SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 8/23/2014
12:17 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
Introduction to Jeremiah 46-49
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Jeremiah
46:1-12
Message of
the verses: We are not moving into the last section of
the book of Jeremiah where Jeremiah speaks to the nations of the world, now not
all of them, but the nations that God had a message for. I believe it would be safe to say that most
of these messages he got from the Lord prior to when Jerusalem fell to
Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. In his
opening commentary of chapters 46-49 Warren Wiersbe quotes Benjamin Franklin
who says “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more
convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men.” “Quoted in Miracle at Philadelphia, by Catherine Drinker Bowen (Boston: Lime,
Brown and Company, 1966), 126. Italics
are in the original.”
So we begin to look at the last section of the book of
Jeremiah which actually covers chapters 46-51, but we will break them up into
two different sections, chapters 45-49 and then 50-51, and the last section is
all about the nation of Babylon, and nation and a system that the NT also has
much to say about. I can say that there
will not be as much commentary on these chapter as there were in the first 45
chapters of Jeremiah, 46 if you include chapter 52 which we have already looked
at.
Let us begin with looking at Jeremiah 1:5 which says “"Before
I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated
you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations."” God said this to Jeremiah when He first
called him to be a prophet, and now as we come to this last section we know that
he had been doing this job for 40 years, and done it faithfully I might
add.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “While these names, places, and events
are ancient history to most of us, the lessons behind these events reveal to us
the hand of God in the rise and fall of rulers and nations. One of the repeated phrases in these chapters
is God’s ‘I will,’ for ‘history is His story,’ as A. T. Pierson used to
say. You will also note that God
judged the gods of these nations, just as He had judged the god’s of Egypt
before Israel’s Exodus (Ex. 12:12).”
Judgment on Egypt PT-1 is the first nation we will look
at and we will begin with “Egypt’s shameful defeat” which covers verses 3-12 of
chapter forty-six.
“1 That which came as the word of the LORD to Jeremiah
the prophet concerning the nations. 2 To
Egypt, concerning the army of Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt, which was by the
Euphrates River at Carchemish, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon defeated in the fourth year of Jehoiakim
the son of Josiah, king of Judah: 3
"Line up the shield and buckler, And draw near for the battle! 4 “Harness
the horses, And mount the steeds, And take your stand with helmets on! Polish
the spears, Put on the scale-armor! 5 “Why have I seen it? They are terrified,
They are drawing back, And their mighty men are defeated And have taken refuge
in flight, Without facing back; Terror is on every side!" Declares the
LORD. 6 Let not the swift man flee, Nor the mighty man escape; In the north
beside the river Euphrates They have stumbled and fallen. 7 Who is this that
rises like the Nile, Like the rivers whose waters surge about? 8 Egypt rises
like the Nile, Even like the rivers whose waters surge about; And He has said,
"I will rise and cover that land; I will surely destroy the city and its
inhabitants." 9 Go up, you horses, and drive madly, you chariots, That the
mighty men may march forward: Ethiopia and Put, that handle the shield, And the
Lydians, that handle and bend the bow. 10
For that day belongs to the Lord GOD of hosts, A day of vengeance, so as
to avenge Himself on His foes; And the sword will devour and be satiated And
drink its fill of their blood; For there will be a slaughter for the Lord GOD
of hosts, In the land of the north by the river Euphrates. 11 Go up to Gilead and obtain balm, O virgin
daughter of Egypt! In vain have you multiplied remedies; There is no healing
for you.12 The nations have heard of your shame, And the earth is full of your
cry of distress; For one warrior has stumbled over another, And both of them
have fallen down together.”
In the first two verses we see that this happened in the
fourth year of King Jehoiakim who was the son of Josiah and Pharaoh Necho has
defeated Judah in 609 B.C. and then Nebuchadnezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho in
604 B.C. We learned before that Judah
wanted to make an alliance with Egypt to help them out, but now they are
defeated it shows that what they should have done all along was to trust the
Lord and not the nations around them.
Dr. Wiersbe says that what Jeremiah wrote in verses 3-12 is
a very graphic description of the famous Battle of Carchemish. We see Egypt being confident as they prepared
their troupes in verses 3-4 and “then watching the soldiers flee in terror
before the Babylonian army in verses 5-6.
The problem with Egypt in this battle was that they were
to confident that they would win, but it was God who said that they will lose
and lose they did, for God had determined their loss for His own reasons, and
one of the reasons was because it was His plan for Babylon to defeat Judah and
to take captives from Judah into Babylon, where God would call them out in His
time as we saw in Daniel chapter nine.
Yes history is truly HIS STORY!
When we look at verse ten we see “For that day belongs to
the Lord GOD of hosts,” in the NASB, but in the KJV it reads “The day of the
Lord,” and this should not be that way as that phrase speaks of end time
events.
As we look at the history of Egypt we see that it is a
very long one, and the nation still exists today and in the end times Egypt
will still be around. It is interesting
to me that when one reads chapters 38-39 of Ezekiel we do not see Egypt as a
nation that will be attacking Israel during the battle of Gog and Magog, and
also Iraq is not involved in that war either.
8/23/2014 1:00 PM
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