Joseph Shulam: An Introduction - Jeremiah's prophecy
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. In partnership with Brad TV, we've been doing commentaries on the five books of Moses, and we finished that. Then we did on the 12 Minor Prophets, and we finished that. Then we did on Isaiah, and we just finished that. Now we are entering into the prophet Jeremiah's text from the book of Jeremiah.
Jeremiah was a very interesting character, and his mission is very interesting. His commission is very interesting, and we are going to face this challenge with prayer. Like John Calvin prayed when he started doing the commentary in Jeremiah, a prayer that asked God for strength, and for guidance, and for leisure—a time to be able to write his commentary in Jeremiah. In the early 5th Century, Jerome, the great Bible translator and commentator and scholar that lived most of his life in Bethlehem, actually in the Old Church of the Nativity, never finished his commentary. He worked for, several years, and accomplished in two years of full-time work. He accomplished writing a commentary in Jeremiah from chapter one to chapter 32. About two-thirds of the book of Jeremiah, never finished it. One of the reasons that Jerome didn't finish is because his library burned, and that kind of discouraged him enough not to finish his commentary on Jeremiah.
So, let me jump in to discuss Jeremiah. He was a priest—a Hebrew Jewish priest. That means that he had a commission to serve in the temple if he wanted to. He lived in Anatot, just over the Mount of Olives, on the other side of the Mount of Olives, Anatot, in the land of Benjamin. Now, he starts his prophecy in chapter 1, verse 1. Or the editor starts Jeremiah's prophecy in chapter 1, verse 1, because it's in third person, speaking in Hebrew in third person:
"The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah, in the 13th year of Josiah's reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the end of the 11th year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, until the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month."
That is the editorial comment in the opening of The Book of Jeremiah.
How do I know it is the editorial comment? Because in verse 4, we change the speaker. Jeremiah is spoken of in the third person from verses 1 to 3, and from verse 4, we have Jeremiah speaking about himself.
"Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying..."
—came to me, not came to him—'came to me, saying':
"Behold, I formed you in the womb; I knew you before you were born. I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the Gentiles, (to the Nations)."
Let me stop here. Uh, this is unusual because all the other prophets prophesied about the Nations as well, except Obadiah, which is a very short one chapter. He talked about the Nations as well, but he didn't prophesy to the Nations. But Jeremiah is actually commissioned by God to be a prophet, that his prophecy is directed, addressed to the Nations, although not only to the Nations but also to Israel, and we're going to see it.
Now that's important for us to think about. We talk about the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, as a product designed for the nation of Israel because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, who has chosen Israel as His pride and His possession, private possession, His treasure, the apple of His eye. We think that God has somehow put the Nations on another level. But I propose to you that Jeremiah is commissioned to be a prophet to the Nations, but not only to the Nations, also to Israel, because Israel is a nation also, and as a nation chosen by God. And we're going to see that in the next chapter—chapter 2—very clearly, in a very important way.
But the concept that God can choose somebody from the womb, from before he was born, and have a destiny set for him, his job, his calling, his mission, before he was born, is a little bit of a difficult concept to digest. Because the impression that we have from John Calvin and those that followed him is that we are predestined. Our lives are predestined. Our destiny has been set ahead of time, like the text in Jeremiah says.
And we are going to see this further down in Jeremiah that we can't understand it in the classical concept of predestination. Yes, God knows all of us before we are born. Yes, God determines a lot of our lives before we are born, or every one of us. He determines who is going to give us life, birth, who our father and mother is going to be. We didn't choose them. He determines what kind of gene pool we're going to inherit. We didn't choose that either. Not the color of our hair, not where we're born, not where we are raised as children, not how tall we're going to be, not how smart we're going to be. A lot of the cards that we have to deal with in life are given to us without asking us our opinion and without asking us what we would choose.
God hands it to us—all of us. That doesn't mean that we don't have any free will. It means that God metes out the tools: the gene pool, our height, our health, our color of our hair, are we going to have hair or not have hair. All of these things are given to us. But still, I believe in Judaism, and the Jewish nation, and the Jewish history, and the Jewish understanding of life and Bible, is that we still have a lot—and especially all of our relationship to God is based on a free will.
Yes, the cards are handed to us to play with them throughout our life, but our relationship to God is not predestined. This is at least the traditional Jewish ancient viewpoint that is still valid. In Hebrew, he said, I'm translating for you, 'everything is set ahead of us except our fear of the Lord'. That is not set. Our relationship to God, our faith in God, our destiny in this relationship with God is not set. But where we're born, the color of our hair, who our parents are, what nationality we're going to have, what skin color we're going to have—all these things are set by God. Except our relationship to God Himself, that is the only real, authentic free choice that we have, and that is a choice that we must make freely.
Now, the English translations oftentimes, like all translations, miss a lot. Because both verse 1 of Jeremiah and verse 4 of Jeremiah start with the words: "The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah," or "The words of the Lord that came to Jeremiah." Dear brothers, Hebrew is a very small language, very small vocabulary. I don't know the number of words in the Japanese dictionaries, but I know that Biblical Hebrew has very, very few words—around 23,000 words. The Webster Dictionary of the English language has 500,000 words. So, a lot of times words have double meaning. For example, the word in Hebrew for words, "divrei" (davar), the root "davar" in Hebrew, has so many meanings. "Davar" could be a word, it could be a thing, it can be an event. Yeah, it has many meanings.
And I think that the way we need to read this text, in Hebrew, is the words and the deeds—the things which Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah, has done. And it starts with this interesting thing. In verse 4, 'before I formed you', God tells Jeremiah,
"...before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, before you were born. I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the Nations."
Now, I want to kind of deviate a little bit on this issue. None of us, not any human being, and in my opinion, not any animal, is an accident that happened in history. All of us are designed specifically according to the great designer—the God, the Father of all mankind, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So I don't believe that only Jeremiah was formed by God. I believe that every human being was formed by God.
There is an element of—not Calvinistic predestination, but there is an element of predestination in our lives, in our birth, who our parents are, where we were born, how we were raised, how much hair we're going to have on our head when we grow up. All these things are given to us. And, of course, free will is given to us by the almighty God. We have choices to make. If we follow the biblical text and see how many times God tells to choose—'choose life!' in Deuteronomy, yeah, choose. Jeremiah had to choose. Elijah the prophet had to choose. He gave Israel the choice: "You are jumping between two branches," he says. "Choose which one you want to serve. You want to serve the idols, or you want to serve God?"
Yeshua (Jesus) gives us choices. He said there are two roads: an easy road that goes downhill, and in fact, there's grease, so you could slide down it quickly and easier; or a very hard road that goes uphill, but it reaches to Heaven, to salvation, and not to damnation. Our life is made up of choices, but the cards, the tools that we need in order to make the righteous and the good and the smart and the wise choices—they are handed down to us. They're given to us, and we have to make the choices. Yes, we have to make the choices. So, God said to Jeremiah,
"I chose you before you were born. I sanctified you."
In other words, "I commissioned you. I prepared you for a certain job, for a certain mission.
"I ordained you to be a prophet to the Nations."
Jeremiah responds to God. It's important for us, as an introduction to the prophecies of Jeremiah, to understand the dynamics of what God wants from Jeremiah and Jeremiah's own attitudes and fears to receive from God his commission. Jeremiah answers God:
O Lord God, behold, I cannot speak; I am a youth.
'I am a young man. I can't take that job.' I realize, Jeremiah would say, that you designed me for this job before my birth, but I don't feel confident, and I am only a young man. I don't feel secure enough. Now remember that Moses had some similar problems. He told God, "I can't do the job. I can't speak right. I am stuttering, and I can't speak the way that you would want me to speak." And God told him, "Listen, I made your mouth. I know exactly what you can or can't do." Jeremiah, the same thing. God answered Jeremiah when he says, "I am a youth, I'm just a young man, and I can't speak." In verse 6 of chapter one, God answers him:
"For you shall go to all to whom I send you, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of their faces, for I am with you to deliver you," says the Lord.
I suppose that everyone that feels commissioned by God to be a prophet, to be a deliverer, like Moses, feels the same thing. I say that I started teaching the word of God and preaching the word of God and evangelizing at a very young age, even 16, as soon as I became a believer and a disciple of Yeshua. And I've been doing it now for more than 60-some years all over the world. Right now, even though I'm retired, I'm teaching in Zimbabwe, in Papua, in Finland, in Bulgaria, in the United States, in Brazil, in Taiwan, in China, in Japan—almost every week now, not physically, but on Zoom.
Of course, we have the coronavirus, thanks to the Chinese, but we also have the solution to the coronavirus, thanks to the Chinese. They gave us Zoom about the same time that they gave us the coronavirus. So, yes, I continue to teach and preach and evangelize and guide and direct people from all over the world. But God says, "I designed you before you were born for this job. Don't give me any excuse. You are going to do whatever I tell you to do, and you're going to speak whatever I give you to speak. I command you, you shall speak."
Now, I want to stop here in a minute with this idea. I don't know if every human being's destiny is set the way Jeremiah's was, the way Elijah's was, the way Moses's was, the way Jesus's was. I don't know. But I know this: that when God puts His finger on you and points at you and says, "This is what you have to do," running away won't help you. Running away won't help you. Dear brothers and sisters, Jeremiah had a rough life; he was persecuted. Isaiah had a rough life; he was persecuted. All the prophets had a hard life—socially, spiritually, sometimes also physically. But they had to do what God had appointed them to do.
And trying to run away, like Samson did in the end, makes your life more miserable, more difficult, more challenging. But in the end, like Samson, you are going to get the job that God appointed you to do done. You will do it, but your circumstances are not going to be as easy and so happy as if you submit to God and receive what He gives you and put it to work. Put your life in His hands. Put your hand in the hand of that lonely Prophet, Son of God, Messiah, divine revelation of God in the flesh, Yeshua.
Receive the commission that God has intended to give you, and don't fight back. Say, "Thank you, Lord. Whatever you want me to do, whatever you want me to have, whatever you want me to say, whatever you want me to submit to, I am here—hineni." Like Abraham said, "hineni," and Isaac said, "hineni," and Jacob said, "hineni," and King David said, "hineni." "Hineni" means, "Lord, I am here, ready to do whatever you commissioned me to do." Yes. May God bless you and me, and let's learn Jeremiah together in the subsequent weeks. In Yeshua's name, thank you, Lord, for the opportunity to study and to share Your word with people around the world.
Joseph Shulam: God's First Love - Jeremiah's prophecy part 1
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. We are studying the book of Jeremiah. We did the first chapter, but I want to repeat it before I jump into the second chapter and say something today about becoming an apostle: every preacher that finished some Bible school in Podunk becomes an apostle, and they become prophets. In Brazil, when somebody became a patriarch, it’s not so easy to become a prophet of God. They didn’t get applause; they didn’t get praise. Jeremiah got beaten. His task was extremely difficult. He was maligned. Isaiah, and his family were ostracized for three years. Amos was thrown out of town, rejected. It’s not such fun becoming a prophet, the messenger of God’s word. Sometimes it is extremely hard, harsh.
Jeremiah is commissioned already from chapter one to do very difficult things. God has chosen him from his youth. God tells him in chapter one, verse 8, “Do not be afraid of their faces", the faces of the opponents, fellow Jews, priests, officials in the government. Don’t be afraid of them.
"Don’t be afraid of their faces, because I’m with you to deliver you,” says the Lord.
But even when the Lord delivers you, it’s still hard. It’s still hard. I have been spit upon in the streets of Jerusalem. I have been beaten in the streets of Jerusalem. I have been bombed in the streets of Jerusalem with hand grenades. A bucket of nails and Molotov cocktails have been thrown into my living room. My car has been damaged. Attempted murder! Hey, it’s not fun to be a prophet of God. Not now and not ever.
So, we did chapter one, and Jeremiah’s commission was in verse 10: "To root out and pull down, to destroy and throw down", and then, after destroying, "to rebuild and to plant". The same message is again repeated in chapter 31, just before God promises a new covenant to Israel and to all those that attach themselves to Israel. And say, after this harsh chapter, chapter 1 of Jeremiah, I’m going to chapter 2.
And there is always God’s grace. God always, in all the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the way down the line, never gives us just bitter herbs, just hot peppers. He never gives us just a jalapeño or a malagueta, very, very spicy, hard-burning pepper. No, he always gives it in a sandwich. The harshness is always sandwiched with the sweetness of God’s grace, all the way from Genesis to Revelation. This principle is held by the Holy Spirit. So, after the harshness of chapter one, we go to chapter two. I’m going to read the first few verses of chapter 2.
Verses 1 to 3 of Jeremiah chapter 2:
"Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Go and cry in the hearing of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: I remember the kindness of your youth, the love of your betrothal, when you went following me in the wilderness, in a land that is not sown, (is not agriculturally fitting, desert). Israel was the holiness of the Lord, the first fruits of his increase; and all that devour him will offend, (offend the Lord). Disaster will come upon them,’ says the Lord.”
Very important text. First, it’s a text of grace, of promise, of hope for the future of Israel. Second, there is some revelation here that Christians ignore. God says, “I remember where I married you when you were young.” Talking to Israel. He’s not talking to the Baptists or the Presbyterians or the Methodists or the Catholics or the Seventh-Day Adventists or any one of those Christian sects. He’s talking to Israel, and he says, “I remember you when we got married in the wilderness, in the land that wasn’t sown, (not fit for agriculture).” Verse 3:
"Israel was holiness to the Lord, the first fruits of his increase. All that devour him will offend, (offend God)."
In other words, all the nations that war against Israel, devour Israel, offend God. Not only offend Israel but offend God himself.
This text in Jeremiah has parallels in almost all the prophets. You want Ezekiel? I’ll give you texts in Ezekiel. You want more texts in Jeremiah? I’ll give you. You want parallels in Isaiah? I’ll give you from Isaiah. Israel is the apple of God’s eye, and anybody who touches the apple of God’s eye will reap disaster, and history has proven that to be true. Yes, when Israel sins—boom!—God gives it to us also. It’s already promised in the book of Leviticus, chapter 26 and 27 of Leviticus, and again in Ezekiel and in Deuteronomy. This principle is very clear, and our history proves it, and this is one of the proofs that there is a God in heaven.
Because when we do something that is out of his will, whatever he promised to happen will happen. We had two brothers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, who were members of our congregation, survivors of death camps during World War II, Hungarian by birth. One of them knew the Old Testament and the New Testament by heart, and he used to teach and say, “Everything that the law of Moses says in the book of Leviticus and in the curses in the book of Deuteronomy, everything that was said, is what happened to us in our history in the 20th century, where people had to devour their own babies in order to survive, it happened in the Holocaust times." Praise God, it didn’t happen too often, but it did happen. People ate human flesh in order to survive. Yes, God’s promises and God’s word is a living word, and it is alive, and it happens. But also, the good things happen.
In verse 2, he says, “I remember when we got married in our honeymoon. I took you to the wilderness, and you followed me in the wilderness willingly.” Then the next thing is, “You are the first fruits of the increase; you’re my first love.” There are other texts that correspond to this text also. But when John in the book of Revelation says to one of the churches, “You forgot your first love,” ask the pastors, ask the preachers, ask the professors of Bible in Christian universities, “What is God’s first love?” Who is God’s first love?
Here you’ve got the answer: Israel is God’s first love. The giving of the law in Mount Sinai was the marriage ceremony. There is no marriage ceremony in the Bible without a writing of divorcement. A "k'tubah" in Hebrew, the Torah is our "k'tubah", our contract with God, and we oftentimes in our history didn’t keep our side of the contract. But God had provisional clauses in that contract that even if we sin, he will never reject us.
The text in Jeremiah 31 that says that God will give us a new covenant, that new covenant was not given to the church. It was given to the house of Israel, to the house of Judah. And Christians read Jeremiah 31 from verse 31 to 34, where God is going to write his Torah, his law, in our hearts. He’s not going to write the Nicene Creed in our hearts, or the Ephesus Creed in 475, or other creeds. That the Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church made man-made principles, man-made religion. No, he’s going to write his Torah in our hearts. That’s verse 34.
But if you read 35, 36, 37, you’ll find out that as long as the sun is in the morning, rising up from the east, and it sets down in the west in the evening, and the moon and the stars at night—as long as these witnesses of God exist, God is the God of Israel, and Israel is God’s chosen people, and Israel is God’s inheritance, and He’s ours. Oh yes, I sound like a Zionist. The reason is very plain, because I am a Zionist. I believe in God’s promises to return His children back to Zion, and in Jeremiah, they appear almost every two chapters. You’ve got some mention of God returning his children back to the land that he gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Oh yes, sir.
So, the church in the book of Revelation that says—John says—they forgot their first love. The Gentiles in Asia Minor, one of the seven churches of Asia Minor, they forgot their relationship to Israel. They forgot the love of God for Israel. Yes, God punished Israel harshly over centuries. Such things as the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal—that wasn’t cotton candy; that was harsh, bloody, cruel, horribly cruel torture of children, women. You can Google the Inquisition and see the pictures that El Greco painted during the period, and you see what kind of instruments of torture the Christian Church, the Catholic Church, used against mainly Jews, but not only Jews.
Yes, this chapter 2 gives me a lot of comfort, and it ought to give you a lot of comfort. "I remember, God says, The days of your youth, the kindness of your youth, the love of your betrothal when you went following me in the wilderness, in the land not sown. You are my first fruits. You are my increase. And anybody who devours you and hurts you offends me, God says." You think God changed his mind after the cross? No sir, he did not.
And history is rolling on forward, and we are going to see more of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel, and also the punishment of the nations that have not repented of their atrocities, their cruelty, their torture, their murder of Jews for nothing, just because they are Jews. Yes, we’re already seeing it, and we see the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel. Jews have returned home to the land of Israel from 103 different countries. You walk in the streets of Jerusalem; just walk down King George Street or Ben Yehuda Street, you’ll hear probably a dozen languages spoken by Jews. We have black Jews, white Jews, orange Jews, tomato Jews, carrot Jews, whatever Jews you want, we’ve got them. And each one returning back to his house, to his homeland, to the inheritance that God gave to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The minute he lands, he kisses the ground. You already feel, “This is my home.” I know, I know I was a baby when my parents came here, but I’ve seen others, others from Yemen, from India, even from China, even believers from China and from India and from Yemen and from all over Europe and the great Soviet Union and South America and Brazil. They felt strangers where they were born in their countries, in the language that they spoke. But once they get here, even though they don’t know the language, wow, we’re at home! That’s appeared more than 20 times in the prophets, and in Jeremiah it appears at least eight or nine times. We’re going to see some of it during our study, but this chapter is of great encouragement.
I’m jumping a little bit forward. Verse 4 of chapter 2:
“Hear the word of the Lord, the house of Jacob, all the families of the house of Israel.” Thus says the Lord: “What injustice have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me, have followed idols, and have become idolaters? Neither did they say, ‘Where is the Lord who brought us up from the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness through a land of deserts and pits, through a land of drought and the shadow of death, through a land that no one crossed and where no one dwelt? I brought you into a bountiful country, (a rich country).’”
The 12 spies that Moses sent to spy out the land in the book of Numbers, chapter 13, come back. And the picture that the Torah gives us is that the bunch of grapes that they carried—two men had to carry the bunch, it was so big, so fertile. The land was fertile, the land is fertile today more than ever. If you’re eating cherry tomatoes, red ones, yellow ones, blue ones, green ones, anywhere in the world, you should know they were developed in the town of Rechovot, the town that is mentioned in Egyptian annals from the fourth millennium BC. Yes, on the Via Maris, on the way of the sea that led the traffic from Egypt to Damascus and from Damascus to Mesopotamia, from Mesopotamia to Asia and to Europe, developed here. If you’re wearing glasses like mine that, in the sunlight, become dark, you should know it was developed in the Galilee, in Kibbutz Amir, right underneath Mount Hermon. If you’re using Waze to guide you through the streets of Kuala Lumpur or London or New York or Nashville, Tennessee, you should know it was developed by high school students in Israel. I could keep on saying, because God is keeping his promises. That’s the greatness of our study in God’s word.
There is a myth—I don’t know if it’s a myth or a fact—that the Tsar of Russia called his priest Rasputin—not such a nice guy, not such an honest guy, but it was the royal priest—and said, “Rasputin, you know I have some doubts in my mind. Can you give me a proof that God really exists?” Rasputin said, “Let me think about it till tomorrow. I’ll bring you a proof.” Okay. The next day Rasputin comes to the king. Oh, the king asked him to give it in one sentence. Rasputin comes back the next day. “I said I can give it to you in one word: the proof that God exists is the word Israel. The nation of Israel, the Jews, are proof that God exists because he promised them thousands of years ago what he’s going to do with them, and he kept the harsh things and the punishments, but also the blessings that he promised them. That’s the proof that God exists.”
With this, my dear brothers and sisters, I will end this lesson. And from here, I want to jump quite a distance and bring Jerusalem and the Messiah into the picture. So, God bless you, and we’ll continue to the next lesson in the book of Jeremiah.
Shalom from Jerusalem.
Joseph Shulam: Jerusalem, Capital of all Believers - Jeremiah's prophecy part 2
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. We did a couple of lessons on Jeremiah, and the last lesson was mainly concentrated on Jeremiah chapter 2, where God speaks to Jerusalem and says, “I remember the kindness of your youth, the love of your betrothal, your marriage to me when you went after me as if in the honeymoon, in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” I spent most of the time on this concept of Israel being the bride, the wife of God. It’s a very big theme, and I did it in one lesson. I want to continue immediately after that to the next chapter, to Chapter 3 of Jeremiah, because it’s still dealing with Jerusalem.
Now, a few general words about Jeremiah that I haven’t said before: Jeremiah is a Messianic prophet, just like Isaiah. Isaiah has several, six or seven or eight prophecies that are Messianic, talking about the Messiah, the era of the Messiah, the time of the Messiah, the mission of the Messiah. Jeremiah is very similar; he's got a lot of Messianic texts, but it also has Jerusalem as a center theme. In Jeremiah, most Christians know Psalm 122:6, “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem,” and alter the translation. It is not perfect from the Hebrew point of view because it says, “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem,” so the Christians read, “so that you may prosper.”
Christians all over the world pray for the Peace of Jerusalem with the wrong motives, so that they will prosper, and their prosperity is interpreted physically, financially, worldly. But that’s not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew word shalom, the root there, is “you should have rest, you should have peace,” the same root as shalom. So those that love Jerusalem will pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, and God will give them His peace. That’s the meaning of the text from Psalms 122:6.
But now we are in Jeremiah, and I will read to you some verses from chapter 3 and then chapter 4 of Jeremiah, not the whole chapter, just a few verses. Chapter 3, verse 17 says,
“At that time, (in the future), Jerusalem shall be called The Throne of the Lord,"
The proper name of the Lord, the tetragrammaton.
"...and all the nations shall be gathered to it, to the name of the Lord, (again the tetragrammaton), to Jerusalem. No more shall they follow the dictates of their evil hearts.”
Talking about the pagans, the idolaters. They will stop following their intuition, their hearts, their culture, their evil intentions and motives. That’s Jeremiah 3:17.
