Tag Archives: Israel

Day 113: The Shepherd Becomes a Lion

Jeremiah 25:30-38

“Therefore prophesy against them all these words, and tell them,
“ ‘Yahweh will roar from on high,
and utter his voice from his holy habitation.
He will mightily roar against his fold.
He will give a shout, as those who tread grapes,
against all the inhabitants of the earth.
A noise will come even to the end of the earth;
for Yahweh has a controversy with the nations.
He will enter into judgment with all flesh.
As for the wicked, he will give them to the sword,” ’ says Yahweh.”

Yahweh of Armies says,
“Behold, evil will go out from nation to nation,
and a great storm will be raised up from the uttermost parts of the earth.”
The slain of Yahweh will be at that day from one end of the earth even to the other end of the earth. They won’t be lamented. They won’t be gathered or buried. They will be dung on the surface of the ground.
Wail, you shepherds, and cry.
Wallow in dust, you leader of the flock;
for the days of your slaughter and of your dispersions have fully come,
and you will fall like fine pottery.
The shepherds will have no way to flee.
The leader of the flock will have no escape.
A voice of the cry of the shepherds,
and the wailing of the leader of the flock,
for Yahweh destroys their pasture.
The peaceful folds are brought to silence
because of the fierce anger of Yahweh.
He has left his covert, as the lion;
for their land has become an astonishment because of the fierceness of the oppression,
and because of his fierce anger.

When you become a fat, satisfied and rebellious sheep, it’s pretty easy to forget that if it were not for your shepherd, you wouldn’t survive long. One of the horrible things about our human nature, is that we can’t handle security and prosperity, that’s one thing we see when we look at a passage like this.

Israel had been given everything they had from God. They didn’t even build the cities that they aquired. God had protected them from the very beginning using supernatural means. They would not have even existed had God not taken them out of Egypt and then continued to protect them up to this point, but instead of being thankful and submissive to God, they became rebellious and challenged God. God had been a good shepherd to them up to this point, but their sin caused Him to make a change.

Jeremiah tells us that God had become angry and was about to roar like a lion at His own flock. I can’t think of anything more frightening than for a shepherd to become a lion. That sounds like something out of a nightmare, but that’s what the sins of Israel caused God to do. God cannot support sin and He was about to demonstrate that fact. Notice that God even says that “the leader of the flock will have no escape.” The people and the leader that God had put over them were going to be punished as if they were sheep being eaten by a lion.

So what are we to do about our problem as humans? Although it isn’t obvious in this passage, hope was on the way. God wasn’t merely delighting in the fact that humans are unable to do anything right. God was making it clear that we have a severe internal problem. We can’t prosper because we can’t stop sinning even under the best of conditions. When Jesus came, God brought our solution. He was able to change our ability to handle prosperity by removing the rebellion from our hearts. That doesn’t mean that we don’t continue fight it in our flesh, but God removed the root of the problem by causing us to be born again. Our Good Shepherd will never turn on us like a lion ever again.

Day 100: Poorly Handling Prosperity

Jeremiah 22:20-23

“Go up to Lebanon, and cry.
Lift up your voice in Bashan,
and cry from Abarim;
for all your lovers have been destroyed.
I spoke to you in your prosperity;
but you said, ‘I will not listen.’
This has been your way from your youth,
that you didn’t obey my voice.
The wind will feed all your shepherds,
and your lovers will go into captivity.
Surely then you will be ashamed
and confounded for all your wickedness.
Inhabitant of Lebanon,
who makes your nest in the cedars,
how greatly to be pitied you will be when pangs come on you,
the pain as of a woman in travail!

It is true that when trouble comes it reveals something about us. When we are in trouble, we find out who we really call out to for help, but this passage shows us something else. What about how we handle prosperity?

Prosperity was Israel’s main problem and I think that it is ours as well. When God gives us prosperity, do we become proud and rebellious and stop trusting in God? That’s what God says about Israel here. Remember that Israel would cry out to God for help when they were in trouble, but as soon as things got good again, they went on with their sinning.

It’s pretty clear that times of prosperity reveal the desires of our hearts. When we have all that we need, what do we choose to do with what we have? As Christians, we choose to give. Our flesh, however, may rise up during times of prosperity and influence us to waste it. The Holy Spirit will bring that to mind and we need to listen and turn away from our fleshly desire to rebel against what God wants us to do. Times of prosperity can be times of temptation.

We have a great example of a man who chose to avoid the temptation of wealth and power. Instead of taking it for himself, he chose to help slaves. I’m talking about Moses. God tells us that he chose to take his reward from God and to lay down his right to become a king in Egypt on earth. Instead, he allowed God to use him to fight for his own people’s release from slavery. He had to run away and become a shepherd for 40 years and then at 80 had to take on a new career as a leader of a very rebellious people. He may not have become king of Egypt, but he did have the privilege of talking to God Himself as a friend and God remarks about it in the Bible.

