Welcome to Prophecy Q & A with Jimmy DeYoung!
I cannot tell you where there will be two Jewish states before the Rapture, but there is going to be a second Jewish state which I believe will probably be sometime during the Tribulation period. Ezekiel 37:15-23 talks about God giving Ezekiel a prophecy. Take two sticks. Put Israel on one stick and Judah on the other. Put them in your hand, and while they are in your hand, the two sticks will become one. That is a prophecy of the two divisions of the Jewish people, Israel and Judah coming back together.
Some people say that it is the ten lost tribes of Israel. There is no such thing as ten lost tribes of Israel. Ezra is talking about the Medo-Persian Empire coming into power. The leader of the Medo-Persian Empire was Cyrus. 150 years before, Isaiah wrote a prophecy that in the time after the Babylonian captivity, God would raise up a man, Cyrus, who would allow the Jews to return to the land of Israel and build their temple. In 1 Kings 11, after King Solomon had been king of Israel for 40 years, his son, Rehoboam, was to take over, but he had an adversary named Jeroboam who was of the tribe of Ephraim. He decided that he did not want Rehoboam to be king to follow in his father’s footsteps. He rebelled and took the ten tribes that became known as Israel into the north. Rehoboam had the two remaining tribes, Judah and Benjamin, and continued on as the nation of Jewish people called Judah. This was in the time of King Solomon, almost 3.000 years ago.
Ultimately, the people from Nineveh, the Assyrians, came and took those ten tribes of the north into captivity. Later on, Nebuchadnezzar came into power and defeated the Assyrian empire. When you defeated an empire in biblical times, you took all of the people under your leadership. The ten tribes of the north, called Israel, were now under the Babylonian Empire, and all twelve tribes were now back together. In Ezra 2, Cyrus was raised up, leader of the Medo-Persian Empire, and allowed almost 50,000 people to go back into Israel under Zerubbabel. In Ezra 6, they have a service in the temple, and they slaughter 12 he-goats for the 12 tribes of Israel. All of the people of Israel were back in the land. In Matthew 10:5, Jesus told the people to go out witnessing. He told them not to go the house of the Gentiles, but to go to the whole house of Israel. Acts 2:5 says that on the day of Pentecost, when the church was begun, there were Jews from every nation of the world in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost.
All twelve tribes of Jews are back in the land of Israel. and that is the way it is today. Ezekiel 37 says that there will be another division. With all of the battles going on in Judea and Samaria about the Jewish settlements, the president of Israel says that they will have to expel some of those Jews in Judea and Samaria. If they are not in the major block of Jewish settlements, they will have to voluntarily give up or be taken out. This will lead to a second Jewish state which is already in operation. They already have a title, Judah. The two Jewish states will come back together when Jesus Christ comes back at the end of the Tribulation period.
Jimmy DeYoung was a prophecy teacher and journalist who travelled the country and the world educating the Body of Christ of the future events foretold in God’s prophetic Word. His goal was to equip Christians with the knowledge and understanding of what God’s Word says will happen someday soon, so that they can make better decisions today. Dr. DeYoung went home to be with his Savior on August 15, 2021.
