Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Jeremiah's Message was Dangerous PT-2 (Jeremiah 1:13-16)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 1/22/2014 9:00 AM
My Worship Time                                             Focus:  Jeremiah’s Message was Dangerous PT-2
Bible Reading & Meditation                                     Reference:  Jeremiah 1:13-16
            Message of the verses:  In today’s SD we will be looking at verses 13-16 which speaks of “The Boiling Pot.”
            The Boling Pot:  God’s Wrath is Coming (Jeremiah 1:13-16):  “13 The word of the LORD came to me a second time saying, "What do you see?" And I said, "I see a boiling pot, facing away from the north." 14 Then the LORD said to me, "Out of the north the evil will break forth on all the inhabitants of the land. 15 “For, behold, I am calling all the families of the kingdoms of the north," declares the LORD; "and they will come and they will set each one his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem, and against all its walls round about and against all the cities of Judah. 16 “I will pronounce My judgments on them concerning all their wickedness, whereby they have forsaken Me and have offered sacrifices to other gods, and worshiped the works of their own hands.’”
            We have just finished studying the book of Isaiah, and one thing we saw while studying Isaiah was that the dominant power in Middle East at that time was Assyria, and not Babylonian, for actually the Babylonian empire’s leaders came out of the Assyrian Empire.  In Jeremiah’s day, that is when he was young the Assyrians were still the power in this region, but according to these verses Babylon would be the empire that will destroy Judah.  The problem was that no one in Judah believed this because Babylon was not powerful at this time.  Babylon is the boiling pot as seen in 1:13-14, and they were also seen as a marauding lion in Jeremiah 4:7 “The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an inhabitant.”  (KJV)  Babylon is also called by Jeremiah a “Flooding river” in Jeremiah 47:2 “Thus says the LORD: "Behold, waters are going to rise from the north And become an overflowing torrent, And overflow the land and all its fullness, The city and those who live in it; And the men will cry out, And every inhabitant of the land will wail.”
            We see that the main reason for this invasion was Israel’s idolatry and this is also seen in our verses today.  I realize that in our modern world today that we do not understand much about the idols that the Jewish people worshiped back in the days that Jeremiah lived, but the fact is that we still worship idols today.  We don’t bow down to idols of stone and wood like they did but we do bow down to idols of plastic and glass and other technology’s, now I don’t mean that we actually bow down to them in a literal way, but we do put these types of things before our worship of the Lord.
            Dr. Wiersbe writes “When a nation turns from worshiping the true God, its people begin to exploit on another, and that‘s what happened in Judah.  The rich oppressed the poor and the courts would defend the rights of the oppressed.  Yet these evil rulers and judges went to the temple faithfully and pretended to be devoted to Jehovah!  All they did was make the temple ‘a den of robbers’ (7:11).  It was this kind of sin that God was about to judge.”
            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  The biggest idol that mankind has worshiped is self, and this was the first sin that entered our world, for Adam and Eve cared more about themselves than they did in their relationship with the Lord. 
My Steps of Faith for Today:  Care more about the worship of the Lord than myself.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible Question:  “Jerusalem” (Luke 2:42).
Today’s Bible Question:  “Who killed Sisera by driving a nail into his temple?”
Answer in our next SD.

1/22/2014 9:33 AM   

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