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CHAPTER NINE

ISRAEL and

The TWO-EDGED SWORD

FOR and AGAINST

and the setting is

SIN or SALVATION

DISQUISITION FROM THE BIBLE

SECTION VI

For More on this Theme
See Israel IV Chapter 10.

Chapter 8 ended in this way:

"In particular, the Lord will fulfil that plan for a repentant remnant, restored Israel as in Ezekiel 37, coming first back to the land and then to the Lord who first gave, and who in His Christ, suffered in its very midst and in its very capital, the just for the unjust to bring us to God.

"Then ended at last, all begins for eternity as in Revelation 20-22.

"Waiting ? It is a wonder for which one waits, and the wonderful being its focus (as in Isaiah 9:6), even the Lord Himself, it is a glory which shows wonder in the very presence of the One who is Wonderful in Himself, by His very nature. Go earth, come heaven: for then, the time has come!"

In this Chapter, pursuing the theme of man and God, Israel and the nations, invasion and reply, taunt and truth, the contemptuous and the contemptible, becoming one ... we plan to look at -

Zephaniah 2:8-11, 3:2,15,18-19.
with Zechariah 11:7-13,  and 13:4-7, Isaiah 24:14-16.

With these prophets we find a beautiful complement to our last Chapter, in their noble, deep, probing, illumination concerning the core and culmination in Christ of that spiritual relationship between man and God, not wrought by carnal imaginations but by divine direction decree and deposition. If there are strong bonds to bind us to Him, who believe, yet there are deep intimacies to feed us who receive Him; and what to an unbelieving world may seem directive is to those who know Him, no more directive than driving on the correct side of the road, the better for peace and order, and for a gracious purpose, for our road is the highway of holiness.

Indeed, in this Chapter and in these biblical premises, we come now to the more ultimate glories as we move past the perils of present time, governed by the word of God, to fruitions, culminations and wonder indeed. For this we wait with patience, for it will surely come, as did all the rest. We start however with divine excoriations concerning wild follies of emulous discord and indeed disdain from two nations.

Moab and Ammon enter the lists in Zephaniah, as we see in our first area - 2:8-11. 

The sheer gall in Ammon and Moab to dare to seek to dispossess Israel, insulting, reproaching: this will bring perpetual desolation. In fact, this dire result faces all who try to invent gods, or being deluded, just do so, contrivers of naturalistic gods which never arrive, of derivative copy-cat gods using some form of imitation to give an ostensible measure of respectability, as in the surrounding nations then and now to so large an extent in so many! The Lord will firstly, reduce such gods - as He did expressly in Egypt, to nothing where they belong in His own assessment; and then ensure that not some parts of the earth but all parts acknowledge Him who is the Creator, whether this nation or that. Such likewise comes from Isaiah 45:22ff., in the saving context:

"Look to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth,
for I am God and there is no other."

The ultimate submission is not to Allah or to Buddha or to Nirvana, or to desired virgin-environment: it is to the reality who is the God of revelation and atonement from the first that man sinned, that God of pity and purity who alone has left the record of the same and who alone has given tests in word, the living Word  and written book of the Lord, the Bible, that cannot be overturned^*1 .

Whatever Israel may have done (and that is plenty, alas in religious divagations of its own), God Himself will overturn those who seek to overturn the writings of the prophets, the articulation of the Almighty which has only one issuance: Jesus the Christ, as in Deuteronomy 18, Isaiah 11, 59:21ff., Psalm 72 and 2, Daniel 7.

This is the new 'Joshua' who leads into the promised land of salvation; for if that was promised to which the Lord has faithfully now returned His people, a new State since 1948, suddenly arising as in Isaiah 49:21 and 66:5-8. Will a nation be born at once! He expostulates, empathetically exposing the amazement with which His sudden action in the future to that time, would arise! In May 1948, it was so; but how great was the preliminary, the prelude, the punishment for unbelief, the demonstration with remonstration; for without Him, one can do nothing, mere squawks and sedition, ambition and construction in vain.

See the British Empire! how glorious an Empire it had potential to be; but drifting from God, despite some ameliorations, how it fell, more and more the national replacing the spiritual. Nor is it alone, for what in Europe is now outstanding but the hope of its unity and power, so that as a NEW UNIT it too may fail, one more demonstration lesson. Yet BEFORE it fails, as with the others, what panache is to come; but it cannot be for too long, since the time is short^*2.

Indeed, in Zephaniah 3, God proceeds to articulate the dishonour of Jerusalem; but nothing alters His intention to starve out the fictitious factions on this earth, illicit gods and their spawn.