But if I jump right now to Jeremiah 4, that continues the theme of Jerusalem, and read to you two more verses, then I want to concentrate on this whole concept of Jerusalem as the center of the earth, as the Throne of the Lord, as the capital of the believers worldwide. Chapter 4, I’m going to read chapter 4, verse 3, 4, and 5:
“For thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and Jerusalem: Break up your fallow ground and do not sow among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to the Lord and take away the foreskins of your hearts, you men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, lest my fury, my anger, come forth like fire and burn so that no one can quench it, because of the evil of your doings. Declare in Judah and proclaim in Jerusalem, and say, ‘Blow the trumpet in the land. Cry, ‘Gather together, come together,’ and say, ‘Assemble yourselves and let us go into the fortified cities.’”
That’s already chapter 4, verse 10. I’m going to read it anyway:
“Then I said, ‘O Lord God, surely you have greatly deceived the people in Jerusalem, saying, “You shall have peace,” whereas the sword reaches to the heart.’ At that time, it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem, ‘A dry wind and desolate heights blows in the wilderness toward the daughter of my people, not to fan or to cleanse.’"
That wind is to destroy. The people of Judah and Jerusalem and the land of Israel were taken to exile to Babylon not so far after Jeremiah. Then, in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, they returned to the land. Then in 70 A.D., after the death, burial, and resurrection of Yeshua and sitting on the right hand of God, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Only in 1967, when Israel took over the whole city of Jerusalem in fulfillment of prophecy, only then Jerusalem was in the hand of the people of Israel, of the nation of Israel.
That means that over 2,000 years, dear brother and sister, Jerusalem was in the hands of the Gentiles, of non-Jews. Only in 1967, Jerusalem, the whole city, returned to the hands of the Jews. I believe that this is the fulfillment of Luke 21, and of Romans 11, and of Isaiah 66, and many, many texts in the prophets, in the Psalms, and in the New Testament that portray the beginning of the salvation of Israel and the fullness of the time of the Gentiles, like Romans 11:25 and 26 say.
But we see that these prophecies in Jeremiah, similar ones in Isaiah, similar ones in the other prophets as well, have three elements. The first element is a kind of a wake-up call to get to work: start plowing, start plowing. Don’t plow in vain, don’t plow for nothing. 'Plow, break up the fallow ground, the unplowed ground, and stop sowing seeds in the thorns'. We have the parable of Yeshua in Matthew 13 about the four soils and the sower who sowed the seed in the different soils. One of the soils was the thorns. It’s a place where the seed can grow; it’ll start growing, and then the thorns will shade it, keep the sun away from it, and choke it to where it cannot produce fruit.
So the prophet here is calling for a wake-up call, predicting a return to the land from the exile, predicting the need to be effective in our work in this land. The example is agricultural, sowing and reaping, and warning not to sow among the thorns. But the next text, the next verse, is talking about,
“Circumcise yourselves to the Lord and take away the foreskins of your hearts, you men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”
Why?
“Lest my fury, my anger come forth like fire and burn so that no one can quench it, because of the evil of your own doings.”
'Circumcise your hearts.'
Now this concept of circumcising our hearts is a very big concept. It didn’t start with Jeremiah; it started way back in the law of Moses. Circumcision started in Genesis with Abraham, in Genesis 17, where God commands Abraham to circumcise his son Isaac and himself. Ah, that’s difficult to do. Abraham must have been a tough guy; he was able to circumcise himself. But then, in the book of Deuteronomy, we have twice this command of circumcising our hearts.
The first time in the book of Deuteronomy, this command comes is in Deuteronomy 10:16. God commands, “You circumcise your hearts and don’t harden your neck. Stop being a stiff-necked nation. Circumcise your hearts and stop being a stiff-necked nation.” But the same text appears again in Deuteronomy 30:6. From Deuteronomy 10, 20 chapters later, toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy, already God changed his mind. He said to himself, “Listen, I know you guys, you’re not going to do it, so in chapter 30, verse 6, it says, ‘The Lord God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your seed, of your offspring, so that you can love God, Jehovah, your God, with all your hearts and with all your souls, in order to have life.’”
Now this text is very important, and I need to parse it out for you. The first time, God said, “You circumcise your hearts so that you will have good, so you have a life that is led with purity of your heart and within your hands.” By the end of the book of Deuteronomy, God says, “I know these people; I better do it myself. Nobody can do it as good as I can for you. I’ll do it for you. I’ll circumcise your heart. I’ll circumcise your heart so that our relationship will be based on love with you and with your children, with your seed, not on fear but on love, so that you can love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul in order to have life.”
But these people are alive. What kind of life is he promising them? He’s promising them eternal life, not only existence. But living, according to the New Testament, if you don’t have God in your life, you’re not living; you’re existing, like a dog, like a lion, like a crocodile, like a hippopotamus, like a monkey. You’re existing; you’re eating, you’re pooping, you’re buying, you’re selling. But that’s not a life. Without God as your anchor, as your savior, as your Lord, it’s not a life; it’s existence.
How do I know that? In the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 10 and 11, further down, says to the Gentiles that they were dead in their trespasses until they got saved by the sacrifice and the blood and the program that God made through his son Yeshua, Jesus. “You were dead before. Now you came alive. You were strangers; now you were brought near. You were outside of the covenants of God; now you’ve got the covenants of God. You are outside of the Commonwealth of Israel; now you’re in the Commonwealth of Israel.” That’s Ephesians 2. You were dead, and anybody in biblical terms that doesn’t have God in his life is like any animal alive, kicking, biting, hunting, doing everything but with a disconnect between our heavenly Father, the Creator, the Father of all mankind, and their lives.
So when in Jeremiah says,
“Take away the foreskin of your hearts, you men of Judah, inhabitants of Jerusalem, lest my fury come forth like fire and burn so that no one can quench it,”
Why? “Because of the evil of your doing,” the evil of your heart. That’s why you need to circumcise your hearts. We see this concept in the book of Deuteronomy twice: chapter 10, verse 6, then chapter 30, verse 6, and chapter 32, verse 22. It appears several more times in the prophets, the same concept of the circumcision of the heart. So, my dear brothers and sisters, Jeremiah is in concert, in agreement with Isaiah because Isaiah 2 predicts that the Gentiles, the nations, will say to one another, “Let us go up to Jerusalem. Let us go up to the house of the Lord, for the Torah came from Jerusalem and the word of the Lord from Zion.” Yeah, Isaiah, I’m going to go there to make sure I’m quoting it right. Isaiah, chapter 2. Let’s go. Again I’m going to read a couple of verses: Isaiah 2:1 and 2.
“The word of the Lord, the word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, and we shall walk in his paths, for out of Zion shall come forth the law, the Torah, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.’”
Jeremiah is saying the same thing in different words. And not only Jeremiah; we’ve got the same teaching in Isaiah 66. Again, we’ve got the same teaching in Zechariah 14, where all the nations will have to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Sukkot, of Tabernacles. We’ve got it in many, many places in the scriptures, this same theme. So when you think about your faith, your relationship to God, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the God of Israel, and you think about your relationship to Jesus, to Yeshua, you should remember your relationship to Yeshua doesn’t put you in touch and committed to Rome or Constantinople or Elkhart, Indiana. It puts you in touch; you are connected spiritually and with your heart with Jerusalem.
And if your church teaches differently, you should draw conclusions. Yes, you should draw conclusions, because I could show you throughout the whole Bible, from the Psalms, from the Ecclesiastes, from Lamentations, from the Torah, and all the prophets and all the writings, that the Lord is coming back to Jerusalem, and this will be the center of the world. Yes, Jerusalem, that war-torn Jerusalem, discarded Jerusalem, the suffering from terrorism Jerusalem, will become the capital of God’s people worldwide.
And so you should start now. You should put Jerusalem at the height of your affairs. You should pray for the Peace of Jerusalem; you shall pray for your brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. You should pray for the Lord’s purpose to be done in Jerusalem and all these promises of God to be fulfilled. May God bless you, my dear brothers and sisters. This is Jeremiah; he’s not the only prophet that says similar things about this. But right now, we’re studying Jeremiah, and you see the connection of Jeremiah’s thinking with the law of Moses, with Isaiah, and with the other prophets. May God bless you, enlighten you, and fill you with his Spirit and with his love, so that you would really prosper, both in the spirit, in the flesh, and in every other way that God will bless you. In Yeshua’s name.
Joseph Shulam: Harsh Words & Restoration - Jeremiah's prophecy part 3
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. We have arrived at chapter 16 of Jeremiah. I actually hate to teach chapter 16 of Jeremiah. It's a hard one; it's a really hard chapter, and I've never heard a sermon. I've been a believer since the age of 16, and I'm 77 years old right now. I've been in church every week, at least one time, all my life as a believer since the age of 16, since 1962. I’ve heard thousands of pastors and thousands of teachings and sermons, literally all over the world, in more than 50 countries that I've preached. I never heard anybody preach the first part of chapter 16 of Jeremiah.
Why? It's a very harsh, very difficult, very unsavory chapter to teach. I'm going to start this chapter reading from the New King James Version:
"The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place. For thus says the Lord concerning the sons and the daughters who are born in this place, concerning their mothers who bore them, and their fathers who begot them in this land: They shall die gruesome deaths; they shall not be lamented, nor shall they be buried, but they shall be like their refuse on the face of the Earth. They shall be consumed by the sword and by famine, and their corpses, their bodies, shall lay meat for the birds of heaven and the beasts of the Earth.’”
Harsh, difficult chapter, talking about the citizens of Jerusalem. My town, my kind of town. I was raised here from the age of one in this city, in Jerusalem, and to read Jeremiah, one of my favorite prophets, saying these harsh things about Jerusalem is difficult—rightly difficult. When I came, growing up in this town, there was a small town, not a big city of over a million people. There was about a hundred and eighty thousand people living in Jerusalem in the early 1950s. A lot of people knew a lot of people. I knew all the people in my neighborhood, all the neighbors, all the children. We went to the same school, to the same kindergarten. The city was not tightly populated. Between each house, there was 50–60 meters distance from the next house.
And these words that came to Jeremiah, he didn't invite them; he didn't want them; he didn't express happiness for receiving it. They came to him; they were imposed upon him by God, talking about: you shouldn't have children; you shouldn't get married; you shouldn't have sons and daughters, because the sons and the daughters who will be born in your time in Jerusalem will see a great tragedy, a great calamity. And this is the God that the Psalm says: God is love. Dear brothers and sisters, God is love. But everything that is written here that is going to happen in the days of Jeremiah was already promised to Moses in the last chapters of Leviticus that say, "If you go against me, if you harden your heart against me, this is what's going to happen to you."
And now God says to Jeremiah, "It's going to happen. Don't have children." You know, the New Testament, Paul says the same thing: "It's better not to have children now." The Talmud says the same thing, and I'll give you the reference: Baba Batra page 60 side b. Rabbi Ishmael says, "It's better not to have children in these times, they are times of calamity." The fall of Jerusalem. God promised that this is going to happen if we are unfaithful to Him. Jeremiah lived in, the middle of the 750 BC, and it was a time of calamity. The enemy was knocking at the door. And the description that I read is very harsh.
And people that believe in the kind of Santa Claus God that He gives gifts and He blesses and He's happy all the time get surprised, get disappointed when they read this kind of text in the Bible. But the God of Israel is the God of love, and sometimes, you know, after warnings and warnings and warnings that God gave my people, the people of Israel, in the end, He had to keep His promises. He had to show who is the boss. He has to demonstrate that He is the God that created the heavens and the Earth, and He's the God who chose Abraham and his seed, and Jacob and his seed, and Isaac and his seed, the line of Abraham, to become a blessing for the world.
