False Worship: The Temple PT-2 (Jeremiah 7:16-20)

SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/14/2014 9:52 AM

My Worship Time                                                      Focus:  False Worship: The Temple PT-2

Bible Reading & Meditation                                     Reference:  Jeremiah 7:16-20

            Message of the verses:  We continue with the first main point from Dr. Wiersbe’s outline in today’s SD.

            Your Prayers Will Do them no Good (Jeremiah 7:16-20):  “16 "As for you, do not pray for this people, and do not lift up cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with Me; for I do not hear you. 17 “Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? 18 "The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to spite Me. 19  "Do they spite Me?" declares the LORD. "Is it not themselves they spite, to their own shame?" 20 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, My anger and My wrath will be poured out on this place, on man and on beast and on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground; and it will burn and not be quenched.’”

            Why would the Lord tell Jeremiah not to pray for the people of Judah at this time in their history?  Well we see in different places in the Bible similar statements but the question still remains as to why the Lord would not allow Jeremiah to pray for the people of Judah.  I want to return to a passage in the book of Genesis that may give insight to this question we have raised.  We go back to sometime after the call of Abraham by the Lord, and the Lord had promised Abraham that he and Sarah would have a son, and Abraham is getting older along with his wife and he is wondering how all this will happen.  In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis we see a kind of a strange event where God tells Abraham to cut some animals in two, but in those days this was common for people to do when they were going to make a covenant with each other.  God is confirming His covenant with Abraham and this covenant is between God and Abraham, and it is an unconditional covenant He is making with what will become the children of Israel.  In this chapter God tells Abraham what will happen in the future for his offspring.  God tells him that there will come a time when his offspring will end up in a foreign country for four hundred years and then at that time the Lord would punish the nation they were in because of their ill treatment of his offspring who would be known as the children of Israel.  God tells Abraham that the people who were living in the Promised Land at the time of Abraham had not finished up with their iniquity:  “"Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.’”  (Genesis 15:16)  I have mentioned that the way that I see this is that God has a container in heaven that He stores His wrath for different nations and perhaps even people and when that container is full God will demonstrate His wrath on that nation or person.   “20 Therefore thus says the Lord GOD, "Behold, My anger and My wrath will be poured out on this place, on man and on beast and on the trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground; and it will burn and not be quenched (Jeremiah 7:20).  Now we have looked at Genesis 15 or at least talked about what is in that chapter and that chapter along with Genesis 12:1-3 speak of the covenant, the unconditional covenant that God has with Abraham and his offspring, the children of Israel.  What we can conclude is that God is not done with Israel like He was done with those who lived in the Promised Land, for God had and still has a purpose with Israel.  The Prime Minister of Israel told the United Nations that they were not going anywhere and the reason he told them that was because of a prophecy that is in the book of Amos.

            One more note on the fact that God told Jeremiah not to pray for the people of Judah and that comes in the form of a note from a verse in 1 John 5:16 “If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this.”  We will also include verse 17:  “All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.”  MacArthur writes “John illustrates praying according to God’s will with the specific example of the ‘sin leading to death.’  Such a sin could be any premeditated and unconfessed sin that cause the Lord to determine to end a believer’s life.  It is not one particular sin like homosexuality or lying, but whatever sin is the final one in the tolerance of God.  Failure to repent of and forsake sin may eventually lead to physical death as a judgment of God (Acts 5:1-11; 1 Cor. 5:5; 11:30).  No intercessory prayer will be effective for those who have committed such deliberate high-handed sin, i. e., God’s discipline with physical death is inevitable in such cases as He seeks to preserve the purity of His church.  The contrast to the phrase ‘sin leading to death’ with ‘sin not leading to death’ signifies that the writer distinguishes between  sins  that may lead to physical death and those that do not.  This is not to identify a certain kind of moral or non-moral sin, but to say not all sins are so judged by God.”

            Now let us move onto what Jeremiah has to say about how the women of Judah were making cakes for the “queen of heaven.”  John MacArthur writes “The Jews were worshiping Ishtar, an Assyrian and Babylonian goddess also called Ashtoreh and Astare, the wife of Baal or Molech.  Because these deities symbolized generative power, their worship involved prostitution.”   

            Let us go back to the book of Genesis and look at what the Lord told Adam and Eve after they had eaten the forbidden fruit:  “14 The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.’”  (Genesis 3:14-15)  We see here that there will be a seed of the women, which is the only time we read about this, for the seed, comes from the man, for that is how a woman can have a child, but God says that there will be a seed of woman, and that that seed will crush the head of Satan.  This is the significance of the virgin birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, in that Mary became pregnant through the act of the Holy Spirit, and this is the reason that the “sin nature” would not be passed on through a man.  Now when we fast-forward a little ways in the book of Genesis we read about a man named Nimrod.  “8 Now Cush became the father of Nimrod; he became a mighty one on the earth. 9  He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; therefore it is said, "Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD." 10 The beginning of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”  We see that this man Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord and that he begin the kingdoms of Babel along with other kingdoms.  We know what God did to judge Babel for they were building a tower in order to plot the stars which is called Astrology.  What they were building were Ziggurats.   

“What part did Ziggurats play in Religion?

“Ziggurats were built to reach nearer the heavens. This was so the gods could be contacted and worshipped. Obviously the same can be done on ground level but on top of the ziggurat they would be "nearer the god".

“The Babylonians, and others of their religion, gave rich offerings to the gods and built splendid temples. Similarly they built ziggurats. The size and splendor of a ziggurat would show the city and king’s devotion to the particular city god being worshipped. They might have temples to other gods but they would only have a ziggurat to the city god.”

            What part does this play in those women in Judah during the time of Jeremiah backing cakes to the “queen of heaven?”  As I stated earlier that there would be a seed of woman which would produce the humanity of Messiah, and this happened in the Person of Jesus Christ, however the cults picked up on this “seed of woman” and gave her different names, and it all started in Babel a kingdom that Nimrod began.  The names of this woman have changed throughout the years, but the cult still remains the same.  I will leave it to your imagination to try and figure what the name of this woman is today, but she is still around. 

            As we look further at our passage from Jeremiah we see that God is done with these people of Judah and would soon bring the nation of Babylon on them to destroy the temple and the city of Jerusalem for they had gone too far. 

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  I have been trying to find a song that I have on my computer that speaks to the subject that we are talking about in today’s SD.  I know that I desire never to get myself into a situation that I sin so that God will want to take me home before my work is done on this earth.

My Steps of Faith for Today:  Keep a short list with the Lord.

Memory verses for the week:  Philippians 2:5-6

5.  have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus 6. Who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,

Answer to yesterday’s Bible question:  “Passover” (Exodus 12:3-11).

Today’s Bible question:  “What did Abraham do when he was told that Sarah would have a child?”

Answer in our next SD.

2/14/2014 11:50 AM