The People Shall Dwell Alone

By Lloyd Goodwin

“The people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.”  Num. 23:9.

The Jews have lived in the midst of all the great civilizations of the world.  These civilizations have died and perished, but the Jew has lived on because he dwelt alone.

God said he would sift the Jews among the nations as corn, “yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth.”  Amos 9:9.

God said, that when the Jews were in the land of their enemies, He would not reject them nor abhor them, nor destroy them utterly, but He would remember the covenant He made with their ancestors.  Lev. 26:44-45.

The mountains may depart, and the hills be removed; but My loving kindness and covenant will not be removed from Israel, said God.  Isaiah 54:10.

He also said, if the ordinances of the sun for a light by day, and the moon and the stars for a light by night should depart from Him, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me forever.  Jer. 31:35-36.

And again, if my covenant of day and night stand not, if I have not appointed the ordinances of Heaven and earth; then will I also cast away the seed of Jacob.  Jer. 33:25-26.

The uniqueness of the Jew is as old as the Jew himself.  They only numbered 70 souls when they went into Egypt to sojourn.  Why were they not swallowed up and assimilated by the Egyptian people as other peoples were?  Two hundred and fifteen years later they numbered almost three million souls, and were feared by the Egyptians.  Such manifest tokens of God’s watchfulness have followed them ever since. 

The survival of the Jew has been one of the most baffling historical phenomena the world has witnessed. 

The Jews religion has, from the earliest times, set him apart from the rest of mankind.

From the days of Baalim, Israel has dwelt alone.  Yet, for all their strangeness and aloneness, they have lived in the heart of all the great civilizations of the world’s history.  They were brought to birth as a nation in a land that was not theirs, wandered as nomads in a wilderness for a generation, waiting for the people of the land that had been promised them to become vile enough, so their God could be justified in uprooting them.

The land that was promised them was, as H. G. Wells said, an international highway linking Asia, Africa, and Europe; a natural land-bridge, linking these continents together.  The Jews were constantly getting run over, knocked back and forth by the great Gentile powers, and many times they were a pawn in their games of war.  Somehow the Jew clung to their ideals and persevered through religion, never successfully being swallowed for long by their captors, like the bush burning yet never being consumed.  They were like Jonah, being swallowed time and again by big Gentile whales, yet always being vomited up again.

The 3,500 year history of Israel is one of the strangest of human annals.  Israel has twice been uprooted from her land, and driven into exile, and for most of these centuries of her life she has had no land or country of her own.  Think of it!  The mighty nations of the ancient pagan world which came on the scene at the same time the Jews did have all disappeared.  The Philistines, the Canaanites, the mighty nation of the Hittites, Media-Persia, the sea-roving Phoenicians, the empire-building Babylonians, are all gone.  Yet the Jews, uprooted, living among them as captives, survived?  Why?

They watched the Babylonians build their empire out of the sands of Babylonia.  They stood in the streets of the ancient cities of Greece, Athens and Alexandria, and watched the culture-loving Greek strut by in their Golden age.  They followed the Roman Armies as they marched throughout the known world.  And then, stood at the grave side as Roman civilization was buried.  They prospered and flourished in the days of Mohammedan rule and civilization.  And, as dawn began to break on twelve hundred years of dark ages, they walked erect and unbowed, out of the ghettos of Europe – a people still to be reckoned with – an enigma still to be solved.  The Jews!

The Jew makes up less than one-quarter of one percent of the world’s total population.  There are about 14 million Jews in a world of over six billion people.

The Jew has sojourned and been an exile on every continent of the world, and marched through every civilization the past has produced.  The ages have seen the rise and fall of mighty peoples, but only the Jews have been endowed with eternity.  Sifted as corn among the nations, yet God said, there would never be a time that He would let the least one of them fall to the ground.  God Himself has watched over them throughout the ages!

The Jew has left no monuments, nor huge piles of stone to mark their passing.  The ancient people of Egypt, the Hittites, and the Greeks have left as a memorial of their greatness their pyramids, their ugly, lifeless gods, and beautiful statues.  The Jews did not and were not given to these things.  They dealt in ideas.  Paul said, “that unto them were committed the oracles of God.”  Rom. 3:2

These people who were to always dwell alone, these Israelites: “…to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenant,” Rom. 9:4.