And if we're not a blessing, we were not fulfilling the very purpose for our election. Then God, in the end, has to take measures—harsh measures—just like He did in the 20th century, with about a quarter to a third of the Jewish population of the world dying in Nazi concentration camps, in gas chambers, in cruel ways of execution. Yes, God is our Father, and sometimes fathers have to discipline their children. And it's always painful; it's always painful. But in this chapter 16, there is also, toward the end of the chapter, a bright side. Let me continue reading so that we see the progression of the text. I read till verse 9. I'm going to go back to verse 9:
“For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will cause to cease from this place, and before your eyes and in your days, the voice of gladness, the voice of mirth, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride.”
Now this text in the future of Jeremiah's text is reversed. Singing, all the Israelis singing our congregations, sometimes singing, they will be heard in the streets of Jerusalem: the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride and the voice of children playing in the streets of Jerusalem, in the hills of Jerusalem and Judea and the streets of Jerusalem, wow, this is a harsh prophecy. But it has the reverse of it that God promises Israel in the restoration of Israel, and we're living in those days now.
The Lord pronounces disaster in verse 10. Why? Because of our iniquity. And the elders of the people of Jerusalem, the Israelites, ask, “What kind of iniquity? What kind of iniquity have you done?” They’re not aware; they’re not aware. The leadership is not aware of what they do wrong. They’re not aware that they became very religious, but they forsook God. You can be very religious and not know that God exists, not realize that God is in control. You can be very religious, go to synagogue, and pray and worship and do everything and be without a relationship with the Almighty Creator of the heavens and the Earth. The prophet accuses the Israelites of his days: "You think your forefathers were bad? You have done worse than your forefathers" (verse 12).
"Therefore, I will cast you out of this land into a land that you do not know, neither you nor your fathers. There, you shall serve other gods day and night, where I will not show you favor."
They went to exile, 70 years, to Babylonian exile, as God promised. But in verse 14, we see a switch. That harsh situation, very harsh, where the bodies of the dead will not be buried but the birds of the air and the animals of the field will devour them, eat them—that situation is not going to last forever.
"Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that it shall no more be said, “The Lord lives who brought the children of Israel out of Egypt,” but, “The Lord lives who brought the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where He had driven them; for I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their forefathers.”
Yes, the first part of the chapter is very harsh. God is not pleased with us, and He punishes us. Verse 14, there is a switch. God says, “Yes, they did bad; they got punished.” But there will be a change in my relationship with my people. There will be a change in which God swears in verse 15 of Jeremiah 16: “But the Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north,” not from Egypt, from the south, but from the land of the north. What’s north of us? It’s Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Russia. I remember in the 1970s writing postcards and getting churches to write postcards to the Russian Embassy: “Let my people go.”
Huge campaigns asking the Russians to release the Jewish people from their captivities in Russia, in Siberia, in all the stands around Russia, where the Jewish people were oppressed. They were not allowed to learn Hebrew. They were prisoners of Zion, they were called; they were in Russian prisons. And then, after God promises this, that He will return those that are in exile, the children of Israel that are in exile, back to the land that He gave our forefathers, continuing in verse 16, He says:
“Behold, I will send for many fishermen,” says the Lord. “Then they shall fish them, and afterwards, I will send many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of every hole of the rocks. For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes.
'I know who they are,' God says. 'I know their sin, I know their iniquity, and...
"...I will repay them double for their iniquity and for their sin, because they have defiled My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.”
From this text, the prophet goes into a song, into poetry:
“O Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come to You from the ends of the Earth and say, ‘Surely, our fathers have inherited lies, worthless and unprofitable things. Will a man make gods for himself, which are not gods?’ Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know. I will call them to know My hand and My might, and they shall know that My name is the Lord.”
With capital letters, 'my name is Jehovah'. In other words, their punishment, because of our sin. Then there is a reversal in God's mind when He realizes that He punished us enough, and He will restore us and bring us from all over, and also from the land of the north. Yes, sir, God will restore us; He is restoring us. I am a product of Jews from Bulgaria who immigrated in 1947 back to this land. They knew nothing about Hebrew; they knew nothing about the land. But they knew we are Jews, and that's where we belong. They packed up three backpacks and brought me, my sister, my mother, and my father. Later on, my grandmother and my uncles and aunts came. They left houses; they left good jobs; they left friends; they left relatives in Bulgaria. And they immigrated to Israel with nothing.
And the prophet now brings this very important point. They will understand that idols are nothing, that idols are not alive, that they're a figment of their own imagination, that they do no good because they're dumb and deaf, and they have legs, but they cannot walk, and they have hands, but they cannot work. Verse 20:
“Does a human make for himself gods when they are no gods?”
Just to ask the question is to answer it. That’s what the words of the commentary say, “If you ask this question, you answer it yourself.” They are no gods. They make idols with their own hands. Isaiah has wonderful chapters about this. And here we are in Jeremiah, and the end of chapter 16 is that God is going to restore the Jewish people back to this land and from the north. I remember writing postcards in the 70s to the Russian embassies that say, “Let my people go,” with names like Sharonsky, Edelstein, and others with names asking the Russian government to release these Jews that were imprisoned for their desire to return home and fulfill this prophecy. Yes, dear Christians in Korea and around the world, we are still in the process. We are still in the process of returning the exiles back to this land. And praise God, we have a lot of Jewish disciples of Yeshua who have returned to this land and many who want to return. And we have to pray together that God is going to continue opening the doors for all the Jews, including those Jews that believe that Yeshua is the Messiah.
Yes, the doors are open, and they’re going to open even wider according to the words of the prophet. And it is our job, first of all, to stand with the state of Israel, because in spite of all the trouble, there is nobody else who can open the doors for Israel to be filled with the exiles that are still in the diaspora, in South America, in North America, and the whole question of the anusim, of the Marano Jews that were forced to convert by force by the Catholic Church for over 350 years in the Inquisition, with torture, with courts, with thousands of Jews being burned alive by the Catholic Church. Their descendants need to come back home, need to wake up that they’re not real Catholics because they were forced by the church to convert, and that they need to come back, yes, believing in Yeshua as the Messiah, but voluntarily come back to this land, put their shoulder to the plow, build the land, strengthen the land, join with their blood relations in the restoration of Israel physically, and after the physical, the spiritual will follow.
Stand with us, pray for us, pray for Israel, but pray also for the believers in Yeshua in this land that don’t have a simple life but are here fulfilling the promises that God gave to Jeremiah, the prophet, but also to the other prophets that speak of the same thing. May God bless you.
Joseph Shulam: The Righteous Branch - Jeremiah's prophecy part 4
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. I want to start this lesson with something from a letter of Jacob in the New Testament. In every language, it is called Jacob—Jacob the brother of Jesus, Jacob the Apostle—but in English, he's called James. Why? Because King Jimmy wanted his name in the Bible, and the translators of the King James translation from the Greek, since James started with "J" and Jacob starts with "J," every word that there was a Jacob—Jacob the brother of Jesus, Jacob the Apostle—they put Jimmy in English. And only in English. In French, it is Saint Jacques; in all the other languages, it is Jacob, Jack, Jaco, Santiago, in Spanish. Only in English, it's James. But I am bringing this to you because of the first verse of chapter 3 in the letter of James:
"My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive stricter judgment. For we all stumble in many things. If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body."
So, this warning is very important, especially for those of us who teach God's word. But the fashion today is everybody becomes an apostle; he becomes a prophet. Some have even become Patriarchs in Brazil. But we need to be very careful—very careful—with the way we treat our relationship to God, to His word, and to the community, to the church. So, I’m now going back to Jeremiah, and I’m going to skip many chapters because we can’t talk about every chapter, and go to chapter 23 of Jeremiah. I’m going to go to verse 1 of chapter 23 of Jeremiah because this corresponds with what I said from the letter of James. It also corresponds with chapter 34 of the Prophet Ezekiel.
"Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!" says the Lord. "Therefore, thus says the Lord God of Israel against the shepherds who feed My people: You have scattered my flock, driven them away, and not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for the evil of your doing," says the Lord. "But I will gather the remnant of my flock out of the countries where I have driven them and bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and increase. I will set up shepherds over them who will feed them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking," says the Lord. "Behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "that I will raise up to David a branch, a plant of righteousness. A king shall reign and prosper and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell safely. Now this is the name by which he will be called: 'The Lord,' (or in Hebrew, 'Jehovah') our righteousness."
Verse 7:
"Therefore, behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "that they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought us (the children of Israel) from the land of Egypt.’ But, 'As the Lord lives who brought us and led his descendands of the house of Israel from the north country and from all the countries where I have driven them'. And they shall dwell in their own land."
So, this is the text I want to deal with from Jeremiah, and specifically with verse 6. Now, for a start with verse 5:
"Behold the days are coming," says the Lord, "that I will raise up to David a branch of righteousness, and he shall reign and prosper and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth."
This idea that the Messiah is a plant, a root—something living that grows, that produces fruit—is a very basic idea that starts from Isaiah chapter 11. Actually, it starts from the law of Moses. If we look at some of the texts, if the law of Moses or in Isaiah or in the New Testament, the Messiah is a living, growing plant, root.
Let me go to Isaiah chapter 11 and read the first verses just so that you believe me about this idea. It's an idea that is not so well known in Christian circles. Isaiah chapter 11, verse 1:
"There shall come forth a rod, a plant from the stem of Jesse, and the branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. His delight is in the fear of the Lord, and he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his loins, and faithfulness the belt of his waist. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."
This continues.
Just wanted you to see this idea that the Messiah is a plant that comes out from the root of Jesse, and he will do righteous judgment on the earth. He will absolve the poor and bless them, and the evil of this earth he will judge with harsh judgment.
But let’s go back to Jeremiah chapter 23, verse 6. This is important, my dear brothers and sisters. It’s really a teaching that we need to know because, in the New Testament, we have only one text that is dependent on these texts here, on many of these texts here in the prophets. Paul says in Romans chapter 11, verse 25-26, that when the fullness of the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled, "Thus, in the same manner, all Israel shall be saved."
One text, that, one time during the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism, a great meeting of six thousand pastors and church leaders in Manila in 1989, the Bishop of Sydney, Australia, got up to speak about Romans 9, 10, and 11. He took it out completely to a different field—a strange field about, you know, helping the poor and not about Israel at all. He didn’t mention Israel. Well, Martha Stern, David Stern’s wife, who’s still in our congregation—David has gone to be with the Lord, but his son and his wife are still here in our congregation, active—ran down during the intermission to the Bishop of Sydney, who was dressed in the Anglican pink robe, and said, "How could you teach Romans 9, 10, and 11 and not mention Israel?" The Bishop looked at her and said, "Lady, sister, every time I mention something about the Jews, whether it’s good or bad, it doesn’t make a difference. The Jews jump all over me, so I decided not to mention the Jews." But she said, "Do you know that this text is talking about the salvation of Israel?" "I know, but I don’t want to talk about it."
Okay, fine. But this text in Romans 11 is talking about the salvation of Israel. And here, we now come eight centuries earlier, before Christ, to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is talking about somebody, a Jew, from the family of King David. And this is what it says in verse 5 of chapter 23 of Jeremiah:
"Behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "I will raise up to David a branch of righteousness. A king shall reign and prosper and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell safely. Now this is his name by which he will be called: 'Jehovah our righteousness.'"
Hold it, brothers and sisters. The divinity of Yeshua was not decided in the year 325 in a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey, called Nicaea. It wasn’t decided then. And because they couldn’t make up their minds without killing each other and poisoning each other, they repeated the conference eight years later in the year 333. Then they decided, and whoever disagreed with them, they poisoned him—bingo—bishop or not bishop. Yes, Athanasius of Alexandria was the executioner not only in Nicaea during that time of the year 333 but ten years later. He took his vengeance on Gregory, the bishop of Alexandria, and on Christmas Eve during the Christmas Midnight Mass, cut him to pieces and paraded his body pieces in the streets of Alexandria. Oh, with the love of Christ! For the love of Christ! Yes, not so simple, my dear brothers and sisters, not so simple.
