What the Six-Day War Tells Us About God's Hand in History

The military facts of the Six-Day War of June 1967 are recounted elsewhere on these pages: how a tiny nation, outnumbered and encircled, prevailed in less than a week against the combined armies arrayed against it. But the deeper question for the Christian is not how the war was won. It is what the war means. For in those six days something happened that reaches beyond strategy and tactics into the realm of prophecy and providence — something that has caused believers across the world to look at the modern history of Israel and ask whether they are watching the hand of God move openly in the affairs of nations.

The Day Jerusalem Came Home

The single most significant event of the Six-Day War was not a battle in the desert but the recovery of a city. On the third day of the fighting, Israeli soldiers entered the Old City of Jerusalem, and for the first time in nineteen hundred years the heart of the ancient capital — including the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Temple — passed once more into Jewish hands. Hardened paratroopers who had never wept in battle stood at the Wall and broke down. They understood, even those who were not religious, that they had walked into the center of their people’s longing, the place toward which every prayer of two thousand years of exile had been directed.

It is difficult to overstate the prophetic weight of that moment. The Lord Jesus had spoken of a time when Jerusalem would be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. For nineteen centuries the city had indeed been trodden down, ruled by one foreign power after another. In June 1967 that long trampling was, in a visible and dramatic way, reversed. Whatever one’s precise understanding of the prophecy, no thoughtful reader of the Gospels could watch Jerusalem return to Jewish hands and feel nothing.

The Set Time to Favor Zion

The believer who looks at 1967 reaches naturally for the language of the psalmist, who foresaw a day when God would arise and have mercy upon Zion — for the set time, he wrote, the appointed time, had come. The psalm goes on to say that the Lord would build up Zion and appear in His glory, that He would regard the prayer of the destitute and not despise it, and that this would be written for the generation to come, that a people yet to be created might praise the Lord. The Christian Zionist does not claim to know the full timetable of heaven. But he reads of a “set time” for the favor of Zion, and he looks at the restoration of the city in his own century, and he is not ashamed to wonder whether the appointed hour the psalmist foresaw has drawn near.

This is the proper way to read the hand of God in history — not with the reckless confidence that decodes every event as a fulfilled verse, but with the reverent attention of a servant who knows his Master’s word and watches for its outworking. The Six-Day War did not fulfill all prophecy. It did not usher in the kingdom. But the return of Jerusalem to the Jewish people, after nineteen centuries, in the lifetime of people still living, is precisely the kind of event the prophets taught us to watch for. To shrug at it is not humility. It is inattention.

Providence, Not Presumption

How then do we speak of the hand of God in the Six-Day War without falling into presumption? We speak as the Scriptures themselves speak of God’s providence: with confidence in His sovereignty and humility about His timing. The Bible everywhere affirms that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, that He removes kings and sets up kings, that not a sparrow falls without the Father. If God governs the rise and fall of all nations, then He governs the history of Israel most particularly of all, for it is the nation He bound to Himself by covenant. The believer need not claim a private revelation about 1967 to affirm the plain teaching of Scripture: that the God who promised to restore His people is the same God who orders the events of history to His own ends.

And so the Six-Day War teaches us less about military genius than about divine faithfulness. It is one more chapter in a single, coherent story — the story this series has tried to trace.

The Whole Story, in Our Own Generation

Across this series we have followed a single thread through the modern history of Israel. We saw a nation born in a single day, exactly as Isaiah said a nation could be. We saw the very stones of the land confirm the record of the Book. We saw a people preserved through every army sent to destroy them, and their ancient capital restored after nineteen centuries. We saw a worldwide exile gathered home from the four corners of the earth, a dead language raised to living speech, a desert taught to bloom, and a people that should have vanished from history instead stand up as a sovereign nation. No single one of these wonders compels belief. But laid side by side, across the maps and the headlines of a single century, they form a testimony that the honest heart cannot easily dismiss.

This is what the Six-Day War, and the whole modern story of Israel, finally tells us about the hand of God in history: that He is still at work in it. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has not retired from the affairs of nations. He keeps His covenants. He fulfills His word. And He has chosen, in our own generation, to make bare His holy arm in the sight of all the nations — restoring His ancient people to their land, their language, and their city, that the ends of the earth might see and know that the Lord has spoken, and the Lord has done it. The friends of Israel watch, and give thanks, and pray for the peace of Jerusalem — until the day her King returns to reign.