“THE TURKEY TREE TAX”
“THE
TURKEY TREE TAX”
A
little history …
The
Bible is nothing but a history book … full of facts and figures … a
future
history book … it’s called prophecy.
Prophecy
is the future told in advance before it happens, and the Bible has
hundreds and
hundreds of them … God says “I will do this” and then he does it!
For
example, in the Book of Ezekiel, God states his purposes 59 times … and
says
that Israel might know that he is the LORD.
Prophecy
is not prediction, guesswork, “most likely will be”,
“hopefully” or “the
odds are”.
Now
there’s a prophecy spoken by Ezekiel … that God would scatter the
children of
Israel throughout the nations and make the land desolate … as follows …
“I (the LORD
God Almighty), even I, will bring a sword upon you … when ye
shall be
scattered through the countries … and make the land desolate,
yea, more
desolate than the wilderness …” (Ezekiel 6:3, 8, 14)
Now
history
tells us that Israel was under the control of Turkey from 1517 to
1917 …
and they utterly laid waste, and thoroughly destroyed the land.
How did
they do this?
In
their ‘wisdom’ the Turkish rulers enacted ridiculous laws … one of
which that taxes
had to be paid on live trees!
So what
did people do? Simple … the people cut down the trees so they
wouldn’t have
to pay any taxes. The country thereby became an absolute desert and
wretched wasteland.
The
Reverend Samuel Manning said in 1874 … “the land is left void and
desolate …
without inhabitants.”
It’s
amazing isn’t it … how the stupidity of man brings about the fulfilment
of
prophecy.
And God
works through desolation and barrenness … Abraham and Sarah … indeed,
after 400
years of barrenness after Malachi, Christ appears and so on.
“For he
shall grow up before him as a tender
plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form
nor
comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we
should desire
him.” (Isaiah 53:2)
Indeed
the world is now desolate and barren … as Christians look forward to
the
rapture.
And
then again, after seven years of tribulation, the world will be an
absolute ‘desolate’
and ‘barren’ cot-case … when the Lord Jesus Christ will return ‘as a
root
out of dry ground’ … but not as a tender plant …
and this
time … very comely and full of beauty (Revelation 19).
Harley
Hitchcock
May 2023
www.
AustralianBibleMinistries
.com