But back to Jeremiah. Jeremiah is talking here in chapter 23, in the first part of the chapter, about the salvation of Israel. It was not an invention of the Apostle Paul in Romans. Paul is building his case on Jeremiah and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Amos and the other prophets that all talk about events—and the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, 26, 27—They talk about the salvation of Israel. Even if they disobey God and He curses them and punishes them with heavy punishments, He’s still going to save them. Because if He doesn’t, He’s the one who fails because He chose the wrong nation.
No, He didn’t choose the wrong nation. We stubborn, stiff-necked Jews were chosen by God because God knows that we’re not going to give up, no matter how hard it becomes and no matter how much the world is going to hate us., and the Germans will put us in concentration camps and burn us and gas us. God knew that this nation, stiff-necked and stubborn, is going to live up and fulfill His promises for the world, for the salvation of the world. Paul says that very clearly in Romans 10 and 11. There are Gentiles that were part of a wild olive tree that doesn’t give good fruit. They were taken out of that tree, plucked out of the tree, and grafted onto the natural tree—the olive tree that brings good fruit. The olive tree is Israel. That’s what Paul teaches in Romans 11.
Yes, sir. And Jeremiah, 800 years earlier, says: "In the days, Judah and Israel will be saved, and the name of the Savior will be called 'Jehovah our righteousness'." It’s a big teaching. There are lots of parallels even in the book of Jeremiah of this text. But let me read on to verse 7. After he says that his name will be 'Jehovah our righteousness', that means that this character from the House of David, a branch from David, will be 'Jehovah righteousness', divine.
Verse 7:
"Therefore, behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "that they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought us out, the children of Israel from the land of Egypt.’"
The Exodus, the Passover—no, the Passover will remain, but our identity with our relationship with God is not going to be the Passover. It’s going to be something else. We will no longer say, "Long live the Lord who brought us out of the land of Egypt," but we should say:
"As the Lord lives who brought up and led the descendants of the House of Israel from the North country and from all the countries where I had driven them, and they shall dwell in their land, in their own land they shall dwell."
The land of Canaan that was given to Abraham, our father, as an eternal inheritance. Read it in chapter 12 and chapter 15 of the Book of Genesis.
Yes, my dear brothers and sisters. The Messiah appears in the prophets—in Isaiah 53, Isaiah 63, Isaiah 66, and in Jeremiah chapter 23, and in Jeremiah chapter 31, and in Jeremiah onward and in Ezekiel 39. Oh, the prophets talk about the Messiah in many ways and many times. God’s heart in Jeremiah 23 is broken. Why?
"...Because of the prophets. All my bones shake; I am like a drunk man, (not God speaking, its Jeremiah speaking), and like a man whom wine has overcome because of the Lord, because of His holy words. For the land is full of adulterers; for because of the curse of the land, the land mourns. The pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up; their curse of life is evil, and their might is not right. For both the prophets and the priests are profane. Yes, in my house, I have found their wickedness, says the Lord. "Therefore, their way shall be to them like a slippery way."
—downhill it means, grazed and downhill, like the word of Yeshua about the two highways: the highway that is hard—you’re going uphill; you have to pull up, you have to make a big effort, you can get tired, you lose breath going uphill; the broad and easy way—downhill, it’s even greased so you slide down quicker to the pits of hell.
Yes, the Prophet Jeremiah is talking because his word wasn’t received in his day. He was beaten, thrown into a well, put in prison, slapped in public by the other prophets that were prophets of no faith in God—idolatrous prophets that served in his day. He was alone, like Isaiah, like Amos—rejected, beaten for speaking the word of God, for speaking the truth from God. Yes, it wasn’t easy to be a prophet. But look at the promises that he brings to Israel that are alive today.
We are witnessing. We are witnessing that the words that Jeremiah spoke in the 8th century BC are true. You walk in the streets of Jerusalem, you can see all kinds of Jews: white Jews, black Jews, red-headed Jews, blonde Jews. From 103 countries, Jews have immigrated to this country of Israel. And in this country, they have blessed the world. If you eat cherry tomatoes, we’ve got yellow ones, orange ones, green ones, red ones, big ones, small ones, elongated like cucumbers, round like marbles. We’ve got all kinds of tomatoes that were developed here in the city of Rehovot, the city that’s mentioned in Egyptian annals from 3000 BC.
Yes, we’ve got it. If you’re wearing glasses like mine that in the sunshine become dark like sunglasses, it was developed in kibbutz in the Galilee, Shamir. If you’re using waze to guide you in the cities around the world, whether in Thailand or in Zimbabwe, you’re using a product that was developed by Jewish young men and women. Yes, Israel is alive, and it’s alive not because of our righteousness but because God promised, and He’s keeping His promises. The way He’s keeping His promises of bringing the Jews back home, He will keep the promises of saving Israel through the Prince of Peace, an everlasting Father, the Son of the Almighty God. That’s what Isaiah says in chapter 9, verses 6-7.
Yes, God’s word is complete, and His fulfillment of His word will be complete. You join us, pray for Israel’s salvation, pray for the Messianic Jewish community in Israel, stand with Netiviah and the Roeh Israel congregation, because we are here. We’re going nowhere. We’re here serving God, serving the people of Jerusalem, the people of Israel—feeding the poor, helping young Israeli believers to go to university with scholarships, blessing the soldiers of the believing families who go to the army. We’re doing a lot of things. We need your prayers and we need your help because we are a part of the fulfillment of these words of the prophet that were spoken 2,800 years ago and are being fulfilled right now as we’re talking.
God bless you who stand with Israel and with the Jewish people because our King, the King of the Jews, is also your Savior and Messiah.
Shalom from Netiviah, from the Roeh Israel congregation, and from Jerusalem.
Joseph Shulam: The Lord Our Righteousness - Jeremiah's prophecy part 5
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. Today, we're going to share a fascinating text that is very, very interesting, and it's quite unknown by a lot of our brothers and sisters, pastors, leaders, and professors in the West because of the language. So, the Lord will bless our study, and I'm going to take you to chapter 23 of Jeremiah. We're going to mention some things that are apropos very pertinent to Israel today, but not only today, to the leadership of God's people in every context—then in the days of Jeremiah and until this very day now in Israel.
Jeremiah 23, I'm going to read from verse 1:
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” says the Lord. “Therefore, thus says the Lord God of Israel against the shepherds who feed my people: You have scattered my flock, driven them away, and not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for the evil of your doings,” says the Lord. “But I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have scattered them and bring them back to their folds, and they shall be fruitful and increase. I will set up shepherds over them who will feed them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking,” says the Lord.
Now, in verse 5—and that's the verse that I wanted to bring to you and stress:
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that I will raise to David a branch of righteousness; a king shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In his days, Judah shall be saved, and Israel will dwell safely. Now this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord Our Righteousness.’”
A very Messianic text. We're going to talk about the Messianic aspect of it, but let me just, for our time’s sake in Israel, discuss the first four verses.
The prophets, in general—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos—all of them criticize the leadership of the people, the shepherds. Jeremiah does the same. The shepherds—who are the shepherds? The prophets, the kings, the spiritual leaders in the temple, the priests—they're the shepherds of the people. Ezekiel is very harsh in chapter 34 of Ezekiel. He's very harsh; he's very strong, much harsher than Jeremiah, about the shepherds, the leadership.
That brings Jeremiah to another level, in which he says the shepherds are not taking care of the flock. They're not taking care of the people. They're not feeding them right. I have scattered my sheep out of the land of Israel to all the countries where I have driven them. But I, God says, will bring them back. I will bring them back to their land, to their folds, and they shall be fruitful and increase.
"...I will set new shepherds over them; they will feed them, and they will fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking,” says the Lord.
And now we're coming into the Messianic text, verse 5 and down. That was the condition of the people. The people will be scattered in the world, and God says, “I will bring them back to their own field, to their own fold, to their own place.” But now He's going to give us the identity of who and how this prophecy will be fulfilled.
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “I will raise to David a branch of righteousness; a king shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth—(not only in Israel, in the earth.) In his days, Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely. Now this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord Our Righteousness.’”
'The Lord Our Righteousness', of course, the word “Lord”—I'm looking at the Hebrew text at the same time—when it is in the English translations, it translates the tetragrammaton 'Jehovah', the holy name of God, the four letters. So, the name of this ruler king will be 'Jehovah Our Righteousness', God Himself, in other words. But wait a minute. The previous verse is a problem because this person that will be called Jehovah Our Righteousness—David will be a branch of righteousness. This is the person that will be called, in the next verse, the Lord Our Righteousness.
The word in English is “branch,” the word in Hebrew is “plant,” not just a branch. The whole plant is from David. Now, this is not a new idea. The idea that the Messiah is a plant, a root, a tree is throughout the prophets. In Isaiah chapter 11, if I go to Isaiah chapter 11, then you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Chapter 11 of Isaiah, we'll start with verse 1:
“There shall come forth a plant from the stem of Jesse, from the root of Jesse, (from the tree of Jesse). There will come forth a branch,”
again the word “branch”,
“that will grow out of the root, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, and the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord. His delight is the fear of the Lord. And he shall not judge by the sight of his eyes, nor decide by the hearing of his ears. But with righteousness, he shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips, he shall slay the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt of his loins, and faithfulness the belt of his waist.”
The description goes on in Isaiah chapter 11.
So, you see here again, Isaiah is talking about a Messianic figure. From where is this Messianic figure? He is a branch from the stem of Jesse, the family of King David. Jesse was David's father. And so this character that is from the family of Jesse, from Bethlehem, is full of the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. It's a Messianic figure he's talking about. If we read more of the chapter, we'd see that he's talking about a Messianic figure. Now, so we have Isaiah identifying the Messiah, and the orthodox-Jewish rabbis see these texts as a Messianic text. Isaiah sees it as a shoot, a plant, a root that grows out of Jesse, the family of David—a branch that comes out of the root of the family of David, full of the spirit of God, the spirit of wisdom, all the seven spirits that Isaiah is talking about.
And then Jeremiah, in chapter 23, verse 5, 6, and on:
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that I will raise to David a branch of righteousness; a king shall reign and prosper.”
So, this is clearly a Messianic text. The new thing about this Messianic text is that the name of this king, the name of this ruler that is from the House of David, a branch from the House of David, a branch of David, but his name will be the Lord Our Righteousness. I said already earlier, the Lord is the tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of the Lord that is pronounced by most as Jehovah in the West.
Oh, here is a Messianic text that attributes divinity to this person born from the tribe of Judah, from the House of David, and he is called the branch, a plant. Now what, what is—why is the Messiah called the plant? Because a plant is a living thing; it's a thing that lives and grows and can give fruit. So, in both cases that we saw in Isaiah chapter 11 and now in Jeremiah chapter 23, we see this branch from David, branch of righteousness as a Messianic figure. I'm going to read a little more from chapter 23, verse 7 and 8:
“Therefore, behold, the days are coming,” said the Lord, “that they shall no longer say, ‘As the Lord lives who brought us the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ but, ‘As the Lord lives who brought up and led the descendants of the House of Israel from the North country and from all the countries where I have driven them.’ And they shall dwell in their own land.”
