SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/28/2015
11:15 PM
My Worship Time Focus: The
Compassion of the Lord
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ezekiel 39:21-29
Message of the
verses: “21 "And I will set My
glory among the nations; and all the nations will see My judgment which I have
executed and My hand which I have laid on them. 22 “And the house of Israel will know that I am the
LORD their God from that day onward.
23 "The nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile
for their iniquity because they acted treacherously against Me, and I hid My
face from them; so I gave them into the hand of their adversaries, and all of
them fell by the sword. 24 “According to their uncleanness and according to
their transgressions I dealt with them, and I hid My face from
them."’" 25 Therefore
thus says the Lord GOD, "Now I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole
house of Israel; and I will be jealous for My holy name. 26 “They will
forget their disgrace and all their treachery which they perpetrated against
Me, when they live securely on their own land with no one to make them afraid. 27
“When I bring them back from the peoples and gather them from the lands of
their enemies, then I shall be sanctified through them in the sight of the many
nations. 28 “Then they will know that I am the LORD their God because I made
them go into exile among the nations, and then gathered them again to their own
land; and I will leave none of them there any longer. 29 “I will not hide My
face from them any longer, for I will have poured out My Spirit on the house of Israel,"
declares the Lord GOD.”
What we need to see in these last two chapters we have
been studying for a few days is that God will destroy Gog and the nations that
will come down to attack them and the result of that destruction will be three
fold. The Jewish people will know that
it was the Lord who has done this, and the Gentile nations will also know that
the Lord did this, and one more point we need to see is that through all of
this that God will be glorified. Again I
see some similar things that will happen during the time when this judgment is
carried out by the Lord with the time that the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt
as seen back in the book of Exodus. God
was surely glorified through that and the nations around Egypt knew that it was
the Lord who did that, and therefore this was a part of the process of having
the Lord glorified through these judgments on Egypt.
I would suppose that it was possible that the exiles who
were listening to this message from Ezekiel would be thinking that when the
Lord would take them back to the Promised Land that this would be all
fulfilled, but that was not the case as all of these prophecies will happen
during the end times. When the Jewish
people came out of Babylon as God promised them that they would they did go
back and by faith rebuilt their temple and began again to practice their
religion, but by the time that Jesus came their religion was really not what
would bring glory to the Lord and therefore it was actually because of this
that they would end up crucifying the Lord Jesus Christ. However we do read that in the end times the
Lord will put His Spirit into the people of Israel and God will take His people
and begin His Kingdom with them along with the saved Gentiles who make it
through the Tribulation Period. Dr.
Wiersbe adds to this in the last paragraph of his commentary for these
verses: “The Gentile nations and people
of Israel will experience great suffering during the seven years of
Tribulation. But the Lord in His mercy
will seal 144,000 Jews to the nucleus of the promised kingdom, and will also
save a great multitude of Gentiles to share that kingdom with them (Rev.
7). The last temple the Jews ever build
will be defiled by Antichrist and ultimately destroyed. But God has promised His people a new land
and a new temple, and Ezekiel will describe these to us in the closing chapters
of his book.”
We are nearing the end of the book of Ezekiel as the last
eight chapters speak of what will happen in the Millennial Kingdom and they
will go fairly fast. These last eight
chapters give us the best understand of how things will go during the
Millennial Kingdom and so in our next SD from Ezekiel we will begin to look at
them.
4/28/2015 11:40 PM
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