Tag Archives: Security

Day 7: A God Forsaken Place

Lamentations 2:5-10 :

The Lord has become as an enemy.
He has swallowed up Israel.
He has swallowed up all her palaces.
He has destroyed his strongholds.
He has multiplied mourning and lamentation in the daughter of Judah.

He has violently taken away his tabernacle,
as if it were a garden.
He has destroyed his place of assembly.
Yahweh has caused solemn assembly and Sabbath to be forgotten in Zion.
In the indignation of his anger, he has despised the king and the priest.

The Lord has cast off his altar.
He has abhorred his sanctuary.
He has given the walls of her palaces into the hand of the enemy.
They have made a noise in Yahweh’s house,
as in the day of a solemn assembly.

Yahweh has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion.
He has stretched out the line.
He has not withdrawn his hand from destroying;
He has made the rampart and wall lament.
They languish together.

Her gates have sunk into the ground.
He has destroyed and broken her bars.
Her king and her princes are among the nations where the law is not.
Yes, her prophets find no vision from Yahweh.

The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground.
They keep silence.
They have cast up dust on their heads.
They have clothed themselves with sackcloth.
The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

One thing that the fall of Judah and Jerusalem shows us is what it is like to be forsaken by God. I’ve mentioned this before. It’s like experiencing a little bit of Hell. When God turns His back on you, you not only lose your access to God, as is expressed in the fact that Judah had no priests, but you also lose your government, which was expressed in the fact that Judah’s kings were taken into exile. Government may seem like a problem today, but let’s not forget that the absence of government is actually much worse. Government, even in its perverse form today, is still an extension of the hand of God. Even though justice is often poorly applied, it is still applied against many evil doers, even today. The same goes for religion. Because many are still allowed to live as Christians in peace, the 10 Commandments are still in operation among believers in the world. If God were to remove all government and all Christians, the world would experience the kind of Hell that Judah was experiencing here.

Another part of this horror was the fact that they stopped hearing the voice of God. His word was no longer being taught to the people. Proverbs reminds us of what this this is like. Let’s read that again:

Proverbs 20:20 :

Whoever curses his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in blackness of darkness.

It may not seem, like this proverb is talking about God’s word, but I believe that it is pretty clear. When you are cut off from your father and mother, you are cut off from the influence of God’s word in your life as a son or a daughter. The same thing happens when you are cut off from God. The worst thing that happens to you is that you lose your sense of direction. As rebellious human beings, we easily lose sight of the fact that God’s authority and God’s word are absolutely necessary for our well being. All God has to do is take those things away and it becomes painfully clear that we needed them all along.

Day 182: Never Too Large to Fall

Jeremiah 46:20-24

“Egypt is a very beautiful heifer;
but destruction out of the north has come.
It has come.
Also her hired men in the middle of her are like calves of the stall,
for they also are turned back.
They have fled away together.
They didn’t stand,
for the day of their calamity has come on them,
the time of their visitation.
Its sound will go like the serpent,
for they will march with an army,
and come against her with axes, as wood cutters.
They will cut down her forest,” says Yahweh,
“though it can’t be searched;
because they are more than the locusts,
and are innumerable.
The daughter of Egypt will be disappointed;
she will be delivered into the hand of the people of the north.”

One of the problems that I have with stock market trading is illustrated in this prophesy. If you were to look at Egypt’s 10 year chart, you would see that investing in it would have looked like a pretty good risk. It had good medical facilities and according to this prophesy, it had one of the largest armies. This passage appears to be also telling us that they had contracted soldiers from other countries to help them as well. The country itself had been going strong for many years and was a power to contend with. If Egypt had sold stock, I would think that it would have been trading at a lower rate because of all of the political unrest in the area. It would probably have looked like an extremely good deal. The problem I have is that even when something looks this good, it is absolutely no guarantee that it will continue, even for one more year. If Egypt would have had their own stock market, the entire market was about to close because they were about to be destroyed by a distant power.

In this passage, God says that it doesn’t matter how beautiful they are or how many troops they have or how many people live there. They were about to be completely taken over by Babylon. Past performance was no guarantee of future results.

I think that the reason the stock market is so frustrating to me is that it doesn’t come with a guarantee. Even our banks are not secure because they are affected by governmental changes as well. Our savings accounts could be similar in function to what Egypt was to Judah. They may affect our decisions when God tells us to do something that seems unusual. What we should always do is simply obey God, but when our own understanding starts to interfere with what God’s says, we make very foolish choices. It’s important for us to trust in God for our well being instead of our own means. Then we will be secure, even if our entire bank account is threatened. That’s because God loves us and He will tell us what we should do next.

Day 175: Whatever It Takes

Jeremiah 44:11-18

“Therefore Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘Behold, I will set my face against you for evil, even to cut off all Judah. I will take the remnant of Judah that have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt to live there, and they will all be consumed. They will fall in the land of Egypt. They will be consumed by the sword and by the famine. They will die, from the least even to the greatest, by the sword and by the famine. They will be an object of horror, an astonishment, a curse, and a reproach. For I will punish those who dwell in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence; so that none of the remnant of Judah, who have gone into the land of Egypt to live there, will escape or be left to return into the land of Judah, to which they have a desire to return to dwell there; for no one will return except those who will escape.’ ”

Then all the men who knew that their wives burned incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, even all the people who lived in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, “As for the word that you have spoken to us in Yahweh’s name, we will not listen to you. But we will certainly perform every word that has gone out of our mouth, to burn incense to the queen of the sky and to pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had we plenty of food, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of the sky, and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.”

So now it is obvious that these poor people who’s lives had been destroyed in Judah were really only interested in improving their own economy. Here, they openly rebel against God and choose to worship “the queen of the sky.” In the process of their rebellion, they actually admit that “we and our fathers, our kings and our princes” had worshiped this god “in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.” They were doing this when things were going well for them. They believed that when they stopped these practices, it caused things to get worse and worse, so they decided to reject God completely.

God does and will improve the economy of those who love Him, but the key is that we are supposed to love Him. If we love money and our own ability to make things happen, then we can expect our economy to be destroyed. Those who obey God and seek His will, will eventually see their economy improve, but it will only happen when God decides to do it.

Now it was Jeremiah’s word against the word of the people and notice that the issue was finances and security. The truth was finally out in the open for all to see. The people of Judah had decided to trust in their own ability to get wealth by serving gods of their own making, but God was calling them to trust in Him and His word and see His salvation. Rather than seeking God and trusting in Him, the people decided to do whatever had to be done in order to improve their standard of living Doesn’t this sound familiar?

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.