Oh wow! I'll get goosebumps when I read this. This person identified as a branch from the House of David, his name is the Lord Our Righteousness, will, in the future, in the days that are coming, said the Lord, the big event will not be the Exodus from Egypt, happened sometime between the 14th and the 12th century BC in the past. But he's talking about the future. This character, that his name is the Lord Our Righteousness from the family of David—and the prophet swears, “As the Lord lives who brought up the descendants of the House of Israel,” no longer they will say from the land of Egypt, but from the North country and from all the countries where I had driven them. And they shall dwell in their own land."
So, you've got here three prophetic elements that are very important. The first one is from the House of David, a plant like Isaiah 11, and it's not the only place. Second of all, The Exodus will no longer be the main event of Israel's history. There will be an Exodus, not from Egypt, but from all the countries where God has gathered his children. In Israel right now, we have immigrants from 103 countries. You can walk the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and other cities, and hear Jews speaking many, many languages. Unusual when you travel in most of Europe. As traveling, you see tourists from all over the world. In Italy, you see tourists from all over. London, tourists from all over the world. But it's not talking about tourists. He's talking that God is going to bring his children from all the countries that he's scattered them, and they will dwell in their own land in safety.
So, from all the countries from the world. Now, this is a nice text, an interesting text, a Messianic text, but things get complicated. They get complicated. Why? Because we have a very, very similar text with some of the same elements in another chapter in Jeremiah. This time, it's going to be in chapter 33, not 23, but in chapter 33. So, let's go to chapter 33 of Jeremiah and see the interesting parallel. Chapter 33, verse 16. Very similar text, almost word for word, part of it:
“In those days, Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell safely.” And this is the name by which she will be called: “The Lord Our Righteousness.”
Very interesting parallel text. One is talking about a branch, a plant from the House of David. The other one is talking about Jerusalem, and both of them have the same mission: Judah will be saved in these days, like in Jeremiah chapter 23, verse 5. And the inhabitants will dwell in safety. And the name of Jerusalem will be the same as the name of the branch from the House of David. As a person, that person will be called Jehovah Righteousness, and Jerusalem, and in Jeremiah 33, it will be called by the same name. Jerusalem will be called 'the Lord Our Righteousness'.
Oh, very interesting. Even more interesting, I'm going to read verse 17 and 18 of chapter 33:
“For thus said the Lord: David shall never lack a man to sit on his throne for the house of Israel, nor shall the priest and the Levite like a man to offer burnt offerings before me, to kindle grain offerings, and the sacrifice continually.”
So, yeah, look again. This time, Jerusalem is called 'the Lord Our Righteousness', but it's still connected with David. Verse 17: David shall never lack a man to sit on his throne of the House of Israel, and the priests will never lack a man to offer offerings in Jerusalem. Wow! What do we have here in summary? We have a Messianic text that connects the Messiah, the branch from the House of David, which is already identified by Isaiah in chapter 11. It connects it with three things: one is dwelling in safety in the land, which we still don't have; second, returning exiles from all the countries of the world; and third, salvation—the restoration of the land and of the people of Israel, and I believe of the world. One is connected to a person; the other one is connected with the same name to the city of Jerusalem.
So, when you come and visit Jerusalem and you see things that you may not like, that are not exactly the way they should be, remember Jerusalem is the only city in the world that has this promise that it will be called 'the Lord Our Righteousness', and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will dwell in safety. Hallelujah! A very interesting parallel text between chapter 23, verse 5 and 6, and chapter 33 of Jeremiah, chapter 33, verse 16, 17, and 18. So, God bless you all. Keep digging, you'll find divine riches in the word of God.
Joseph Shulam: The Untold Promises for Israel - Jeremiah's prophecy part 6
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. We are in Jeremiah, chapter 31. Now, the problem with this chapter 31 is that most Christians only know four verses from that chapter, and I am sad to say that even most pastors only know four verses from that chapter. It's a serious problem. I don't like to talk about problems, but it's a serious problem because if you pick a little here, a little there, a few verses from here, and connect them with other verses from there, what you're doing is a salad from nice that has everything in it, including fish. That's not a way to study the Bible. And, Brad TV has been very kind to me and very kind to its listeners and those who watch my teaching on Brad TV, and they allow me to be very frank, very Israeli, very Jewish, and very much a disciple of Yeshua, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, the Savior of the universe, the uniter of humanity.
Yep, my dear brothers and sisters, it's true. It's true that we need to re-study, re-learn how to learn the word of God, and the first rule is: it's a book. The word Biblia comes from the city of Biblos in Lebanon, just south of the city of Beirut today, and the name Biblos is the name of the city. And that's why the book that we call Bible is called Bible. Because what happened in Biblos is before the people of Biblos got a hold of the text of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, they figured out that it's too difficult and too heavy to carry a big scroll made out of goat skin or sheepskin in some cases, and with the wooden stands that you have to roll it, and it's difficult to find things in it. It's much easier if you have a book, a Biblia, a book that you can flip from one end to the other in seconds, and you don't have to roll that heavy—sometimes it weighs 15 kilos, 20 kilos—a good Torah scroll. That's only the five books of Moses. We're not even talking about the prophets.
So that's why we get the word Biblia, Bible in English, from the city of Biblos, because that's the first place that they made a codex. They cut the scroll into leaves, and they sewed the leaves at the ends, and it became a book. So, the word Bible means a book, 'the book' for us Disciples of Yeshua Mashiach. But a book has a beginning and has an end. Even our Bible starts with a beginning, "In the beginning," and you get to Revelation chapter 21, and you find out, that's the end—the heavens and the Earth will melt away, and there will be a new heavens and a new Earth—something that Isaiah the prophet prophesied in the 8th Century BC. And there will be a New Jerusalem. Hallelujah! I am so glad that there won't be a new New York or a new Beijing, but there will be a New Jerusalem.
So, a book has to be read in its context, and every chapter has to be read in the context. And you will see in a few minutes how important it is, in order to understand the meaning that the Lord and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob intended for us to understand. How important it is to read at least the context of the chapter and not pick four verses from the middle of the chapter and make a salad out of it. That's what Christian theology has done for nearly, nearly 1700-1800 years. Yep. So, I'm going to start chapter 31 of Jeremiah from the beginning so that we know who is the prophet speaking about, who is he addressing. The three questions that everybody that reads the book, or a newspaper, has to ask are: Who is the writer? Who is he addressing? And what is the consequence? What is the context of that newspaper, or book, or pamphlet, or tract, or anything else that you have to read?
So, here I am starting from verse 1 of chapter 31 of the Prophet Jeremiah:
“At that time,” says the Lord, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people.”
Verse 2:
“Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness, Israel, when I went to give them rest.” The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, with lovingkindness, I have drawn you. And again, I will build you, and you shall be rebuilt, O Virgin of Israel.”
So, who is the prophet talking about in chapter 31 of Jeremiah? He is not talking about the church. He’s not talking about Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian Church, Egyptian Church, Seventh-day Adventist Church. He’s not talking about any church. He’s talking about the people of Israel, the nation of Israel. That’s to whom the Lord is speaking in chapter 31 of Jeremiah. That’s a beginning. That’s a beginning, dear brothers and sisters. What is he saying? Pay attention to the grammar when you read, too. You have to.
He’s talking about the people that suffered in the wilderness, suffered in Egypt, suffered under the sword, suffered from their enemies. And he says, “Don’t worry, I’m going to give you rest.” And this is God speaking through the mouth of the Prophet, or through the pen of Jeremiah the prophet, and He says:
“I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, with lovingkindness I will have drawn you to me.”
That’s the meaning. Of course we know the history of the Bible, we know the history of the Jewish people. Not all the time the love of God that is everlasting expresses itself with chocolates and candy and drinking hot chocolate. No. Sometimes love is expressed, as the writers in America wrote a book, "Tough Love." My parents loved me even though they kicked me out when I believed in Yeshua. But eventually, they all became Believers of Yeshua—my mother first, and then my sister, and then my sister’s family, and then finally my father became a Believer also.
But my father loved me; I know he loved me. My mother loved me; I know she loved me. But one time, I had a big—my sister was 15 years older than me. She was born in 1931, and I was born in 1945. So, she was much older than me. I had a big fight with my sister, and we were eating lunch. I took the soup spoon—we had good soup spoons, good silverware, from Silver, heavy, big English—and she was screaming at me. I took the soup spoon, boom, threw it in her face, and it entered her mouth. She was pregnant at that time, and it broke two of her front teeth. The spoon did, not me, the spoon did.
And that’s the only time that my mother showed me a different kind of love. She tied me—we lived on a Main Street, the Bethlehem Road, and we had a yard with a stone fence and a garden. And in the middle of the garden, there was an apricot tree. She tied me to that apricot tree—where the whole neighborhood could see it—left me there crying for about an hour and a half. When I started screaming, she came out with a rope and hit me with the rope a few times. She still loved me, but that love expressed itself because of what I did to my sister in a different way than normal. Yep. God did the same.
Is it the same in our history! Jeremiah chapter 1 starts with the idea that Jeremiah is going to be a prophet and is going to bring destruction, exile, suffering, tearing down of the city of Jerusalem. And we’re reading now in chapter 31 that God will rebuild the Virgin of Israel. In verse 4:
“And you shall again be adorned with your tambourines, and you shall go forth in dances, those who rejoice. You shall plant vines on the mountains of Samaria.”
Hallelujah! Today, too.
“And the planters shall plant and eat as ordinary food, for there shall be a day when the watchmen will cry out on the mountain of Ephraim, ‘Arise and let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.’”
So, here is my first point. Everything till now is an introduction. Here is my first point, dear brothers and sisters: my point is that the chapter of Jeremiah 31 is not talking to and addressing the church. It’s addressing Israel in a time when Israel was in a difficult situation. When the prophets of God, like Jeremiah, were beaten, put in jail, thrown in a well like Jeremiah, it wasn’t easy to be a disciple of God, a worshiper of the Almighty God, Creator of the universe. No, it wasn’t popular. The prophets of Ba'al, the false prophets, were popular in that time. But the prophecy that God is giving Jeremiah is that this is going to change. Israel will be rebuilt. Even Samaria will be rebuilt, and the people of Samaria will say, “Let us go up to Jerusalem, to Zion, to worship the Lord our God.”
I’m in verse 7. I’m not going very fast.
“For thus says the Lord: Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout among the chiefs of the nations. Proclaim, give praise, and say, ‘O Lord, save your people, the remnant of Israel.’”
Hallelujah! I added the Hallelujah; it’s not in the text.
“Behold, I will bring them forth from the North country and gather them from the ends of the Earth, among them the blind and the lame, and the women with child, (pregnant women—in other words), the one who labors with a child together. Great throng shall return there.”
There where? We’re not talking about Manhattan, New York. We’re not talking about Mexico City. We’re not talking about Tokyo. We’re talking about Jerusalem, the land of Israel. That’s where they’re going to return. From where they went to exile, they shall come...
"...with weeping, supplications. I will lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of water, in the straight way which they shall not stumble, for I am a Father to Israel. Ephraim is my firstborn."
Ah, my dear brothers and sisters in Korea and in the world, it’s so important to pay attention to who is the writer, who is he addressing, what is the circumstance, what is the consequence, and what is the general context of the text. Now, God, in verse 10, changes his subject:
"Hear the word of the Lord, O Nations."
Up to now, he has been talking to Israel. Now this change is addressing the nations, the Gentiles.
“Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the islands far off, and say, ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him and keep him as a shepherd does keep his flock.’”
Oh, I remember this song from kindergarten. [Singing] “I’m sorry, I can’t sing, but I tried:
"The Lord has redeemed Jacob, ransomed him from the hands of one stronger than he. Therefore, they shall come and sing in the heights of Zion, streaming goodness, the Lord, the wheat with new wine and oil—oh, prosperity. Their soul shall be like a well-watered garden. There shall be sorrow no more.”
