that was taken in 1948. I passed in a church once where there was a guy that was a missionary. He wasn't a member of the church. He was just with us for one day. And he had been to Israel every year for 20 or 30 years at the time. I don't remember how long that was or even who it was or when it was. But at any rate, he had been there for decades, every year. And every year he used to go to the identical locations and take a picture of what the land was like on that year. Then they go back there again the next year, and the next, and the next. And as you look at those pictures, you just stand there in a state of astonishment. When Marie and I were there in 1967, or 1977 I guess it was, somewhere around there, and we stood on the top of one of the mountains. We looked out over the valley that is going to be where the Battle of Armageddon is fought. I want to tell you that it was just green as far as you can see. It was a beautiful land. But yet when the Jewish people returned to the land, it was a land that was desolate. That's almost what it says here in Isaiah 1-7, that your country is desolate. That's exactly the condition they found it in. So the Bible declared that Israel would become a desolation. And after the Jewish people returned, it would once again become a land that is flowing with milk and honey, but that the Arab land, they would continue to be desolate. That's exactly what happened. We shouldn't be astonished by that. Ezekiel 36, 34, 35 put it this way. The desolate land shall be tilled instead of lying desolate in the sight of all who pass by. So they will say, this land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden, and the waste of desolate and ruined cities are now inhabited. Some eyewitnesses have written their memories about the land before the Jewish immigration. Let me give you a quotation from Mark Twain when he visited the Holy Land. He quotes, I'm going to read it, listen to what he says. There is not a solitary village throughout the whole extent of the valley of Jerusalem in Galilee, not for thirty miles in either direction. One may thrive ten miles hereabout and not see ten human beings. For this sort of solitude, to make one dreary, come to Galilee. Nazareth is forlorn. Jericho lies a moulting ruin. Bethlehem and Bethlehem in their power and poverty and humiliation are unattended by any living creature. A desolate country where the soil is white worthless, but it is given wholly over to weeds. A silent, mournful expanse, a desolation. We never saw a human being on a whole journey through Galilee. Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the alam tree and the cactus, those fast friends of worthless soil, have almost deserted the country. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes, desolate and lumbly. This is the land that was flowing with milk and honey. And when Isaiah wrote this, the land was a beautiful land, like the Garden of Eden, and it was almost unbelievable to the people that it would ever become like that. But as God said it, so it has happened. And in 1948, when they went back, that is exactly what the Jewish people have found. And then I would draw your attention, if you will, back to Isaiah chapter 11, the section that was read this morning, Isaiah chapter 11. And we find there the fact that the Jews, it was predicted of them, that when they returned to Palestine, they would return by flying through the air like birds. Now we just take that for granted, because most of us have been in airplanes frequently. But you know, there was a day before these guys by the name of the Wraith Brothers invented the airplanes, Nobody ever flew, ever, in the history of the world. But yet here we are, Isaiah, a man who thousands of years ago, listen to what he says in Isaiah 11 and verse 14. Listen. But they, that is those returning to fill Israel, shall fly down upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward the west. I just want that one part of the scripture, ring clear in your ears. They shall fly on the shoulders of the Philistines. How could a person in the ancient world predict that people would fly in the air in what we today call airplanes? It would have done him no good whatsoever.