The mission of this people who were destined of God to live in the heart of the world (for it has been said that the land of Israel is the heart of the world, that Jerusalem is the heart of Israel, and the Temple is the heart of Jerusalem), to this lonely people has been given the great responsibility of performing three great world-influencing missions.

Their legacy to the world was to be spiritual.

The Jews cam into history and the world picture rather late and inconspicuously.  For them, there was no stone age, bronze, or iron age.  They came to birth as slaves in a strange land.  They had no buildings, cities, armies, or weapons, and only the promise of a land to move to.  The one thing they did have – and this made them unique in the ancient world that produced them – was their revelation of God; which, boiled down, is an idea.  In a world of idolatry, they believed in and worshipped one God, and this God was invisible.  They subscribed to the idea of circumcision, and refused to offer human sacrifice.

These were strange, and even modern ideas for that day.  But it was these very ideas that preserved them, and kept them together as a nation.  It caused them to dwell alone, to be sure!  They were out of step and out of fellowship with their neighbors, but it created a purity that lengthened their national life.

To them it was given to receive, write, and preserve the revealed laws of God.  This was their first mission to the world; and for this, the world will forever be in their debt!

The Jew, by nature, was no different than the Gentiles that surrounded him.  And, he instinctively wanted to be like them.  His religion set him apart.

First, he worshipped one God, and this God was invisible!

Idols were repulsive and forbidden.  Circumcision was demanded.  He was forbidden the right to trim his beard, Lev. 19:27, and commanded to wear a ribband of blue around the border of his garment.  Num. 15:38.  His law also demanded one day of complete rest out of seven.  This, in itself, was a point of derision and the Gentiles made much of it.

The Jew himself has sought to make void this prophecy.  He has not wanted, in the past, to dwell alone, to be a people apart, to not be numbered among the people.  He has rebelled time and time again.

In the days of Samuel, they asked for a king to be over them.  This, in itself, was not bad, but they showed what was in their heart when they said, “That we also may be like all the nations.”  I Sam. 8:19-20

In the days of Ezekiel also, this desire was still strong, and they were yet saying, “We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries.”  Ezek. 20:32

It was because of this trait and tendency that God sent them into Babylonian captivity for seventy years.  For throughout the days of the first commonwealth, they constantly flirted and sought to be as their Gentile neighbors.  So, to cure them, God sent them into captivity.

Their second mission was to bring the Messiah to the world, and give Him to humanity!  In order to accomplish this, in the centuries before His coming, strict laws of segregation were imposed upon Israel that further separated him from his neighbors, and caused him to dwell in lonely isolation.  Many times these laws, and the reason for them, were not understood even by the Jews themselves, and this caused friction.

Their laws of marriage were strict.  Marriage was permitted only among themselves.  This created a closed communion, but it was necessary to preserve the blood lines that were to produce the Messiah.  These laws of marriage and segregation began with Abraham, and were never relaxed through the centuries, till the Messiah was born of two direct descendants of the house of David, of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham.  The lineage could be traced in an unbroken line all the way back to Abraham – forty-two generations!  Matthew, chapter one.

The last great world mission the Jews will be used of God to fulfill will bring to them an understanding, at last, as to the reason and the way of their strange past; their segregation and isolation from other nations, their strange customs and laws; the reason why they have had to dwell alone; for it has been God’s purpose and plan to make of them a nation of priests.  Exod. 19:6

Their last mission will be a mission to the world in which the Jew will figure personally.  For they will be used of God to carry the Gospel of Christ to the entire world as missionaries during the thousand-year reign of Christ!

So, their entire past has been for the purpose of preparing them for this final great work of harvest, a reaping of the Gentile world.

No longer to dwell alone, but now to be the pulse and heart of the world, with all nations coming up to Jerusalem from year to year to worship and learn of His ways.  A nation of Priests!  The Ministers of our God!  Isaiah 61:6

Never again to dwell alone!