Israel’s rebellion ultimately cost them their country. No wonder Moses had such a hard time with them. They were living in opposite ways. Because Israel chose to run after other gods and refused to listen to God, they ended up alone with nothing, but Moses ended up with a reward that no one could take away.

Day 99
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Day 101

Day 82: What’s the Point of This?

Jeremiah 17:9-10

The heart is deceitful above all things
and it is exceedingly corrupt.
Who can know it?

“I, Yahweh, search the mind.
I try the heart,
even to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his doings.”

God had invested heavily in Israel and Judah. Even when things were not going well, God continued to try to bring them back. Jeremiah was now pronouncing that the final end was about to come. God was now going to remove His investment, but God knows everything. With that knowledge, why would He invest in a complete failure? I believe that this passage is critical to understanding what was really taking place. God was using Israel as an example for all the other nations in all periods of time to witness. God was putting the very heart of man on display.

What we learn here is that the human heart is completely corrupt. God put the hearts of the Israelis on trial and they failed miserably. They had every physical advantage given to them by God, yet they ended up becoming worse than the people that God removed from the land before them. God gave them everything except for one thing. He didn’t give them a heart change and that ended up being the thing they really needed. God was able to expose the wicked heart of Israel by exposing their actions. He knew how their actions related to the thoughts in their hearts. I believe that God used His laws to expose their evil. He then demonstrated what happens to people who don’t obey His laws.

It would be pretty depressing if that was all God was doing with Israel. Jesus made it clear to us that the reason that all this was taking place, was to prepare their hearts for the Messiah. What we learn from Israel’s example is that the human heart is naturally corrupt. We can’t do anything but sin when our hearts are exposed by God’s law. That’s the power of the Ten Commandments. They prove that we are corrupt, but it doesn’t stop there. Jesus has come and made a way for us to have our hearts replaced with incorruptible ones. God’s intent wasn’t to merely expose our corruption, but reveal His love us by solving our problem. This was His intent from he very beginning.

John 3:17

For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him.

Day 81
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Day 83

Day 79: God’s People and God’s Land

Jeremiah 16:14-21

“Therefore behold, the days come,” says Yahweh, “that it will no more be said, ‘As Yahweh lives, who brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;’ but, ‘As Yahweh lives, who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the countries where he had driven them.’ I will bring them again into their land that I gave to their fathers.

“Behold, I will send for many fishermen,” says Yahweh, “and they will fish them up. Afterward I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them from every mountain, from every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from my face. Their iniquity isn’t concealed from my eyes. First I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double, because they have polluted my land with the carcasses of their detestable things, and have filled my inheritance with their abominations.”

Yahweh, my strength, and my stronghold,
and my refuge in the day of affliction,
the nations will come to you from the ends of the earth,
and will say,
“Our fathers have inherited nothing but lies,
vanity and things in which there is no profit.
Should a man make to himself gods
which yet are no gods?”

“Therefore behold, I will cause them to know,
this once I will cause them to know my hand and my might.
Then they will know that my name is Yahweh.”

As we have seen in other warnings against the Israel, God tells Jeremiah that someday in the future, God will gather Israel back into their land. We know that this happened after the Babylonian captivity because we read about it in Ezra and Nehemiah, but was this really what is being predicted here?

Remember that the return to Israel and Jerusalem back in Nehemiah’s time was only a partial return. Not all of the people were there. In fact, there were many who were still living in Babylon. This passage says that a time is coming when they will come from all over and return. It mentions fishermen who will “fish them up.” In other words, there will be those who purposefully seek out the Jews to bring them back to their land from all over the world. There isn’t any evidence that this happened in Ezra’s time.

If we fast-forward to today, I think we have the same problem. There are many Jews that have gone back to Israel recently from all over the world and I understand that this time there are officials in Israel that are trying to find them around the world, but is this the fulfillment of this prophesy? I don’t think so.

There are still many Jews that are spread out across the world. What we see today may be a shadow of what is to come, but, as in the days of Ezra, I don’t think it is complete. Notice that the last part of this passage mentions the comments of “nations” that come to God. I believe that this is the critical missing piece of the prophesy. God expects the nations of the earth to promote Israel in that day and I believe that the Bible is teaching us that they will be involved in finding the Jews and putting them back in Israel. At that point, I believe it will be known across the world, that the Jewish people were brought out of all the nations by God just as they were brought out from Egypt in the past. The whole earth is to go through great trouble and plagues just like Egypt and after that is over, all will agree that the Jews and their land belong to God alone.

Day 78
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Day 80