“[The LORD] turned rivers into a desert, flowing springs into thirsty ground, and fruitful land into a salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who lived there” (Psa. 107:33,34).
Well over 100 years ago, as he surveyed the wastelands of the Middle East, R.C. Trench wrote: “God makes [a land] barren, and ever less capable of nourishing its inhabitants; but He makes it so through the sloth, the indolence, the selfish shortsightedness, the quarrels among themselves of those that should have dressed and kept it. In the condition of a land may be found the echo, the reflection, the transcript of the moral and spiritual condition of those that should cultivate it: where one [the people] is waste, the other [the land] will be waste also. Under the desolating curse of Mohammedan domination the fairest portions of the earth have gone back from a garden to a wilderness: but only let that people for whom Palestine is yet destined return to it again, and return a righteous nation, and in a little while all the descriptions of its earlier fertility will be more than borne out by its later fertility, and it will easily sustain its millions again.”
So indeed, the Land of Israel has begun — as Isaiah promised — to blossom as the rose (Isa. 35:1). Lands left as swamps by the Arab peoples have been drained and planted. Other lands, barren deserts, have been irrigated and fertilized. In all this, we see the beginnings of the fulfillment of Isaiah’s words (and Trench’s as well). But even now, we know it is only the beginning: that same Land of Promise will blossom yet further, and “the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt” (Amos 9:13), when God’s true — that is, repentant and truly righteous — people will be planted, no more to be uprooted from their Land (v. 15)!
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One