I’ve been in George Washington mode for a couple months – just finished a thousand page biography of him and am just starting another thousand pages on him. (Here’s the book I’m reading now.  Excellent, just excellent!) When I finish that book I have a little study plan mapped out in prep for Kaitlyn/my annual trip to DC and Mount Vernon in May.  Here’s an amazing thing I uncovered today (in light of what I dub “Recognition Theology” — (America as “Israel” or as an Israelite nation and the nation we call “Israel” today, to be Biblically precise, actually being Judah).

Prior to his public service, George Washington was a land surveyor (as was his father who died when George was 11.)  Using his father’s surveying equipment, as a young man, Washington surveyed and purchased land.  Below is a picture of the front cover of his surveyor’s notebook which as you can see, has some scribbles, a couple calculations, and a one-sentence, very cryptic quote in his own handwriting —- historians never mention this quote apparently disregarding it as being without context and therefore gibberish and entirely meaningless to us today.

Here’s the quote as it’s tough to read in the pic…

If you can’t find it in the book of Ezekiel, look for it in Israel.

It reads like a riddle – a prophetic surveyor’s riddle.

Google the riddle and you’ll see that absolutely nothing comes up.  It’s on no historical radar anywhere that I can find. Yet, Peter A. Lillback does mention it.  He discovered the page in the Library of Congress and he writes the following about why Washington might have written that on the cover of his surveyor’s notebook;

As Washington was taught the Scriptures by his Anglican childhood tutors, he learned that Israel was a nation marked out by very clear boundaries (Joshua 13-21), such as would be well understood by surveyors.  And the book of Ezekiel concludes with a remarkable survey of the New Jerusalem (Ezekiel 40-48). The young surveyor apparently autographed his official record with this observation.  His task in the pristine woods of the New World in some way reminded him of the Biblical accounts of marking off expanses of land that had been gifted by God. [George Washington’s Sacred Fire, by Peter L. Lillback, page 108-109]

Lillback obviously has a sense of what this is about— but I believe Washington knew that blood descendants of Abraham came here and that this land is the land of promise spoken of by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel and Joel.  It is foretold in Joel 2:20 that at the time they are attacked at the end of the age, the people of Israel will be occupying a vast land between an eastern and a western sea (America is the only non-island nation spanning from “sea to shining sea“). Perhaps you are aware that when Washington died, Thomas Jefferson wrote; “verily a great man hath fallen this day in Israel.”

What did these guys know about “Israel” that few recognize today? (Did you know Jefferson was a “Jew?”)

End Time Israel is not just a little nation in the Middle East but rather “a nation and company of nations” with a population as innumerable as the sand on the seashore, just as God told Abraham it would one day be.  Hosea 1:11 foretells the coming day when “the people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited...”

Judah = Jews. “Israel” refers to the ten northern Hebrew tribes – the blood descendants of Abraham who were scattered and migrated mainly through the Caucasus Mountains and populated Europe and eventually the New World. It appears Washington had some sense of these things.