Devotional
Commentary on Jeremiah 23
From bad
elders in chapter 20 and bad kings in chapter 22 we now follow the Lord through
Jeremiah to bad pastors. It is bad when people are bad but when the Anointed of
the Lord goes sour, it is tragic. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter
the flocks of My pasture” (verse 1).
God has a
word to these shepherds or pastors of the flock: “You have scattered My flocks”;
“you have driven them away”; You have not taken care of them. The evil of their
deeds will be upon them (verse 2).
Special
is the situation of the scattered flock: “[Emphasized “I”], I will gather them;
I will restore them; “they shall be fruitful and multiply” (verse 3). This may
be a reference to the Latter Rain gathering since this is the great harvest of
the Lord like there never was. The reason this is the eschaton event and not in
Jeremiah’s life or later, is the words “no longer” [`od welo] appears in verse
4. “I will set up shepherds over them; and they shall pasture them; and they
shall no longer fear nor shall they be dismayed; nor shall any of them be
missing.” This paragraph was referring to the Latter Rain period which is
almost in our nearest future. We almost touch it already if not already. The
next verse is not in the eschaton but back in Jeremiah’s time.
A promise
of Christ’s coming is made saying “days are coming [in 4 BCE when Christ was
born] when I will set up of David a righteous shoot”. This is the Messiah long
expected. “And He shall reign a King [of grace at 31 CE and King of Glory at
His Second Coming] and prosper”. He “shall perform judgment [since 1844 in the
anti-typical function of High Priest and advocate mediating atonement for
saints]”. After the Hell event extinguishing evil and creating a new earth and
heaven again “[He shall perform] righteousness on the [new] earth” (verse 5).
“In His
days” [the days of the King of Glory who created a new earth and heaven] “Judah
shall be saved and [spiritual] Israel shall dwell safe, and this is His name
that He shall be called: The Lord is our righteousness” (verse 6).
“Behold
days are coming…” [at the Second Coming] “when they shall no longer say: ‘As
the Lord lives’ Who brought people out of Egypt (verse 7) but Who brought
people out from exile (verse 8). They shall “dwell on their [promised eternal]
land”.
Because
of the prophets Jeremiah was shaken and in agony and almost fainted, because of
the Lord and because of His holy words (verse 9). That is what happen if people
study the Word of God deeply like Jeremiah did. Not every pastor is Christlike,
not every prophet expounder kosher on interpretation. They use culture and
own-time assignment to interpret the prophets and sidestep God’s serious
messages.
The land
is full of adulterers and false oaths and punishment was mourning, dried out
dwellings in the wilderness. Their eagerness was not for God but evil and their
power was not right (verse 10). The seriousness of the Asherah and Baal cult
cultural accommodation and recognition jurisprudence was at play here. A
jurisprudence of absolute equality of evil with good, of Yahwish with Asherah
religions are at stake here. People were forced not to discriminate or decide
between either but to accommodate both.
The
result had an effect on the prophet and priest in the land (verse 11). The Lord
said that in the Temple He found their problems. They loved to write graffiti
on the Temple walls and other walls like at Kuntillet `Ajrud in the Negev and
also at Khirbet el-Kom near that hill and Deir `Alla in Transjordan (verse 12).
What does
God do with people that do not follow His way? “Their way shall be for them
like slippery places in the dark” and they will fall and “I will bring evil
upon them” “in the year of their visitation”. This is a definite time like the
Hell event after the millennium. When Christ comes we know it is 1000 years to
this date. Very specific (verse 12).
In
Samaria Baal prophets prophesied to the people about Baal and misled the people
(verse 13). “Spiritual” Israel was misled.
In
Jerusalem the prophets committed adultery and going with falseness and
encouraged evildoers so that none return from evil. All of them were LGBTQH or
as Sodom and her inhabitants as Gemorrah (verse 14).
Punishment?
They will eat wormwood and poisonous water to drink for falseness came from the
prophets of Jerusalem and from the whole land (verse 15). Let me give some
examples from archaeology exactly proving what God is complaining about here: about
the building at Kuntillet `Ajrud (Naͻaman 2011: 317). “If our hypothesis is correct, the
building’s primary purpose was to serve as a storage
space for the holy trappings of worship of Asherat, for the gifts brought to
her by her believers, and to accommodate the cultic personnel.“ About the textiles there: (Naͻaman 2011: 317-318.) “This and other examples would
account for the unusual abundance of textiles found at the site, which were
possibly sold to believers to hang upon the sacred tree (Naͻaman/Lissovsky, 2008, 198–199; also
Ackerman, 2008).” Describing
the situation between 591-588 when his wife died (Ezechiel 24:1) he said in
16:16-19: ”And of your garments you took, and decked
your high places with divers colors, and played the harlot thereupon: the like
things shall not come, neither shall it be so. You have also taken thy fair
jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made to yourself
images of men, and did commit whoredom with them, And took your broidered
garments, and covered them: and you have set mine oil and mine incense before
them. My meat also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, wherewith
I fed you, you have even set it before them for a sweet savor: and thus it was,
said the Lord God“ Inscriptions: (Kajr3.1 = Pithos/storage jar A) “Said his A[she]r[ta]: W[al]k.
