SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 5/17/2016 11:58 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 Divine Choice
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 3:1-2
Message
of the verses: 1 Then he showed me
Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan
standing at his right hand to accuse him. 2 The LORD said to Satan, "The
LORD rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from
the fire?"”
Now the highlighted section of
verse two is what we want to talk about this evening as it has some different
things that we need to look at from this small section. As we look at this section we can ask the
question what is the Lord talking about here.
Well if you are at say, a camp fire and in that fire is a branch that you
want to take out before it gets burned up so you can use it for something it
could be described as a branch that was plucked out of the fire. Now we want to look at another place we see
this phrase “"I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, And
you were like a firebrand snatched from a blaze; Yet you have not returned to
Me," declares the LORD (Amos 4:11).”
When we think of when Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed we know that
there were several people that were saved from that destruction, as there was
Lot, and his two daughters as even though his wife came out she really was not
a part of those that believed the Lord would save her as her heart was still in
Sodom and so she disobeyed the Lord by looking back at the destruction of Sodom
and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt. So we can determine that this phrase means
that there is some who are rescued out of a difficult situation. The remnant that Zechariah was preaching to,
you could say the same thing about them along with Noah and his family. If memory serves me right there is a verse or
two in the letter of Jude where we can see this applied. “Jude 1:23 save others, snatching them out of
the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by
the flesh.” I remember my first pastor preached
through the book of Jude and he told the story of leading a very old person to
the Lord and he used this verse to show the meaning of the salvation of this
older man as he was not going to live too much longer and so we can say that he
was snatched out of the fire.
Now why do you think the Lord is
saying this to the remnant? Well a good
question to ask is why did the Lord bring a remnant out of, first the burnings
of Jerusalem and then out of Babylon to bring them back to Jerusalem. The answer is that it was His desire to have
them clean up their lives as we will see later on in this chapter and to begin
to live for the Lord. We can also say
that He brought them back because He has a future for them, a future that is in
the end a very bright future. Joshua’s grandfather
was killed by Nebuchadnezzar and his father went into captivity into Babylon,
so both of them saw the terrible things that happened to Israel at the hands of
the Babylonians and anyone who survived the exile could be considered a brand
plucked out of the fire. Think about
what Hitler tried to do to the Jews and think about those that survived that holocaust
and they too were brands plucked out of the fire.
John MacArthur finishes this
section by writing “And I think there's a future element in that statement of a
brand plucked out of the fire, 'cause that fire might represent all the
persecution of the Jews throughout history. Someday when God gets them back in
the land and they're wonderfully saved and they become His holy nation and they
become His priest nation again God can say and this is a brand plucked out of
the fire because they've been in the fires of persecution all through the
years, haven't they? And you see the whole point here is that God's salvation
of Israel is based on a divine choice. I have chosen Jerusalem, not because
they're better, not because they're more intelligent, but because God chose
them.”
5/18/2016 12:25 AM
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