Zion's Voice

Haftarah Reflections   15

Torah portion           Exodus 10 : 1  to 13 : 16

Haftarah portion     Jeremiah 46 : 13 to 28

Listen to the Prophets

In last week’s Haftarah parashah, we heard from the prophet Ezekiel about the Lord rewarding the king of Babylon because he had used his army to fight against the king of Tyre, who had offended the Lord in relation to Jerusalem.

Jeremiah takes up the same theme this week. But the thrust of Jeremiah’s prophecy was directly to the Pharaoh of Egypt. He notes that Egypt was haughty, proud, and prosperous. Egypt was, at that time, a fertile land producing abundant crops of grain. In Joseph’s time, the ‘years of plenty’ had produced enough grain to satisfy not only the Egyptians, but also the surrounding nations with grain for the next seven years of drought. Joseph wisely built large grain vaults to store the grain in preparation for the debilitating drought God had shown Pharaoh in a dream.

But there was also another issue God had to deal with. There had been a remnant of the people who were not in captivity in Babylon (read the story in Jeremiah 42), who had asked Jeremiah to petition the Lord on their behalf, vowing that whatever the Lord said through Jeremiah, they would faithfully follow. When that word came they did the exact opposite of what God had declared, and chose instead to go to live in Egypt. This was an absolute violation of God’s promise to them of safety in their own land.

So, both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, prophesied the downfall of Egypt at the hands of the Babylonians, And because this remnant of Israelites had chosen to disobey the voice of God in going down to Egypt, the prophecy of Jeremiah regarding their own plight was assured by their presence there.

There is a lesson for us right here.

God had given these Israelites (His own people, called by His Name) a clear instruction through the medium of His respected prophet Jeremiah, declaring both the benefit of their obedience to His word, and the disastrous consequence of disobedience. There are those who might say “What a dreadful thing God has done to these people”. The truth is exactly the opposite. What a dreadful thing these Israelites did in not heeding God’s solemn warning. It is worthy of our attention lest we find ourselves doing exactly the same thing, albeit in very different situations.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is always true to His word. He is a God of justice and a God of righteousness. He has spelled out clearly for us, in His word, the path we should tread before Him. The benefits of obedience are clearly spelled out, and the consequences of disobedience are there for us to see also.

In our day, we are seeing, not only individuals and groups, but whole nations, metaphorically ‘thumbing their nose’ at God. Even worse, there are some church denominations doing the same, especially in regard to Israel. When God spoke the promise of blessings and curses to Abraham in Genesis 12;3, He was deadly serious. It is worthy of note, yet again, that the words which are both translated ‘curse’ in English, are two different words in Hebrew, the language in which the Hebrew Scriptures were written. The first is “a’rar” meaning bitterly curse. The second “qalal” means to treat lightly, or to treat with contempt. How is it possible for whole Christian denominations to be so misled?

But in our parashah we end with on a note of comfort for Israel. The last two verses have two promises and a warning within them. The first promise is that Israel will not suffer the same devastating defeat as the Egyptians. The second is that their lives will be spared. However, because of their disobedient breaking of the first covenant made with Moses, and their utter contempt for the word delivered to them by Jeremiah, they would be punished by their actions. Because we have the record of history we are able to see exactly what happened to Israel some hundreds of years later, and for the same reasons. They would again be sent from the land, and on that occasion for almost two thousand years. We are only seeing, in our lifetime, that God is again calling them back to the Land again. This time it will be a lasting return, because this return is just one of the signs that God is preparing to send Yeshua back again to rule and reign from Jerusalem.

These prophets of old still speak today don’t they?

Shabbat Shalom

RS