A Coincidence | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 7, 1871

A Coincidence.

In the course of our Bible reading we came, Feb. 28, 1871, to the narrative of the deliverance of the Jews from the malice of their enemies, as recorded in the book of Esther. We there read of the setting apart of the fourteenth and fifteenth days of the month Adar to be observed as festival days in commemoration of their escape from the wicked devices of Haman. And these days were called “Purim” from “Pur,” a lot; because Haman, the enemy of the Jews, had cast the lot, to consume and destroy them. And it was ordained, as we read in Esth. 9: 28, that “these days should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every family, every province, and every city; and that these days of Purim should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them from their seed.”

Turning from a contemplation of these wonderful events which took place 509 years before Christ, to the business of the day, we took up a daily paper, dated Feb. 27, 1871, and the first paragraph upon which our eyes rested was headed “The Purim Masquerade.” Then followed a notice of a celebration of this very feast of Purim, which was ordained two thousand three hundred and eighty years ago, to be held by the Jews in the city of Detroit, March 7, 1871! As we closed the Bible, our mind was upon a festival as it existed centuries ago. But as we turned to the present living, moving world, lo! the ancient institution appeared as a thing of to-day, carried abroad by the daily papers of this almost closing quarter of the nineteenth century. The Bible record and the newspaper notice lay side by side. There were almost twenty-four hundred years between them; and what a comment was the one upon the other! We behold a festival, as instituted in Asia over five hundred years before Christ; and passing down through an interval of nearly twenty-four hundred years, we see the same festival still celebrated by the same people, at our own doors and before our own eyes.

Let a person take his stand back in the far-distant year when this feast was instituted; let him be shown what calamities would befall the Jews, what defeats they would suffer, what an overthrow their country would experience, and what a dispersion among the nations of the earth, awaited them; and then ask him what would become of their institutions, or even of themselves. He would reply, Their institutions must cease, and they themselves be absorbed and lost among the nations of the earth. Such would have been man's prediction concerning them. Such, however, was not God's. And the facts of to-day show that man's prediction would have been wrong, but that God's was right; the Jew is still himself, and his ancient memorials are still observed.

What a monument testifying to the truthfulness of God's word are these scattered members of the Jewish race! The bald blasphemies, the bold denials, or the subtle sophistries, of the disbeliever in divine revelation, need no other answer. Look at the predictions concerning them; look at their history; and then look at them as they exist to-day. The preservation of their identity, though scattered through every nation under heaven, and their escape from destruction, though downtrodden, persecuted, and oppressed on every hand, are not fortuitous; and the wisdom which foretold all this, is higher than that of man.