SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/18/2016 9:50 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
God’s Judgment on Sin
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: Zechariah 5:5-8
Message of the verses: “Then the angel who was speaking with me went
out and said to me, "Lift up now your eyes and see what this is going
forth. 6 I said, "What is it?"
And he said, "This is the ephah going forth." Again he said,
"This is their appearance in all the land 7 (and behold, a lead cover was
lifted up); and this is a woman sitting inside the ephah.’ 8 Then he said,
"This is Wickedness!" And he threw her down into the middle of the
ephah and cast the lead weight on its opening.”
This vision
has to do with God’s judgment on sin itself and not the sinner so much,
although they are inextricably connected.
Once again we are talking about the Millennial Kingdom in this vision
for its ultimate interpretation; however it also has a present condition in
Zechariah’s time. We have mentioned in
earlier Spiritual Diaries that when the Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylon
that their problem with idol worship was over, never to appear again, however there
was another problem and that was the sin of materialism, and they got this
problem from being in Babylon. When
Israel came out of Egypt they brought along with the idol worship, so this time
that brought another sin out of a Gentile nation they were living in. Nehemiah chapter five speaks of this spirit
of materialism that these Jews brought back with them and also we read the
following from Malachi 3:8-9 “8 “Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me!
But you say, ’How have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings. 9 “You are
cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, the whole nation of you!” Now we have studied the book of Revelation
last year and when we got to the 18th chapter we saw this same
spirit of materialism in Babylon, something God will judge them for as seen in
that chapter.
An ephah is
a large or the largest measure of what grain was measured in. MacArthur writes “An ephah equals 1.05
bushels, 8 gallons, or 38.86 quarts. It’s
like a big barrel, and it was what was used to measure grain, to carry flour or
to carry barley. It was even large
enough for a small person to fit in it.
So what he looks here and sees is, he sees an ephah filled up and what
he’s seeing is the iniquity of Israel is full.
Israel’s sins are heaped up. The
largest possible measure in the Jewish society was an ephah, and he is saying, ‘You’re
not sinning by the quart any more; you’re sinning by the ephah, fully heaped up.’ And this basically was the sin of materialism
and this is exactly what it will be in the end time. God will look down at the society of mankind
just before Jesus comes and He will see nothing but materialism all over the
globe.”
When we
studied Revelation we saw that religion will come to an end as seen in chapter
17, but as mentioned the sin or perhaps we could say the worship of materialism
takes over and as mentioned God will destroy it.
As we look
at verses 7-8 we see that there is a woman inside this ephah and a lead is over
her and she is put back into the ephah and a lead cover is placed over
her. “God is keeping the lid on evil so
none gets out because when God comes to wipe out sin He’s going to do a job on
it and there isn’t going to be one grain outside.”
We surely
can see this wickedness on the earth now, especially in our country, and it
will grow far worse during the time of the tribulation, especially during the
first three and a half years when the judgments do not happen so fast.
The woman
mentioned here is the false religious system, as we have seen when we studied
the book of Revelation. She is a
prostitute and religious prostitution is pictured as a woman. You can check out what we wrote in the 17th
chapter of the book of Revelation to see more about what John wrote about this
woman. We see from this vision that God
is dealing with sin, mostly the sin of materialism.
6/18/2016 10:25 PM
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