Said to Yahēl[yō], and to Yōācśā, and to [...]. I have blessed you to YHWH
of Samaria and to his [3rd person listed supra’s statue] Asherah.” Another
inscription there: Kajr3.6 = Pithos/storage jar B) “Message of ͻAmaryō: Say to my lord. Are you well? I have
blessed you to YHWH of Teman and his Asherah. May He bless you and may He keep
you, and may He be with the lord of your house”. Still another inscription: (Kajr3.9
= Pithos B [3]) “May he [functionary]
bless you to Yahweh of Teman and to his [functionary’s] Asherah. All that he asked from a man,
favored one of the father and quiver. Also to him Yahweh will give according to
his heart.“ All these
were found in the Negev and dated to between 630-597 BCE.
Is
Jeremiah making things up? Is Yahweh speaking the truth? Yahweh will not give according
to their evil hearts accommodating Asherah with ecumenism jurisprudence focus
on equality of religions. If the country has this trend, the faithful believer
should not have it but separate from these narratives.
“They say
to those who despise Me, ‘The Lord has spoken, you shall have peace’ and to
everyone who follows the view of his heart they say: ‘no evil shall befall you’”
(verse 17). This is exactly what is stated here in the last inscription above. There
is an example of the same words appearing on a Letter from Lachish (586 BCE)
discovered at the gate but a later closer look may suffice.
Who is
entitled to speak for the Lord? “He who hearken to His word and listened”
(verse 18). This is the test of a prophet. The Word of God gives counsel for
the future. The Lord is a Revealer of future events.
A message
for us who are closer to the End of Time is provided here in verse 20: “The Lord’s
anger shall not return until He executes it and until He fulfills the plans of
His heart. At the end of days you shall consider it perfectly.” The premium of
study of the Word of God is to be higher near the End of Time. God did
not send the prophet yet they run and He did not give the message yet they
speak (verse 21). If they stood in God’s council properly, they would have let
the people hear the words and bring them back from the evil deeds and evil ways
(verse 22). Is God a Deistic God Who is absent after Creation like a clock
which is wounded up to run by itself or near almost like Pantheism where the
gods are in everything? (verse 23). Can anyone hide from the Lord like Adam and
Eve? (verse 24). God fills the heavens and the earth and the Holy Spirit is
everywhere (verse 24). God does not say believe now in pantheism that God is in
everything. Pantheism originated when Indians and others discovered the spirals
of nature in the 6th century and later in the 12th
century Fibonacci in his “book of calculations” or Liber Abaci displayed the
uniformity in nature that have the exact same spiral in sunflowers, pine cones,
the petals of flowering plants, and the list just goes on even in modern times
weather patterns. This fact caused the Hindus to be pantheists since humanly
such is impossible unless god is inside nature. But that is not what God says
to Jeremiah here.
The
prophets are falsely saying that they have dreamed (verse 25). Their first
problem is that they are self-deceived “prophets of the deceit of their hearts”
(verse 26). The meaning of this is that they think/plan/purpose/contemplate the
remnant to forget His name with dreams that they tell one another similar to
their forefathers who through Baal forgot the name of the Lord (verse 27). Like
Ellen G. White and her dreams the Lord is in favor that if a prophet has a
dream “let him/her tell a dream and who has My Word, let him tell My Word as
truth” (verse 28). To the Scripture is the test of the true prophet. Jeremiah
cannot speak things contrary to what earlier prophets predicted by the Word of
God [what Moses said, what Isaiah said, what David in Psalms said] otherwise
they are false and a fake. That is the test of a prophet. It must not conflict with
the Bible. What if the prophet says some things not in her own time but in the
distant future like dairy products and meat will be contaminated with
pesticides not good for human consumption, like eggs? Then you have to wait for
that time to come to see if the prophet was true in the prediction.
The Lord
asked what the difference is between straw and wheat? (verse 29). The Word of
God is like fire and like a hammer that shatters rocks [of ignorance and
prejudice and hang-ups and rebellion]. Even the rebellion against anti-Women
Ordination stances of the Word of God found by the General Conference the third
time in a row.