Later in Zephaniah, in fact in 3:12,15,18, we find that Israel is to be purged, and Jerusalem in particular, and that when this is over (as in Zechariah 12-13:1), then there will be a certain quality in the residual people of Israel.

	"I will leave in your midst a meek and humble people,
	and they shall trust in the name of the Lord."

Is it so hard! These, converted to Christ whose sermon on the Mount is not for poetical but for practical purposes as in Matthew 5-7, will come to that point in the Lord's dealing that they speak no lies, nor will there be a deceitful tongue. This appears to move on to the millenium, but even in principle when the Lord intervenes as in Micah 7, Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 59, Psalm 2, 72, there will be a certain beauty of holiness. This is for now, and it is imperative that the people of the Lord, who cling only to Him, only to Christ as Saviour in the triune plan of salvation, free and final, irrevocable and sure, redeemer and bodily resurrected, having come to save and coming to rule, who find His power and relate to His patience positively, to realise the point. As Philippians 1 makes so clear, EVERY Christian is a 'saint'. You do not make them, as if the pope again played God; HE makes them, and every one saved IS one!

Let us then endeavour with all holy zeal so to act. Let us return to the indictment of Zephaniah 3 at the its start, against Jerusalem; but then as we move we come to a deliverance even more important than the geographical one, equally attested: it is the spiritual one.

Here is a people who as in Zechariah 3:9, find this:

"The LORD has taken away your judgments, He has cast out your enemy.
The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst;
you shall see disaster no more."

As in Ezekiel 39 as it ends, what made Israel, a people ostensibly for the Lord, to become weak was wickedness, and the consequent discipline. Now what makes it strong is the Lord, and their absolute reliance on Him, with all the other Christians who on that day, with the light for Israel and for the Gentiles alike,  lit within with a glow both delectable and awesome in its purity.

In that day:

	"The LORD your God in hour midst, the Mighty One, will save.
	He will rejoice over you with gladness,
	He will quiet you with His love,
	He will rejoice over you with singing."

Such is the nature of the Christian's pilgrimage: whatever trials or tests may surge on and out again, this is the medium. Such is the rest into which are drawn all who are His of any and every race and climate zone, that it is deeply moving, for as sin has moved out, so sanctity has moved in. Praise the Lord.

Thus energy, history, power, peace, glory, divine intervention, discipline here and there to this nation and to that in this and that manner, it all is wound together, like the fronds of a fern before it opens; and then, allowed to transpire, it all comes until the light is glorious and this earth itself hastens out of the way to make way for a new heavens and earth in which righteousness dwells (II Peter 3).

Is it an argument as with Stephen ? is it a foreign power, as with Assyria, Babylon, Hitler's Germany, the papacy which so shrivelled in its armies that Stalin asked how many divisions the pope had; or is it wolves baying to extinguish a direct testimonial to the power of God in this, that not only can He keep ALIVE His Israel, in the very midst of His own discipline of her, over MILLENIA, but He can bring her back even before salvation arises on her horizon (as in Ezekiel 37, Zechariah 12), and still manage both to protect and to deliver her mightily when the set time comes, as it now has: it is all one in this.

The Lord both can and will do it. To the individual similarly, He declares:

"Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it" -

I Thessalonians 5:24, Philippians 1:6).

In HIM, is all power, wisdom, might, brightness of understanding, depth of wisdom, power of control, lustre of love, liberty for truth to avail and to prevail because it IS true; and it is He and He is it, for in Him are all the riches of glory without shame, capacity without tyranny, evidence with faith its brother for man to have access, so that he who trusts in Him, that one shall never be ashamed (Psalm 25:3, Romans 9:33).

Thus does the Lord rove over all time from Israel's fall to its restoration, even that second part of it when the vast remnant returns not only to its land but to its Lord. It is this which, though slender compared with ALL, is nevertheless abundant in its own thrust as it is restored in spirit also,  to the LORD. It is for one, it is for all, this coming of the Lord which will consummate the holiness and effectuate the promises to the uttermost part, so that all in one (as in Revelation 5, where the saints await their brethren to come, many as slain from the earth), and one in all (where the vast throngs of Jewish Christians and Gentile ones are in one sea of spirituality, derivation different but consummation the same, as in Revelation 7). So is Christ over all, and so does every knee as in Isaiah 45:22-24, even those from all the ends of the earth.

