The Period of Israel’s Exile and Return and the Period of the Papal Exile and Return

By falling into faithlessness without repentance, the people of Israel failed to realize the ideal of God’s nation founded upon the Temple. To make another attempt at fulfilling this Will, God had the people suffer hardships as exiles in Babylon. This was similar to when God had the Israelites suffer as slaves in Egypt to restore through indemnity Abraham’s mistake in the symbolic offering.

In the period of the Christian empire, God worked through the pope and the emperor to establish a kingdom prepared for Christ at his Second Coming. God’s intention was that ultimately they would bequeath the empire and the throne to the Messiah when he would come as the King of Kings and build God’s kingdom (Isa. 9:6); (Luke 1:33) upon that foundation.

Yet the emperors and popes became corrupt and did not repent. The popes did not lay the spiritual foundation upon which the emperors could stand as the central figures for the foundation of substance. Therefore, the foundation for the Second Advent of Christ was not established. To begin a new dispensation to restore this foundation, God allowed the popes to be taken into exile and suffer captivity.

In the earlier parallel period, nearly seventy years elapsed from the time King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took into captivity King Jehoiachin and his royal family, as well as prophets including Daniel and Ezekiel, priests, officials, craftsmen and many other Israelites, until the fall of Babylon and their liberation by the royal decree of King Cyrus (II Kings 24; 25); (II Chron. 36); (Jer. 29:10); (Jer. 39:1-10).

It then took another 140 years for the exiles to return to their homeland in three waves, until they fully reformed themselves as a nation united around the Will of God as proclaimed in the messianic prophecies of Malachi. Henceforth, they began to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. In the period of papal exile and return, which was to restore this period through indemnity in the form of substantial parallels, Western Christianity had to walk a similar course.

The popes and priests, sunk in immorality, gradually lost the confidence of the people. The authority of the papacy sank even lower due to the repeated defeats of the Crusades. The end of the Crusades saw the gradual collapse of the feudal system in Europe and the emergence of modern nation-states. As the power of secular monarchies grew, the conflict between the popes and the kings escalated. In one such conflict, King Philip IV, “the Fair,” of France imprisoned Pope Boniface VIII for a time. In 1309, Philip forced Pope Clement V to move the papacy from Rome to Avignon in southern France. For seventy years, successive popes lived there subject to the kings of France, until 1377 when Pope Gregory XI returned the papal residence to Rome.

After Gregory’s death, the cardinals elected an Italian, the Archbishop of Bari, as Pope Urban VI. However, a group of cardinals, mostly Frenchmen, rejected him, elected another pope, Clement VII, and established a rival papacy in Avignon. The Great Schism continued into the next century. To resolve this impasse, the cardinals from both camps held a council in Pisa, Italy, in 1409, which dismissed both the Roman and Avignon popes and appointed Alexander V as the legitimate pope. The two popes, however, refused to resign, creating for a short time the spectacle of three contending popes. Shortly afterwards, cardinals, bishops, theologians, royalty and their envoys gathered for the General Council of Constance (1414-1417). It dismissed all three popes and elected Martin V as the new pope, effectively ending the Great Schism.

The Council of Constance insisted that the general councils of the Church had supreme authority, greater than that of the pope and with the power to elect or depose him, and directed that subsequent councils be held at regular intervals.

Thus, it sought to reorganize the Roman church as a constitutional monarchy. However, in 1431, when delegates gathered for the next council, held in Basel, Switzerland, the pope tried to adjourn the meeting. The delegates refused to leave and carried on in the pope’s absence, but to no effect; in 1449, they finally disbanded. The plan to institutionalize a constitutional monarchy within the Roman church came to naught, and the papacy recovered the authority it had lost in 1309.

The leaders of the conciliar movement in the fifteenth century had tried to reform the corrupt papacy by setting up a representative council composed of bishops and laymen and giving it supreme authority. Nevertheless, the papacy ended up reasserting its full authority, as it had not enjoyed since before its exile.

Furthermore, these councils condemned more fundamental reforms as promoted by John Wycliffe (1330-1384) and Jan Hus (1373-1415), who was personally invited to attend the Council of Constance only to be burned at the stake. At that point, the die was cast for the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation.

This period of approximately 210 years ran from 1309, with the papacy’s seventy years of exile in Avignon, through the Great Schism, the conciliar movement and the restoration of papal authority in the Roman church, to the eve of the Protestant Reformation spearheaded by Martin Luther in 1517.

Its purpose was to restore through indemnity, in the form of substantial parallels, the 210-year period of Israel’s exile and return – from Israel’s seventy years of exile in Babylon through the stages of the returning to Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple, until the reform of politics and religion under the leadership of Ezra, Nehemiah and the prophet Malachi.