Jerusalem Desolated Seventy Years

Nebuchadnezzar, after blinding King Zedekiah, deported him and the people to Babylonia, and utterly destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple with fire. The Bible says that the city lay desolate for seventy years.

Those seventy years of desolation of Jerusalem are Scripturally declared to have been a punishment upon the Israelites for not properly keeping their Jubilee years, which God had appointed them. Every fiftieth year was to be a Jubilee year, when all debts expired and all property was to be returned to its original owner--typifying the coming "Times of Restitution." (Acts 3:19-21.) But the Israelites, like all other peoples, were selfish. They knew that this observance would mean loss. Hence they kept these Jubilee Sabbaths very imperfectly for awhile, and gradually discontinued them.

God explains that the seventy years' desolation following the taking of the Israelites into captivity was a substitute for the whole number of Jubilee years. This we read was, "to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths; for so long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years."-- 2 Chronicles 36:21; Jeremiah 25:11.

Bible students reason that if the entire number of Jubilees was to be seventy, and if the Jubilee cycles were forty-nine years each, then seventy cycles from the time the Jubilees were instituted would mark the beginning of the Antitypical Jubilee--the "Times of Restitution." This they reckon somewhere about the year A.D. 1874. 

Many hold that we are living in the time when the Antitypical Jubilee is being inaugurated; mankind will return gradually to all their rights and privileges for a thousand years. The present social unrest is incidental to the great change. We are living in the beginning of the New Era. Growing intelligence is bringing emancipation, and shortly the Messianic Kingdom will multiply the blessings and wipe out the curse.--Revelation 21:4,5.