reveals a perfect symmetry across the full arc of time.
The book launches next Wednesday at 12.01am and is an essential guide to anyone who wants to understand Israel not just as a current phenomenon, but as the central thread in a much bigger story. Feel free to put yourself on the waiting list for that announcement by going to www.prophecyshock.com
