The One Year Bible TLB (197 page)
Read The One Year Bible TLB Online
Authors: Tyndale
Don’t envy evil men but continue to reverence the Lord all the time, for surely you have a wonderful future ahead of you. There is hope for you yet!
September 18Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffing rulers in Jerusalem:
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You have struck a bargain with death, you say, and sold yourselves to the devil
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in exchange for his protection against the Assyrians. “They can never touch us,” you say, “for we are under the care of one who will deceive and fool them.”
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But the Lord God says, “See, I am placing a Foundation Stone in Zion—a firm, tested, precious Cornerstone that is safe to build on. He who believes need never run away again.
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I will take the line and plummet of justice to check the foundation wall you built; it looks so fine, but it is so weak a storm of hail will knock it down! The enemy will come like a flood and sweep it away, and you will be drowned.
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I will cancel your agreement of compromise with death and the devil, so when the terrible enemy floods in, you will be trampled into the ground.
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Again and again that flood will come and carry you off, until at last the unmixed horror of the truth of my warnings will finally dawn on you.”
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The bed you have made is far too short to lie on; the blankets are too narrow to cover you.
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The Lord will come suddenly and in anger, as at Mount Perazim and Gibeon, to do a strange, unusual thing—to destroy his own people!
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So scoff no more, lest your punishment be made even greater, for the Lord God has plainly told me that he is determined to crush you.
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Listen to me, listen as I plead: Does a farmer always plow and never sow? Is he forever harrowing the soil and never planting it?
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Does he not finally plant his many kinds of grain, each in its own section of his land?
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He knows just what to do, for God has made him see and understand.
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He doesn’t thresh all grains the same. A sledge is never used on dill, but it is beaten with a stick. A threshing wheel is never rolled on cummin, but it is beaten softly with a flail.
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Bread grain is easily crushed, so he doesn’t keep on pounding it.
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The Lord Almighty is a wonderful teacher and gives the farmer wisdom.
29:
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Woe to Jerusalem,
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the city of David. Year after year you make your many offerings,
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but I will send heavy judgment upon you, and there will be weeping and sorrow. For Jerusalem shall become as her name “Ariel” means—an altar covered with blood.
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I will be your enemy. I will surround Jerusalem and lay siege against it, and build forts around it to destroy it.
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Your voice will whisper like a ghost from the earth where you lie buried.
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But suddenly your ruthless enemies will be driven away like chaff before the wind.
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In an instant, I, the Lord of Hosts, will come upon them with thunder, earthquake, whirlwind, and fire.
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And all the nations fighting Jerusalem will vanish like a dream!
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As a hungry man dreams of eating but is still hungry, and as a thirsty man dreams of drinking but is still faint from thirst when he wakes up, so your enemies will dream of victorious conquest, but all to no avail.
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You are amazed, incredulous? You don’t believe it? Then go ahead and be blind if you must! You are stupid—and not from drinking, either! Stagger, and not from wine!
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For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep. He has closed the eyes of your prophets and seers,
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so all of these future events are a sealed book to them. When you give it to one who can read, he says, “I can’t, for it’s sealed.”
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When you give it to another, he says, “Sorry, I can’t read.”
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And so the Lord says, “Since these people say they are mine but they do not obey me, and since their worship amounts to mere words learned by rote,
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therefore I will take awesome vengeance on these hypocrites and make their wisest counselors as fools.”
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Woe to those who try to hide their plans from God, who try to keep him in the dark concerning what they do! “God can’t see us,” they say to themselves. “He doesn’t know what is going on!”
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How stupid can they be! Isn’t he, the Potter, greater than you, the jars he makes? Will you say to him, “He didn’t make us”? Does a machine call its inventor dumb?
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Soon—and it will not be very long—the wilderness of Lebanon will be a fruitful field again, a lush and fertile forest.
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In that day the deaf will hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the blind will see my plans.
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The meek will be filled with fresh joy from the Lord, and the poor shall exult in the Holy One of Israel.
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Bullies will vanish and scoffers will cease, and all those plotting evil will be killed—
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the violent man who fights at the drop of a hat, the man who waits in hiding to beat up the judge who sentenced him, and the men who use any excuse to be unfair.
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That is why the Lord who redeemed Abraham says: “My people will no longer pale with fear or be ashamed.
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For when they see the surging birthrate and the expanding economy,
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then they will fear and rejoice in my name; they will praise the Holy One of Israel and stand in awe of him.
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Those in error will believe the truth, and complainers will be willing to be taught!
30:
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Woe to my rebellious children, says the Lord; you ask advice from everyone but me and decide to do what I don’t want you to do. You yoke yourselves with unbelievers, thus piling up your sins.
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For without consulting me you have gone down to Egypt to find aid and have put your trust in Pharaoh for his protection.
