Category: Prophets – Warnings for 21st century ‘christians’
Jeremiah by Michelangelo
Old Testament Prophets WARNED Israel, Judah, and neighboring nations about what GOD has planned IF they did NOT REPENT (and they usually didn’t).
How does this speak to 21 c. ‘christians’ in these last days? Are you bold enough to WARN your SOCIAL ‘Friends’ of what Jesus Christ warns? Does the message of a Prophet apply even more to them and US, now? SHARE your scriptural warnings from the Prophets and WITNESS for our LORD, WHO IS and returning… soon.
How long, Lord, have I called for help, And You do not hear? I cry out to You, “Violence!” Yet You do not save.
Are You not from everlasting, O Lord my God, my Holy One? We shall not die. O Lord, You have appointed them for judgment; O Rock, You have marked them for correction.
“Behold the proud, His soul is not upright in him; But the just shall live by his faith.
“Indeed, because he transgresses by wine, He is a proud man, And he does not stay at home. Because he enlarges his desire as hell, And he is like death, and cannot be satisfied, He gathers to himself all nations And heaps up for himself all peoples.
“Woe to him who builds a town with bloodshed, Who establishes a city by iniquity!
Behold, is it not of the Lord of hosts That the peoples labor to feed the fire, And nations weary themselves in vain?
“But the Lord is in His holy temple.
Let all the earth keep silence before Him.”
Habakkuk 2:20 NKJV
O Lord, I have heard Your speech and was afraid; O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years! In the midst of the years make it known; In wrath remember mercy.
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.
Indeed, not only Jews have rejected their Messiah. And what Christian wants to believe the report that our Christ is a man of sorrows?
Which hopeful worshiper of God desires to embrace sorrows for this brief mortal life?
Not me. But it gets worse.
He is despised and rejected of men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:
Isaiah 53:3a KJV
Despised?
Rejected by others?
Acquainted with grief?
WHY would anyone want to be like Jesus Christ, the Messiah of God, IF we must resemble any of these descriptions of man in God’s own Image?
AND it gets worse. For Isaiah continues with the expected reactions of other men to this tender shoot from the dust of the promised land:
.. and we hid as it were our faces from him;
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Isaiah 53:3b KJV
Acquainted with sorrows
Jesus was a Man of sorrows. And yes, more lately it seems that so am I.
For I too am a man acquainted with sorrows — and with DEATH.
We shudder to think about this inevitability and finality of our own mortality.
In fact, you too are a man or a woman of sorrows IF you dare think about sin and death. All see it.
We know those who have died. Some we love deeply: our mother, father, a beloved grandparent, a sister or brother who dies before us — even a wife or husband, a beloved lifelong friend…
They die…, one and then another, and leave us behind to grieve a great loss of love we embraced for so brief a time.
Sadly, I surmise: I am a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief…
Why am I despised and rejected?
Some confession here: I have often felt despised by those who I thought mattered most in the world. Certainly I’ve been rejected by those holding the keys to power and influence in the world.
Aren’t most of us? (I always thought it was just me.)
Looking back though, I now see through the mist of life that each time I witnessed Jesus Christ as Lord to those who reject Him, I was hated. And look what Isaiah says about the Messiah:
..there is no beauty that we should desire him. ‘We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. – NLT
The scene we encounter is man hiding from the LORD in Eden – a scene of our sinful hiding from God every time we want to be like the Messiah – a second adam’ sent to atone for our sins.
Dear grieving worshiper of the Lord suffering the sorrows of your faith,
Do not despair over what the Sacrifice of the Savior has done for you.
מַכְאֹב makʼôb, mak-obe’; sometimes מַכְאוֹב makʼôwb; also (feminine Isaiah 53:3) מַכְאֹבָה makʼôbâh; from H3510; anguish or (figuratively) affliction:—grief, pain, sorrow.
He IS the sacrificial LAMB of G-d who takes away the sins of the world.
But He was pierced for our offenses,
He was crushed for our wrongdoings;
The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him,
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, So He did not open His mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment He was taken away;
And as for His generation, who considered That He was cut off from the land of the living For the wrongdoing of my people, to whom the blow was due?
He was a man of sorrows
.. they took the branches of the palm trees and went out to meet Him, and began shouting,
“Hosanna!
BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD, indeed, the King of Israel!”
SHAKEN 2 of our 4-post series is an update of commentary on the January 6th crisis of 2021 following the insurrection and assault on Capitol Hill - a lingering malignancy which not-so-amazingly continues to shake the very foundations of freedom of WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES of America who must agaub think carefully about our ways.
Think back carefully: Do YOU remember this recent history correctly?
inciting disrespect for Government“So help me God.”
GOD & Government
Although this series points to current events of the United States and the world, SHAKEN! is not a partisan political post, but a fleeting glace at government and the role of God in the leadership of nations.
Our next post will point back to God and government at various times including this Prophet’s writings. So here’s the setting and time, NOT the US in A.D. 2021, but Persia in about 521 B.C., some 2500 years ago.
Darius the Great was the third Persian King of the Achaemenid Empire
About 50,000 Jews returned. In 536 B.C., they began to rebuild the temple (cf. Ezra 3:1–4:5) but opposition from neighbors and indifference by the Jews caused the work to be abandoned (cf. Ezra 4:1–24)– source: Commentary of John MacArthur
Where is the great City of David or the expansive Empire of Solomon of five centuries before?
Where is the rebuilt Temple of the Lord from the Book of the Law uncovered during the reign of a previous administration (of Cyrus and the Governor Nehemiah)?
Thus saith the Lord of hosts, saying: This people saith: The time is not yet come for building the house of the Lord.
Aggeus (Haggai) 1:2 DRB
Darius the Great
King of Kings Great King King of Persia King of Babylon Pharaoh of Egypt King of Countries
Now therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts, “Consider your ways!
Haggai 1:5 NASB
6 You have planted much but harvested little. You eat but never have enough to be satisfied. You drink but never have enough to be happy. You put on clothes but never have enough to get warm. The wage earner puts his wages into a bag with a hole in it.”
7 The Lord of Armies says this: “Think carefully about your ways.
WHY has this happened?
Are theirs not the same questions as our political and religious leaders ask in these days of desperation?
WHY has God allowed this?
9 “You expected much, but then it amounted to little. When you brought the harvest to your house, I ruined it. Why?”
This is the declaration of the Lord of Armies.
“Because my house still lies in ruins, while each of you is busy with his own house.
So on your account, the skies have withheld the dew and the land its crops.
Haggai 1:9b-10 CSB
11 I have summoned a drought on the fields and the hills, on the grain, new wine, fresh oil, and whatever the ground yields, on people and animals, and on all that your hands produce.”
What is the PEOPLE’s response?
12 Then..
Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel,
governor of the Achaemenid Empire’s province Yehud Medinata led the first group of 42,360 Jews who returned from the Babylonian captivity in the first year of Cyrus the Great, the king of the Achaemenid Empire. – source: Wikipedia
the high priest Joshua son of Jehozadak,
and the entire remnant of the people
.. obeyed the Lord their God and the words of the prophet Haggai, because the Lord their God had sent him.
So the people feared the Lord.
That was their response to the Lord God.
Yet what answer now from ‘the entire remnant .. of the people’ from US?
3 ‘Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Doesn’t it seem to you like nothing by comparison?
Remember Zerubbabel their governor,the high priest Joshuaand all of the people obeyed the Lord their Godand therefore ‘So the people feared the Lord.‘
The Lord’s declaration:
4 Even so, be strong, Zerubbabel
Be strong, Joshua
Be strong, all you people of the land..
Be strong, all you people of the land—this is the Lord’s declaration. Work! For I am with you—the declaration of the Lord of Armies.
5 This is the promise I made to you when you came out of Egypt, and my Spirit is present among you; don’t be afraid.’”
The LORD Who Leads
Can you imagine WHY the LORD God would restore a broken nation whose LEADERS OF GOVERNMENT AND WORSHIP had not led ALL of the PEOPLE to repentance?
In fact, Zerubbabel, Joshua and all the remnant of Israel once again bowed down in awe to the LORD, the God who had led them from Egypt and once again from Babylon.
Yet hear the word of the Lord to US — for WE THE PEOPLE are a stiff-necked and rebellious people led by winds of wantonness and words of wrath which stand upon our own strong wills.
For the Lord of Armies says this: “Once more, in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all the nations so that the treasures of all the nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,” says the Lord of Armies.