Some will say,

"Surely in the Lord I have righteousness and strength,"

as to Christ do men come, and all the enemies of the Lord and His people, now in double array, Jew and Gentile as in Isaiah 49:6, cannot stop them.

It is not some other Lord; it is not some other people: it is He the light to the Gentiles who as Jeremiah declares, will come to Him despising their idols (Jeremiah 16:19-21). One will say, "I am the Lord's", another call himself by the name of Jacob, and yet another write, "The Lord's" as from every source and situation, all assembly as one in Him who IS One (Isaiah 44:3-5).

Was Israel, as Zephaniah was inspired to write in his day, involved in such an unspiritual travesty that he could write (2:3-7):

Yet HE remains the same.

It proceeds:
 

             But they rose early and corrupted all their deeds' " ...

But then immediately after this, with the eye seeing vast distances to the consummation, the prophet wrote this (Zephaniah 3:8):

" 'Therefore wait for Me,' says the Lord,

'Until the day I rise up for plunder;

My determination is to gather the nations

To My assembly of kingdoms,

To pour on them My indignation,

All my fierce anger;

All the earth shall be devoured

With the fire of My jealousy.

 

'For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language,

That they all may call on the name of the Lord,

To serve Him with one accord.

From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia

My worshipers,                 

Shall bring My offering.

 

'In that day you shall not be shamed for any of your deeds

In which you transgress against Me;

For then I will take away from your midst

Those who rejoice in your pride,

And you shall no longer be haughty

In My holy mountain.

       And they shall trust in the name of the Lord.' "

The nations will inherit, just as Israel inherited in its time, the wrath that awaits the wily, the supercilious, the naturalistic kneading of things made as if to mould them into gods and god-like powers. They will be gathered but in vain, some against Israel, and in the end, against the Lord; but there the day comes as Zephaniah shows, and it ends as in Revelation 19; though the wrath of man continues till it is finally inextinguished, as is burnt paper, that has nothing more to give in order to burn, and becomes an assortment of ashes.

Thus the Jewish specialty, having contributed its components and through them came the Word of God and the Christ (Romans 9), and the Gentile specialty, having come in vast numbers from a long range of continent, island and shore: these come one and all who are called and sealed, as Isaiah 24:16 so gloriously puts it:

"They shall lift up their voice, they shall sing;

For the majesty of the Lord

They shall cry aloud from the sea.

Therefore glorify the Lord in the dawning light,

The name of the Lord God of Israel in the coastlands of the sea.

From the ends of the earth we have heard songs:

'Glory to the righteous!' "

In this correlative passage in Isaiah, we then turn to the cost of this glory, of this victory, this tragedy become triumph; and a foretaste of Isaiah 52-53 is found with that  eminent subtlety and artistry for which the Lord is so notable and so to be praised,  in His word.

Thus, turning from the attainment, we look at the woes of His atonement payment.

"But I said,

'I am ruined, ruined!

Woe to me!

The treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously,

Indeed, the treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously.'

 

"Fear and the pit and the snare

Are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth.

And it shall be

That he who flees from the noise of the fear

Shall fall into the pit,

And he who comes up from the midst of the pit

Shall be caught in the snare;

For the windows from on high are open,

And the foundations of the earth are shaken.

The earth is violently broken,

The earth is split open,

The earth is shaken exceedingly.

The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard,

And shall totter like a hut;

Its transgression shall be heavy upon it,

      And it will fall, and not rise again."

There it is, from the ends of the earth, is heard the cry at HIS MAJESTY, not as some title but as the truth, felt in the heart, experienced in the mind, thrust into the eye that delights in it. The city of Jerusalem becomes the new focus, where the completion of its follies becomes the scene for the scenario of salvation. We see the one betrayed by His fellow as in Zechariah 12:5ff. -

"What are these wounds in Your hands?
Then He shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.

"Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow,
says the LORD of hosts: Smite the Shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered."

So is the dreadful betrayal, first by a man, then by a nation, accomplished, and in what is the immediate price to be found for treachery ? It is 30 pieces of silver, "that princely price they set on Me!" (Zechariah 11:13).

Here is the Lord speaking, determining in what way He will deal with His flock (Zechariah 11:7-11), and covering the case from divine perspective, with the very power of God. Speaking as the Shepherd (cf. Ezekiel 34 where His incarnation as such is shown just as His bearing of the guilt is shown in Hosea 13:14,both by the Lord God Himself), He divulges more from so long ago.

He continues in this pictorial presentation of history to come: "Then I said to them, If it is agreeable to you, give Me My wages ..." The devastating irony is like that of the Titanic. Here is one not touted to be truth, but the truth itself, being betrayed for cash, interpreted with a terrible irony as wages for His Messianic mercy, healings, resurrections, grace and words. "Throw it to the potter," He directs, with supra-historical insight and divine disdain.

 In Zechariah 13, amidst the false prophets we walk, and then someone turns to the LORD, and asks, not How much did you make out of the flock ? (cf. Jeremiah 23, Zephaniah 3:3ff., Ezekiel 34:7ff.,18-20), but the correlative question for the Good Shepherd:

 "What are these wounds in your hands ?"

They work their way down the hand, as the flesh resists but in vain the weight of the entire body left for hours so suspended, and thus there is a line the eye can at last follow upwards as if toward the heart. Was it a wound in vain ? Not at all, but here is no false prophet as they intended in their treatment of Him, but one crucified, a thought they did not care to find.

Yet it is so, for these are

"Those," says He, "with which I have smitten in the house of My friends."

It is perhaps as if to say: These ? they are from My nation, to which I came, who though they were made by Me, so treated Me! (cf. Isaiah 49:7), because they abominated Me! Indeed, there is NOT ONLY the actual wound to be found in each hand, there is the sword wound between the hands, now seen no more extended in crucifixion, where the soldier smote Him. It is an ensemble, in hand, up hand, between these wounds.

The hand wounds and the sword thrust wound provide a texture of wounds linking hand with hand, a puzzling onset, arcane! What is this ? They are slow to realise the enormity of it, the reason for it, what caused it! as well they might be, unenlightened, questing, not facing the obvious, when the curtain is drawn up and the eyes see what was both predicted and performed upon Him!

Alas, payment is made where mercy is despatched and yet rebutted, offered and yet crushed. Before the blessing there is the rebuke: Zechariah 13:9, the purging, the purification, and yet how long, how very long it takes: till this present moment, it proceeds.

What then ? "Awake O sword!" The wound is indeed imparted, for the case is this:

"Strike the Shepherd and the sheep will be scattered," a passage applied to Himself by Christ, on the famous occasion of His predicting Peter's fall (Matthew 26:30-34).

Alas and alas for those who so misconceived, mistreated Him, who now cannot abide the simple truth, who crucified Him. But the truth is not killed, though the body in which He came was killed; for it arises free, and its reign does not spare as if to sanctify a lie. Did they then destroy their mercy as far as they were able ? but death could not contain Him who came according to the predestinate purpose and foreknowledge of God, whose own Being was thus incarnate (Hosea 13:14, Acts 2:23).

Alas, however, death very much could contain many of those now left by the crucified Shepherd of the flock, and unprotected, vain in misfaith, they inherited the sword that smites the lie, and exploits the vulnerability which departs from the Prince of Peace.

Thus comes that rebuke of the gory to those in glory in their own minds, carried away with the insensitivies of religion as commerce (as in II Peter 2). The Gentiles in vat numbers have followed in the same folly.

What are those wounds, are they not arising between your hands ? Oh those ? we might express the point in a ready English, They are the wounds with which I was wounded in the house of My friends. They are not exotic, but execratory; these are not those of idolatry but of friendship, of loyalty, of those so touched by My coming that they accorded Me these! I did not achieve them in some ritual of frenzy. I was GIVEN THEM.

It is as if to say further:

Nor was I given them by enemies. No, that hypothesis too is wrong. I was given them by friends. Indeed, it is not enough to say that they gave them to Me. They did so when I was in their house, in their nation, in their intimate company, in their capital in a band where even one of My close associates managed to contrive this by betrayal. 

No, not at all is this some adventure of a zealot, it is the tragedy of misplaced friendship, of those who seeing their God, see to His death in the fleshly format as if He were some criminal, requiring death for blasphemy, or for false worship (Isaiah 53:9).

To interpret, it is as if to say, in this and the following context:

Never imagine these wounds to be self-inflicted, or the result of enemy action. These tore into Me from another source: FRIENDS; and it was in their INSTITUTION, their house, the environs of their very Temple, their proper place, that this was done. It was not done in a corner, but in full view of all, showing all that hospitality would require: except in this, that it was the opposite. It is as it was, when 30 pieces of silver were a FINE PRICE for My betrayal.

Here is the result! Look well at it for now comes the sword. You reject the Physician, then the disease becomes rampant. You reject the peace (Isaiah 9:7), then your immediate reward is the death which exposure permits and folly invites.

Such is the sustained irony from Zechariah 11, a tour de force that bites into the unbelieving heart, rebukes the mistaking eye and alerts the susceptible spirit to the truth, as does a stinging antiseptic alert the mind to a wound.

It is the same irony, the same scenario, the same Saviour, and the same Speaker as in Zechariah 11, who spoke of His 'wages'.

The sword indeed arose. But the Lord returns as in Zechariah 14, and all nations will find His rule as in Psalm 72, and the whole earth will be filled with His glory before, time up, it goes (Isaiah 51:6).

What then, Will this earth continue in regalia of lies and fraud ? Not at all. Was Israel permitted to do it ? Has not the duet of millenia, where Israel's song had so much sorrow, TOLD the world the folly of removing the heart and core of your life and sacrificing yourself to your own will and thoughts in defiance of the Lord! Alas, the nations are in the same truculent disregard to inherit their own shame; but in the name of the Lord, whether from Israel or the Gentiles, there come those for whom the removal of this earth is like a change of house to a newer and better environment, coming to the MAKER of this earth for the era of a new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65, Revelation 20, II Peter 3), where righteousness is there in its exultation and in its intimacy.

So has history pulsed, and will it proceed to its template, till finished.

Indeed, there is a stark and startling parallel: Jesus CAME at the time predicted by Daniel, and His work was done. Israel has COME BACK in the midst of the set piece conditions which Christ foretold, and that is done, that now also;  and the accompanying events have come. These events include the crucial restoration of Jerusalem to Israel as in Luke 21:24, so marking the end of the Gentile era. The Gentile world itself is performing precisely as predicted (Matthew 24, Luke 21. II Timothy 3, 4, I Timothy 4, II Peter 2), on the way to that seduction of wisdom and belligerent immorality foretold (Romans 1:17ff.).

So vast was this end predicted to be, that it would at length make this earth uninhabitable by man (Matthew 24:22), except the Lord, despised and cast to the Gentiles, come back to rule, which He will. What Israel with Rome did in flesh, much of the Gentile world now has done in spirit, and for one and for all who do not return to the Lord, the result of folly without faith, is judgment without mercy; for mercy murdered is left to wallow, while truth does not die any more (Isaiah 59), but in incandescent purity, is realised and released. Reality ? you cannot change it. It is. And praise God, it is well that it is, for truth is not surrendered to passion, and pity despised, does not placate evil by lapsing from  purity.

Now comes the End of the Age, like a ship berthing.

That, with all the rest, speaks of God's opinion of those who contest His will for nation or race, surging into imaginary magnificence or power or oppressive arrogance: for against all this, there is only one Saviour, born into Israel, killed in Jerusalem, to return where they once caused a biological evacuation by miserable means, now to a rule. It is this which will establish what holiness is (Isaiah 11, Psalm 2, 72), till the final end of this earth moves out, and the actors move to their appointed posts and premises (as in Daniel 12).

Already the distant blast of the ship of Divine State returning, may be heard. The dock is increasingly in the desired and foretold state. It comes. That, it is worth waiting for (Habakkuk 2:3):

             It will not tarry."

	Stand therefore in heightened expectation:
	but you must wait in faith, waiting for wonder;
	for the finale which displaces confusion, condemns pretence,
	praises virtue, establishes grace, welcomes home the children of God,
	collapses the very lung that breathes folly,
	and establishes for ever the beauty of holiness in its native place.

Here then is the ultimate for man and the culmination of years by the thousands. In these, there have been justified fears in the ungodly, but justification from sin in the godly, where peace is now at last continually like a river that swells with abundance, while praise is removed from tawdry self-serving substitutes and the Lord is seen face to face.

Over time, His extensive and intensive counsels have moved in many directions with one set of clear principles of faithfulness, mercy and justice, till freedom's light finished, faith's truth remains. Now is found altogether beyond the mists of preludes and the parades of preliminaries (I Corinthians 13),  the God of creation and of redemption. Now are found, with Him, those whom He has redeemed out of history into eternity, where resurrected in body, new in spirit, gifted with ongoing grace in everlasting life, the saints of God, each one of the Christian family, find rest in the consummation of the quest, beholding the very face of God (Revelation 22).

NOTES

*1

 SMR,  TMR , Scientific Method

Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ,

Who Answers Riddles and Where He is, Darkness Departs.

Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny.

*2

See for example Answers to Questions Ch. 5 with SMR Chs.  8 and  9. On Isaiah here, see With Heart and Soul ... Ch. 6.