Because of time, I have to jump a little bit of the text, but it continues on the same vein until verse 15. I’m jumping to verse 15 from verse 10. The scene changes from what is going to be in the future to what is happening now in the days of Jeremiah. From where Jeremiah lived, he could see what is happening.
“Thus says the Lord: A voice was heard in Rama, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.” “Thus says the Lord: Refrain your voice from crying and your eyes from tears, for your work shall be rewarded,” says the Lord. “And they shall come back from the land of their enemies—from Babylon, from the north—and there is hope in the future,” says the Lord.
Hope for Israel, for the people who are left, for the exile. They’ll come back. There is hope for them.
"And your children should come back into their own border. And I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself: “You have chastised me, and I was chastised like an untrained bull. Restore me, and I will return, for you are the Lord my God.”
Restore me—it means bring me to repentance. “Bring me to repentance, and I will repent.” That’s what Israel is saying to God. But this scene of Rachel taking her children to exile is a realistic thing, and that’s why he says that he is looking from Rama. Rama is the place from where Joseph of Arimathea came from—the guy that gave his grave for Yeshua to be buried in, one of Yeshua’s disciples who was a Sanhedrin member, together with Nakdimon Ben-Gurion. Nicodemus, the son of Gurion. That’s why our first Prime Minister was a kind of a believer. He was a believer in Yeshua. He changed his name from David Green to Ben-Gurion, because Nicodemus, the secret believer that came at night to Yeshua, his family name was Son of Gurion—Ben-Gurion. So, Rama is about 60 meters higher than Mount Zion, than the old city of Jerusalem. It’s the highest point around Jerusalem, and the exiles left Jerusalem going north on the road to Damascus. And from Rama, the prophet could see them walking on the old road.
Yes, that's three things that we learned: One is that chapter 31 is not talking about the church. It’s talking about Israel. The second thing is that God is going to be kind, and sometimes will be pretty rough. And there is a future that is flourishing, blossoming like a rose. Israel’s future is secured by God’s promises to the prophets of Israel, even to Moses himself. And I’m going to summarize this: The prophet speaks in the name of Israel in verse 19:
“Surely after my repentance, I repented; and after I was instructed, I struck myself on the thigh and said, ‘I am ashamed. Yes, I’m even humiliated.’”
And that’s what it takes, folks. There is no repentance without being ashamed. There is no repentance without being humiliated. And the prophet is speaking in the name of Israel as a prophecy that Israel will repent. We have that promise many times in the prophets, but we have it in the New Testament. In Romans chapter 11, verse 25 and 26, Paul says, “Thus, I will not keep it a secret from you Gentiles that in the fullness of the time of the Gentiles, all Israel shall be saved.” No, maybe. No question mark. “All Israel shall be saved.” That’s already here in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, Amos, and most of the classical prophets proclaim that promise of God. And God is keeping his promises. The fact is, I am a Jew. Everybody in our congregation is Israeli. Not everybody is Israeli, but everybody is saved, including people who were Orthodox Jews before. Our founders were—or the founders of Netiviah were Orthodox Jews. I was in the Yeshiva, an Orthodox Yeshiva at that time too. Yes, God keeps his promises. All Israel shall be saved, and we are just the beginning sparks of light in the great darkness. But the light will overcome the darkness, and all Israel will be saved.
We’ll continue in the next lesson.
Joseph Shulam: The Eternal Covenant with Israel - Jeremiah's prophecy part 7
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. Last lesson, we did the first part of chapter 31 of Jeremiah, which is one of the chapters that Christians know something about. I made a clear point that the address in this chapter is not to the church; it’s to Israel, from the beginning of the chapter to the end of the chapter.
We talked about Israel's repentance, about God's promises of hope that they will return back from the Exile and rebuild the cities, and repent themselves with humility and sincerity, and God's promise to bring them back to the land, rebuild the land, and His invitation for them to repent. And they do repent. Then we come to the second lesson from this chapter.
More promises of God, wonderful promises of God, talking about the children of Israel. In verse 24:
"And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all its cities, together, farmers and those who are going out with the flocks, for I have satiated that weary soul and have replenished every sorrowful soul."
God is restoring the joy back to the people of Israel in chapter 31 of Jeremiah. The prophet awakes from his vision, from his sleep, and his sleep, he says, 'was sweet to me' in verse 26. And now I’m in verse 27:
"Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with seed of man and seed of beasts. And it shall come to pass that, as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to throw down, to destroy, and to afflict, so I will watch over them to build and to plant," says the Lord. In those days, they shall say no more, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge." But everyone shall die for his own iniquity. Every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge."
Oh wow! What do we have here? We have here God changing the Torah. In the Torah, Exodus chapter 34, verse 7, it says that God is going to visit the sins of the children of the fathers and their children to the third and the fourth generation. And now, the 8th century BC, God says that’s no longer going to be the law. The law is changing. From now on, every man is responsible for his own sin, not your father, not your father’s sins, not your grandfather’s sins. Your father is not going to get punished for your sins, and you’re not going to get punished for the sins of your father. Each one shall die for his own iniquity. Verse 30 of chapter 31 of Jeremiah, that’s very interesting. If you want to learn more about this change, go to Ezekiel, chapter 18. The whole chapter deals with this change. God has a right to change the law.
We have a government that’s been elected democratically, that they want to change the laws. They want to change the laws from democracy to dictatorship, like Turkey, Hungary, Russia, China, and some other countries in the Far East. So the people are rioting. Yes, our situation is not good, but God has a right to change the law that He gave, and He’s changing the law. Now why is this important? This is an introduction to the text that the Christians love—these four verses in the middle of Jeremiah that the Christians love, starting at verse 31. We read verse 30: "Each one will pay for his own sins; the fathers will not pay for the sons, and the sons are not going to pay for each one for his own iniquity. Every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge." Now:
"Behold, the days are coming, said the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the days that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord....
After which days? The days of their exile. After He returns them back home. "...I will put my law, (my Torah, in Hebrew). I will put my Torah. Where are you going to put it? In the bookshelf? Nope. I will put my Torah where? Verse 33:
"I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."
Notice this phrase. It is such an important phrase. It appears about 20 times in the prophets. People need to pay attention to that. God says in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Hosea, in Amos, in Joel, in the future tense. 'Hey, my dear God, what have we been till that point? Have we been chopped liver? We were your people from the days you called Abraham to leave Ur and Haran and come to the land of Canaan. We were your people when you took us out of the land of Egypt, from slavery to freedom. But what happened? Our relationship, got, spoiled a little bit, and you were not at fault. We were at fault.' But what was in the past is finished. We saw it earlier in this chapter. What’s in the future is what we’re reading now from verse 31 down.
What is God going to do in the New Covenant, in the New Testament? Who is He going to make this covenant with? Again, not with the churches, not with Christianity, with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. I will give them a new covenant, a new testament, (Brit Chadasha in Hebrew). So if you’re Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Foursquare, Three Square, Five Square, whatever you want, remember Yeshua came as a Jew, was circumcised by a Jewish rabbi with a sharp knife, eight days old, 30 days later dedicated in the temple, purified in the temple, at the age of 12, when He finished 12, He came and did Bar Mitzvah in Jerusalem, in the temple. He died as king of the Jews.
Yeah, and God, through Him, has changed not the Torah, not the law, but the place where it was—it was written on stone, on top of Mount Sinai—and now it’s no longer going to be written on stone. Stone is cold. It’s going to be written on our hearts, fill us with the Holy Spirit, and that’s true for Jews and for Gentiles who gave their life to the King of Kings, to the king of the Jews, Yeshua. Jesus is His name. Yep, that’s true. God is going to write His Torah in our hearts. That’s what He says. But not only in our hearts. I like that.
'I will put my law in their minds.'
I like that. The heart is an instrument of feeling emotions, but we need the mind also. You can’t study the word of God only with your heart, what you feel. No, you’ve got to use your head. We Jews know that. We learned it. We learned it from our Gentile captors in Europe, in South America, in Central America, in North America. We learned that in order to survive, it’s not enough to be in a relationship with God from the heart, but we’ve got to use the mind. And when we study the word of God, we’ve got to use our head too, not only our hearts.
So the text says, God says that to Jeremiah:
"I will put my Torah in their mind and write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."
That phrase appeared earlier in the chapter, as I said. It appears 20 times in the prophets in the future tense.
"No more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother, saying, "Know the Lord," for they shall know me from the least to the greatest of them, says the Lord."
For how will they know me?
"For I will forgive their iniquities and their sins I will remember no more."
Hallelujah! We ended with verse 34. That’s where the Christians end. They stop reading in verse 34. Why do they stop reading in verse 34? Because they don’t want to hear what God has to say in verse 35, 36, and 37. But I’m going to tell you what God says in those verses. Here is verse 35:
"Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun by light by day and the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night, who disturbs the sea and makes waves roar. The Lord of hosts is His name. If these ordinances depart from before me, that says the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall also cease from being a nation before me forever."
What does it say? He says that if tomorrow morning you get up and there’s no sun rising in the sky and the night comes and there is no moon and stars, that’s when God is going to reject Israel. But I’m sorry. I’ve traveled the world over several times in the last years. More than 50 countries. I have been close to the North Pole in Lapland, in Finland, and there, the summer, the sun doesn’t set. It’s there. And at night, in the winter, there are the northern lights, but there’s still moon and sky and stars. Those are witnesses. Every night when they come out, the moon and the stars, you should remember God is still the God of Israel. He is still never rejected the Jewish people.
Supposed doctrine that the churches teach. Yes, never rejected the Jewish people.
'As long as those ordinances, the sun, the moon, and the stars, are in the sky by day and by night, the seed of Israel shall not cease from being before me forever.'
That’s verse 36 of Jeremiah 31.
"And if the heavens above can be measured, and if the foundations of the earth stretched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, says the Lord."
And He continues the prophecy in chapter 31. I’m going to end soon this second lesson from chapter 31, which is something unusual in this series.
"Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that the city shall be built for the Lord, from the Tower of Hananel to the corner gate. The surveyor’s line shall again extend straight forward over the hill of Gareb. Then it shall turn toward Goath, and the whole valley of the dead bodies, (that is, Gae Ben Hinnom, near Mount Zion) and the ashes, and all the fields as far as the brook of Kidron—(that’s where the Pool of Siloam is)—through the corner of the horse gate toward the East, shall be holy to the Lord and shall not be plucked up or thrown down anymore forever."
Hallelujah! Jerusalem is going to be here still, no matter how many enemies we have around us, no matter how many atomic bombs Iran might have. Jerusalem is still going to be here. Well, maybe Beijing, New York, Buenos Aires, Mexico City are not going to be there anymore forever, that says the Lord.
Joseph Shulam: The Trials of Jeremiah - Jeremiah's prophecy part 8
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. This will be the last lesson from Jeremiah in this series. It will come from Jeremiah chapter 38, from verse 1 and on. In my opinion, this is a very important text, and Jeremiah is the most on-record persecuted prophet in the Bible. First of all, all the classical prophets were persecuted. The popular prophets that actually were working for the king—for David, for Saul, and for Ahab—we have prophets that we know about who worked for Ahab.
They didn't get persecuted. Why? Because they were paid prophets. They didn't leave us books, writings like the book of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Minor Prophets. They prophesied in spite of the fact that nobody wanted to hear them. Why didn't people want to hear them, and why did people hate them? Some people hate them. Why did they persecute them? Because they spoke the word of God. They did not massage the ego of the kings and the officials in the Kingdom of Israel or in the Kingdom of Judah. They spoke the word of God, and the word of God is seldom very popular—seldom very popular—because it has things there that are challenging to us human beings made from flesh and blood, with weaknesses, with aspirations, with temptations, with sin.