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But in trusting Pharaoh, you will be disappointed, humiliated and disgraced, for he can’t deliver on his promises to save you.
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For though his power extends to Zoan and Hanes,
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yet it will all turn out to your shame—he won’t help one little bit!
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See them moving slowly across the terrible desert to Egypt—donkeys and camels laden down with treasure to pay for Egypt’s aid. On through the badlands they go, where lions and swift venomous snakes live—and Egypt will give you nothing in return!
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For Egypt’s promises are worthless! “The Reluctant Dragon,”
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I call her!
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Now go and write down this word of mine concerning Egypt, so that it will stand until the end of time, forever and forever, as an indictment of Israel’s unbelief.
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For if you don’t write it, they will claim I never warned them. “Oh no,” they’ll say, “you never told us that!”
For they are stubborn rebels.
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They tell my prophets, “Shut up—we don’t want any more of your reports!” Or they say, “Don’t tell us the truth; tell us nice things; tell us lies. Forget all this gloom; we’ve heard more than enough about your ‘Holy One of Israel’ and all he says.”
Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.
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Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith.
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But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him.
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For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ,
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and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him.
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We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same—we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus.
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And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.
4:
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But remember this, that if a father dies and leaves great wealth for his little son, that child is not much better off than a slave until he grows up, even though he actually owns everything his father had.
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He has to do what his guardians and managers tell him to until he reaches whatever age his father set.
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And that is the way it was with us before Christ came. We were slaves to Jewish laws and rituals, for we thought they could save us.
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But when the right time came, the time God decided on, he sent his Son, born of a woman, born as a Jew,
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to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own sons.
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And because we are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, so now we can rightly speak of God as our dear Father.
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Now we are no longer slaves but God’s own sons. And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us, for that is the way God planned.
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Before you Gentiles knew God you were slaves to so-called gods that did not even exist.
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And now that you have found God (or I should say, now that God has found you), how can it be that you want to go back again and become slaves once more to another poor, weak, useless religion of trying to get to heaven by obeying God’s laws?
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You are trying to find favor with God by what you do or don’t do on certain days or months or seasons or years.
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I fear for you. I am afraid that all my hard work for you was worth nothing.
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Dear brothers, please feel as I do about these things, for I am as free from these chains as you used to be. You did not despise me then when I first preached to you,
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even though I was sick when I first brought you the Good News of Christ.
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But even though my sickness was revolting to you, you didn’t reject me and turn me away. No, you took me in and cared for me as though I were an angel from God or even Jesus Christ himself.
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Where is that happy spirit that we felt together then? For in those days I know you would gladly have taken out your own eyes and given them to replace mine
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if that would have helped me.
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And now have I become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
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Those false teachers who are so anxious to win your favor are not doing it for your good. What they are trying to do is to shut you off from me so that you will pay more attention to them.
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It is a fine thing when people are nice to you with good motives and sincere hearts, especially if they aren’t doing it just when I am with you!
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Oh, my children, how you are hurting me! I am once again suffering for you the pains of a mother waiting for her child to be born—longing for the time when you will finally be filled with Christ.
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How I wish I could be there with you right now and not have to reason with you like this, for at this distance I frankly don’t know what to do.
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Listen to me, you friends who think you have to obey the Jewish laws to be saved: Why don’t you find out what those laws really mean?
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For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one from his slave-wife and one from his freeborn wife.
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There was nothing unusual about the birth of the slave-wife’s baby. But the baby of the freeborn wife was born only after God had especially promised he would come.
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Now this true story is an illustration of God’s two ways of helping people. One way was by giving them his laws to obey. He did this on Mount Sinai, when he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Mount Sinai, by the way, is called “Mount Hagar” by the Arabs—and in my illustration, Abraham’s slave-wife Hagar represents Jerusalem, the mother-city of the Jews, the center of that system of trying to please God by trying to obey the Commandments; and the Jews, who try to follow that system, are her slave children.
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But our mother-city is the heavenly Jerusalem, and she is not a slave to Jewish laws.
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That is what Isaiah meant when he prophesied, “Now you can rejoice, O childless woman; you can shout with joy though you never before had a child. For I am going to give you many children—more children than the slave-wife has.”
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You and I, dear brothers, are the children that God promised, just as Isaac was.
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And so we who are born of the Holy Spirit are persecuted now by those who want us to keep the Jewish laws, just as Isaac, the child of promise, was persecuted by Ishmael, the slave-wife’s son.
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But the Scriptures say that God told Abraham to send away the slave-wife and her son, for the slave-wife’s son could not inherit Abraham’s home and lands along with the free woman’s son.
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Dear brothers, we are not slave children, obligated to the Jewish laws, but children of the free woman, acceptable to God because of our faith.