The
second problem with the prophets is, the prophets steal their words from one
another “those who steal My words from one another” (verse 30). Blatant plagiarism
claimed to be their own word from the Lord when it was just a stealing of
thoughts from earlier prophets and patched up as their own. If the prophet is
false, in the long run the theology will catch the person out since falsehood is
unable to keep speaking truth. That is why falsehood is falsehood. It speaks
truth with patches of falsehood and is very dogmatic about it overriding truth
eventually. An evangelist in 1997 was scheduled to finish his last sermon of
his series in a church when an important senior pastor visited and the elders
swop the sermons and he could not preach. Now, this year in 2017, the pastor
who was kicked out took the other pastor to court saying: “you stole my pulpit”.
Friction is still going on about it. What do we do with accusations that Ellen
White copied Farrar and other Books to write Desire of Ages (1898) without
citation? Some phraseology seemed very similar written in a style of a
pietistic preacher and yet academically very detailed. This led M. L. Andreasen
to spent 90 days with her watching her if she is a fake (his testimony on
YOUTUBE). Shortly after Frederick Farrar wrote in 1874 and Alfred Edersheim
wrote in 1883, her book appeared. Farrar and Edersheim are thin in pastoral
messages. Ellen White brings pastoral messages and harmonization as a key
point. She does not work with a polarizing agenda for the Word of God. Plagiarism?
A few paragraphs seem to use similar jargon but that the paragraph was exactly
the same is doubtful. One can find it for a line or two but then the writing is
off again. Let us look at an example: In comparing John 8:1-11 with Ellen White
in 1898 in Desire of Ages page 405 with Frederick Farrar (1874): 71 footnote 1
and 62; also with Alfred Edersheim in 1883 Volume II Book iv chapter 7; there
is a phrase in Ellen White’s Desire of Ages in 1898 that is not in Farrar nor
in Edersheim. This is how I wrote to prof. dr. Craig Evans, the famous non-SDA
emeritus professor in New Testament that was my wife’s external examiner at
Andrews for her Phd. It reads:
“There, traced before them, were the guilty secrets of their own lives”. I could
not find this in the biblical text of John 8, nor in Farrar nor in Edersheim. Where
did this Victorian period writer got this idea from? I asked dr. Evans. She could
not read Greek, but, listen to this, I found it listed in Metzger’s Greek
edition of the New Testament on page 414 in a Greek manuscript in Greek. If I
translated it, it reads “ground, each and everyone of their sins”. It was in
Codex Nanianus in the Marciana Library in Venice dating from the 10th
century CE (Metzger’s U). Take note: it is in Greek, in a 12th
century Codex in the British Museum also in a manuscript in the archives called
(Metzger’s 700) which is also in Greek. These two manuscripts. I am
wondering: Ellen White could not read Greek so, did the Holy Spirit direct her
to an understanding of a language that she was not familiar with, from a
manuscript that are thousands of miles from her own location, locked up in a
building inaccessible to the ordinary public dating centuries before her own?
[16 November 2007 Koot van Wyk to Craig Evans]. I
remember reading hemerological cuneiform texts and comparing them. Hemero means
day and it was “daily predictions for a period of 360 days in advance to the
ruler” of what will happen to him, what he should not eat, or go to, or avoid,
to stay alive or not get sick. One of them dated to the time of Nazimarrutash
the Kassite king famous during the entry into Canaan. It is in the Istanbul
Museum and is almost 99% complete with 30 days every month and one year 360
years. This was divine time predictions by fortunetellers (false prophets) to
the king. Then I compared similar hemerological texts from the time of
Jeremiah, I the court of neo-Babylon, the days of Nebuchadnezzar with these
earlier texts. They guy plagiarized and copied the earlier predictions and here
and there added or changed the outcome slightly. One can see it in the errors
of copying he did! The king did not know he got prophecy “warmed-up all over”
as Ma Moses, the cook (Alabama, USA) from the Jerusalem Center used to say. The third
problem with the prophets is that they prophecy false dreams “against those who
prophecy with false dreams” (verse 32). They said the Lord told them but He did
not. If they say the burden of the Lord told me then Jeremiah should ask them
what burden and give them the message that the Lord will forsake them (verse
33). Jesus said: “not everyone who says to Me Lord, Lord will enter into
heaven.” These will suffer retribution upon that household (verse 34).
The Lord
did not want them to say “the burden of the Lord”. They should just ask: “What
did the Lord say” (verse 35).
The
burden was supposed to be for people like Jeremiah and other true prophets “shall
be to the man of His word” (verse 36). Word people will receive from the Lord
burdens but others not. These prophets pervert the Word of God, the Word of the
Lord of Hosts.
Punishment?
“Here I am” and the Great I am is going to exile them, forsake them and the
city (verse 39). When the Lord bring final punishment at the Hell event with
the extermination of all evil: “I will place upon you everlasting shame and
everlasting embarrassment that shall not be forgotten” (verse 40).
Dear God We all
say Lord, but help us to be not forsaken in the End-Time as people You do not
know. Accept us in Your Kingdom come. In Jesus name, Amen.