And when somebody points out the sin, it is dangerous. We have the best example in the New Testament of John the Baptist, who was invited to a party in Herod's house, a palace on the other side of the Jordan, a place called Machaerus. He exposed Herod's sin and the sin of the women around his life. It ended up that his head was served on a platter to Herod and to the women that he had affairs with—to put it in a mild way.
Jeremiah, was like all the classical prophets—what's a classical prophet? The prophet that wrote a book. We have a book in his name. Jeremiah is the prophet that we know more about the persecution that he received than any other prophet. But this is something that, in the church, is not talked about very much for many reasons. One of them is, today, to be a prophet is to profit, it's not exactly spiritually like it was in the days of the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. So, Jeremiah, I'm going to read from chapter 38, verse 1.
"Now, Shfat'yah, the son of Matan, G'dalia, the son of Pashur, Yukal, the son of Shlamiyahu and Pashhur, the son of Malhia, heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken to all the people, saying, “Thus says the Lord: He who remains in the city shall die by the sword, by famine, by pestilence; but he who goes over to the Chaldeans shall live. His life shall be as a prize to him, and he shall live.”"
That’s from verse 1 to 3 of chapter 38 of Jeremiah.
Now, I want to give you the names of the people that came and complained to the king about what Jeremiah is saying. Shfat'yah means the one who judges by God, or is God’s judge, and he’s the son of Matan. Matan is gift—what a name! Nice name: the Lord’s judge, the son of Matan, the gift. The second guy that came to complain about Jeremiah was G'dalia. G'dalia in Hebrew, it means somebody who is great for God—or God is great with him. The third guy was Yukal, and the son of Shlamiyahu, God’s peace. These three gentlemen, with fantastic names, come to the king and complain about what Jeremiah is speaking.
Jeremiah is speaking that if you remain in the city, you'll die. The Chaldeans, the Babylonians, are going to come and wipe out the city and burn it, and there will be famine and pestilence. You should leave. According to these three gentlemen, Shfat'yah G'dalyah and Malchiah, Jeremiah is inciting the people to leave the town, to leave Jerusalem, because if they stay, they will die. But if they go and join the enemy, they will survive. They will survive the famine, they will survive the pestilence, they will survive the enemy. It says very clearly, at the end of verse 2:
“He who goes over to the Chaldeans shall live. His life shall be a prize to him, and he shall live.”
So, here we have a situation. You know, Israel right now is in a mess. We have a small minority in the government that gained their seat there because our Prime Minister had to, you know, for his survival, had to win the election. And the only way that he could create a government is by a coalition. So he gathered some from the barn, and some from the sewage, and some from the agriculture, and some from the army, and made a coalition. That coalition is challenged by a vast majority of the people of Israel.
The elite of the Israeli army challenges the government because they want to pass laws that are less than democratic, put it in a mild way. So, a similar situation was in the days of Jeremiah. The enemy was at the door—a vast enemy: Chaldeans in English, but it’s Babylonians. An empire—a great empire—that ruled a lot of Southern Asia countries, like Azerbaijan and Persia, and all the way to Kazakhstan, was ruled by these northeastern empires, like the Arameans first and then the Babylonians and the Persians.
So, the prophet is demoralizing according to these three gentlemen, demoralizing the people and tells them to go and join the enemy. They are called, you know, honorable names. And these three gentlemen go to the king and say, “Let us put this man to death.” “Let us kill Jeremiah,”
"...for thus he weakens the hands of the men of war."
He weakens the hands of the army. He weakens those that remained in the city, and he weakens the hand of the people themselves by what he’s saying.
"...Because this man doesn’t seek the welfare of these people but their harm."
He’s criticizing the leadership, he’s criticizing the priesthood, he’s criticizing the people, and suggesting that they leave and join the enemy—not to fight against Israel, but just leave the country.
"Then Zedekiah the king said: ‘Look, (to these three noblemen), he is in your hand, for the king can do nothing against you.’”
"So they took Jeremiah and cast him into a dungeon of Malhia, the king’s son, which was in the court of the prison. And they let Jeremiah down with ropes, and in the dungeon there was no water but mire—clay, mud—so Jeremiah sank into the mire."
He would have died there without water, without food, sinking in mud or worse than mud, depends how you translate mire.
Now, there was one servant, in English, in verse 7, it says:
"...“servant of the king an Ethiopian”—one of the eunuchs who was in the king’s house—heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon. And when the king was sitting at the Gate of Benjamin, Eved melech, the servant of the king went out to the king’s house and spoke to the king, saying, “My Lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they had done for Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon. And he is likely to die from hunger in the place where he is, for there is no more bread in the city.”
The city is under siege by the enemy, and there’s no more bread.
"Then the king commanded the king’s servant, the Ethiopian, saying, “Take from here 30 men with you, and lift Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon before he dies.” So the servant of the king, Eved Melech, took the men with him and went into the house of the king under the treasury and took from there old clothes and old rags, and let them down by ropes into the dungeon to Jeremiah. Then the servant of the king, the Ethiopian, said to Jeremiah, “Please put these old clothes and rags under your armpits, under the ropes.” And Jeremiah did so. So they pulled Jeremiah up with the ropes and lifted him out of the dungeon, and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison."
Let’s take the scene that we are reading about. Jeremiah was put there by noblemen, servants of the king, ministers in the king’s court, with the excuse that he’s damaging the kingdom, he’s damaging the people, he’s damaging the king because he’s saying, “Leave Jerusalem. Abandon. Raise a white flag to the Babylonians. Surrender if you want to live and if you want to survive.” The king, the politician—not just, a King, he’s a politician—he tells those of his servants, these three men with wonderful names but horrible people, “Ah, he’s in your hand. Do whatever you want to with him.” So they take Jeremiah, they put him in the dungeon, in the prison, in a place that is like a well full of mud or mire, as its translated in English.
Another servant, notice he's not just a regular servant, is is called 'Kushi' in Hebrew. Its translated 'Ethiopian', but literally it means a person of dark skin, a black brother. That servant of the king goes and says to the king, “Listen, Jeremiah will die. If you leave him there, he’ll die.” The king says, “Okay, go get 30 men and get ropes and pull him out of there.” Now, here is the key of Israel's problem then and the key of Israel's problem now. Not only Israel, many countries—you can’t trust the politicians. They told, “Okay,” the king said to the sons of Pashor. The king said to his noblemen, to Sh'fatiyah, God’s judge, the son of Matan, to G'daliyah the one who makes God great. The son of Shlamiyah, God’s peace, is the family name of this Yukal, and to Pashor, the son of Malchiyah, Lord is my king, family name. What wonderful family names!
He said, “You know what? Jeremiah’s yours. Do whatever you want to do with him." So they take him and they dump him in the dungeon, in a well full of mud, or worse. Then this Ethiopian brother, black brother, comes to the king and says, “Listen, this is what they did to Jeremiah.” What does the king do now? He told those, “Go do whatever you want to with him.” Now he says to this guy, “Go get 30 people. Pull him out of there.” The politician wanted this way and that way; they don’t want it that way straight because most of the politicians are in politics to survive themselves, to make themselves powerful and rich, and to dance according to the music of the people, of the politicians. This servant of the king—he has no name, simply the king’s servant,
The king’s servant with no name, a black brother—tells the king, “You can’t allow this to happen.” He did allow it to happen. “You can’t allow that to happen.” The king said, “Okay, get 30 people. Go, go bring Jeremiah out of the well, out of the place.” And he comes prepared. He got old clothes so that Jeremiah will put them under his armpits. He’s sinking in the mud. It’s not so simple to pull him out. He has, you know, they have to tie the ropes around him, and they did. They didn’t want to damage him physically, so they brought these rags to put under his armpits, and they lifted him up.
And Jeremiah remains in the prison court. Why? Because he knows that if he comes out now to the streets of Jerusalem, these powerful men—princes, translated to English, servants of the king, close ministers, servants of the king—will kill him. So he stays down there in the dungeon, but not in the mud. Zedekiah the king sent and had Jeremiah the prophet brought to him at the third entrance of the house of the Lord. Aha, he doesn’t want to bring him in from the main gate. He doesn’t want him to come from the main gate. He sent for Jeremiah. He wants to talk to Jeremiah. He wants to hear from Jeremiah, but he’s bringing him in from the back gate of the palace.
And, the king Zedekiah—God’s righteousness, that’s what the king’s name is, Zedekiah, God’s righteousness—brings him into his palace and asks him, “Tell me the truth. Don’t hide from me anything.” And Jeremiah says, “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you frankly.” Verse 15: “If I had declared it to you, you will not surely put me to death. You know, if I tell you the truth, are you going to kill me or keep me alive? And if I advise you, will you listen to me? Will you take seriously what I say to you?” And the man, the king, in verse 16, swears. Zedekiah the king swore secretly to Jeremiah, saying, “As the Lord lives, who made our very souls, I will not put you to death, nor will I give you into the hands of these men who seek your life, who want to kill you.”
I’m going to end this lesson with what Jeremiah said because it is apropos, fitting not only for Israel today but in many, many centuries, and not only in Israel. That’s what kings and politicians do. Verse 17:
"Jeremiah said to Zedekiah, “Thus said the Lord, the God of hosts, the God of Israel: If you surely surrender to the king of Babylon's princes, then your soul shall live, this city shall not be burned with fire, and you and your house shall live. But if you do not surrender to the king of Babylon's princes, then this city shall be given into the hands of the Chaldeans, the Babylonians. They shall burn it with fire, and you shall not escape from their hands.”
Verse 19:
"And Zedekiah the king said to Jeremiah, “I am afraid of the Jews who have defected to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hands and they abuse me.” And Jeremiah said, (verse 20), “They shall not deliver you. Please obey the voice of the Lord which I speak to you, so it shall be well with you and your soul shall live. But if you refuse to surrender, this is the word of the Lord has spoken, has shown me: Now, behold, all the women who are left in the king of Judea’s house shall be surrendered to Babylon’s princes. Those women shall say, “Your close, friends, have set upon you and prevailed against you. Your feet have sunk in the mire, and they have turned away again." “So they shall surrender all your wives and your children to the Chaldeans, to the Babylonians. You shall not escape from their hand, but shall be taken by the hand of the king of Babylon, and you shall cause this city to be burned with fire.” And Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, “Let no one know of these words, and you shall not die. But if the princes hear that I have talked with you, they come to you and say to you, ‘Declare to us now what you have said to the king and also what did the king said to you,’ do not hide it from us, and we will not put you to death.” Then you shall say to them, “I presented my request before the king that he would not make me return to Jonathan’s house to die there.” Then all the princes came to Jeremiah and asked him, and he told them according to all these words that the king had commanded. So they stopped speaking to him, for the conversation had not been heard. Now Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison until the day that Jerusalem was taken, and he was there when Jerusalem was taken."
It’s interesting, dear brothers and sisters. It’s so interesting. And the reason I chose to end this study of Jeremiah with this text is, first of all, because all the classical prophets suffered. They said things to the public that the public didn’t want to hear. They did massage the public’s consciousness and said things that the public wanted to hear. They spoke the word of the Lord, and they spoke it raw—not only raw, with a little bit of Tabasco sauce on top of it. Yes. But the politicians, the politicians, the one that God didn’t trust, in spite of their wonderful names. The king didn’t trust, and both his princes, his ministers, didn’t trust each other and they only functioned for their own good. But in the end, their good became the disaster for Jerusalem and the disaster for the kingdom that was taken to Babylon, to exile.
So our countries today—in Europe, in the United States, in Israel, in the Middle East in general, and in other parts of the world as well—dear brothers and sisters, we need to know that the only hope we have is to listen to the word of the Lord, to do what God asks us to do, take the advice from God’s word and from the Holy Spirit, and trust no one else. God bless you all.
