If you had been there in the Land of Israel (Matthew 2:20-21), in the unromantic streets of Jerusalem on another hot and sticky day in the First Century AD, in the tense streets lined with bored Roman occupation forces ready and willing to arrest and brutally crucify any they felt might raise a finger against Roman authority, in the bustling streets moving with common daily activities of merchants and bargaining vendors, of women with their children shopping in the outdoor markets, of poor beggars and groups of conflicting religious sects and revolutionary groups whispering politics, streets fragrant with the burning animal sacrifices rising on curling plumes of smoke in the temple courts, filled with the sounds of Jewish pilgrims from many tongues making their way through the winding streets to the temple to hear the teachings of many local and itinerant teachers and rabbis, if you had been there and seen amongst t he crowds a poor and common looking young Jewish rabbi and stone mason with his disciples as other rabbis and their disciples, his tunic damp with sweat as all others in that humid climate, if you were there with no Christian religious or messianic teaching and doctrine of seminaries and denominations, with no Christian religious history or holidays or customs or churches, with no book called the New Testament to study, with no clear and published doctrine of how a messiah was to appear, would you have dismissed him as just another interesting part of the rich fabric of Middle Eastern Jewry of the time, or believed that the young teacher was the fulfillment of ancient messianic prophecies that you may have never heard or read, would you have indeed believed him the Messiah son of David, the son of God, or God Himself? 

If you were walking the hot and sticky summer streets of Jerusalem today in the Twenty-First Century, seeing Jews of every tongue and culture and color walking its streets and buying and selling in its shops and malls, purchasing fish and vegetables and poultry and cheese and wine in its covered outdoor markets in exchanges of words in the Hebrew tongue, a language risen from the dead after not being spoken for nearly two thousand years of exile from the Land of Israel, if you saw the tribes of Israel gathered again from Kurdistan and Algeria, from Germany and Brazil and Morroco, from France and America and Russia and Yemen and Iraq, from Egypt and Argentina and Holland and Spain and Turkey and Canada and Ireland and Sweden and Ethiopia and endless other nations and languages, if you saw with your eyes the cities of Judah rebuilt and forests replanted and covering what had been barren hills for centuries, and grapevines restored to thei r former estates and fig trees and fish farms and dairy farms and grazing cattle and you tasted the delicious ice cream made from their milk, if you had watched for half a century as the Islamic neighbors of this people on this tiny restored land hatefully attempted to destroy and eradicate them from the face of the earth with their attacking armies of Allah and failing every time, if you had seen the invading armies of liquidation in 1967defeated in a somehow familiar number of six days by a much smaller Israeli force delivering the Holy City of Jerusalem into their hands on the seventh day after two thousand years, if you had seen the blind hatred in the eyes of these neighbors as they sent their children to murder old Jews who still have the numbers tatooed on their arms from the Nazi death camps, if you had seen Jewish people with the same names as their biblical fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Samuel and Joshua and David again in Jeru salem praying in earnest for delivrance from a surrounding sea of hatred to the same God as those fathers, if you saw the ancient scroll of Isaiah the prophet unrolled before your eyes after waiting silently for twenty centuries in a dry cave by the Dead Sea until being discovered by a goat in 1947, to speak again a year before the re-birth of the nation of Israel before the eyes of the nations, would you believe that this before your own eyes is but a coincidence, a quirk of history, a political accident, or would you see these events as the fulfillment of ancient Biblical prophecies of Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Jesus and Paul, a work performed by the hand of the living God and Creator of Israel and time and history according to His manifold promises and foreknowledge?