SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/24/2019
11:44 AM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The Slaughter
at Ramah”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Matthew
2:16-18
Message of the verses: “16 Then when Herod saw that he had been tricked
by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children
who were in Bethlehem and in all its environs, from two years old and under,
according to the time which he had ascertained from the magi. 17 Then that
which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet was fulfilled, saying, 18 "A
VOICE WAS HEARD IN RAMAH, WEEPING AND GREAT MOURNING, RACHEL WEEPING FOR HER
CHILDREN; AND SHE REFUSED TO BE COMFORTED, BECAUSE THEY WERE NO MORE.’”
I
really don’t think that Herod knew anything about fulfilling prophecy when he
had the babies killed in Bethlehem. I
think that because of the evilness of his heart that this was actually the
natural thing for him to do. I seriously
doubt that Herod had any conscience left because of the hardness of his heart,
similar to Pharaoh as seen in the early part of the book of Exodus.
John
MacArthur talks about the word “fulfilled” which is seen in verse
seventeen. “The term ‘fulfilled’ (from poeroo, ‘to fill up’) marks this out as
completing an Old Testament prediction.
This prophecy, like that of Jesus’ return from Egypt , was in the form
of a type, which, as we have seen above, is a nonverbal prediction revealed in
the New Testament. In the passage (Jer.
31:15) from which Matthew here quotes, Jeremiah was speaking of the great
sorrow that would soon be experienced in Israel when most of her people would
be carried captive to Babylon. ‘Ramah,’
a town about five miles north of Jerusalem, was on the border of the northern
(Israel) and southern (Judah) kingdoms.
It was also the place where Jewish captives were assembled for deportation
to Babylon (Jer. 40:1). ‘Rachel,’ the
wife of Jacob-Israel, was the mother of Joseph, whose two sons, Ephraim and
Manasseh, became progenitors of the two half-tribes that bore their names. Ephraim
is often used in the Old Testament as a synonym for the northern kingdom. ‘Rachel’ was also the mother of Benjamin,
whose tribe became part of the southern kingdom. She had once cried, ‘Give me children, or
else I die’ (Gen. 30:1), and now her beloved ‘children,’ her immeasurably
multiplied descendants, were being taken captive to a foreign and pagan land.
“Rachel
weeping for her children’ therefore represented the lamentation of all Jewish
mothers who wept over Israel’s great tragedy in the days of Jeremiah, and most
specifically typified and prefigured the mothers of Bethlehem weeping bitterly
over the massacre of their children by Herod in his attempt to kill the
Messiah. So even while Israel’s Messiah
was still a babe, Rachel had cause to weep again, even as the Messiah Himself
would later weep over Jerusalem because of His people’s rejection of Him and
the afflictions they would suffer as a consequence (Luke 19:41-44).”
Matthew
does not mention the next verse after Jeremiah 31:15 “Thus says the LORD,
"Restrain your voice from weeping And your eyes from tears; For your work
will be rewarded," declares the LORD, "And they will return from the
land of the enemy (Jer. 31:16).”
I
am reading a book written by Warren Wiersbe entitled “WHY US? When Bad Things
Happen to God’s People,” and in last night’s reading from it this book I saw
the following “He [God] does not always take the pain away, but He uses the pain
to give birth to joy. We are not saved from our travail; we are saved by our travail.” This comes from the chapter “Pictures of
Pain,” and this particular picture comes from “travail and birth.” One more quote from this section and we will
be nearly finished with this SD “Just as there can be no birth without travail,
there can be no glory without suffering.”
Jesus went through travail as He suffered on the cross, but after His resurrection
there came joy as all who will accept His forgiveness will be saved. Jeremiah 31:16 speaks of the joy that the
children of Israel had when they returned to Jerusalem.
I mentioned that in tomorrow’s SD we
will look at a former SD that I wrote about Christmas, actually the birth of Christ.
Today’s quotation from “Love in Action”
we will look at what David Jeremiah commented on yesterday’s verses from Exodus
2:15; 3:1-4.
“God often programmed isolation into the
lives of people He wanted to use. He put
Moses in the desert for forty years before He freed him to be the leader of the
exodus. I really believe that in our
culture today, if we are ever going to learn how to deal with
self-encouragement, we are going to have to figure out a way, no matter how
hard it is, to walk away from things and buy some time where we can be alone with
God. There is ministry in solitude, to
be alone, to be quiet, so that you can talk to God, and God can talk to you.”
12/24/2019 12:21 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment