Ezekial 16:1-14 & Jeremiah 31:36-38

“Again, the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ² ‘Son of man, cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, ³ and say, ‘Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: ‘Your birth and your nativity are from the land of Canaan; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. ⁴ As for your nativity, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed in water to cleanse you; you were not rubbed with salt nor wrapped in swaddling clothes. ⁵ No eye pitied you, to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you; but you were thrown out into the open field, when you yourself were loathed on the day you were born.

⁶ And when I passed by you and saw you struggling in your own blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ ⁷ I made you thrive like a plant in the field; and you grew, matured, and became very beautiful. Your breasts were formed, your hair grew, but you were naked and bare.

⁸ When I passed by you again and looked upon you, indeed your time was the time of love; so I spread My wing over you and covered your nakedness. Yes, I swore an oath to you and entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine,’ says the Lord God.

⁹ Then I washed you in water; yes, I thoroughly washed off your blood, and I anointed you with oil. ¹⁰ I clothed you in embroidered cloth and gave you sandals of badger skin; I clothed you with fine linen and covered you with silk. ¹¹ I adorned you with ornaments, put bracelets on your wrists, and a chain on your neck. ¹² And I put a jewel in your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown on your head.

¹³ Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen, silk, and embroidered cloth. You ate pastry of fine flour, honey, and oil. You were exceedingly beautiful, and succeeded to royalty. ¹⁴ Your fame went out among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through My splendor which I had bestowed on you,’ says the Lord God.”

I hope that you enjoyed the journey through the book of Hebrews. I certainly learned a lot.

We will take a bit of detour from going through the entire book for a bit. For the next few weeks, we are going to look at God’s love for Israel and His commitment to her.

Recently, I encountered a very large ‘religious’ organization in China and South Korea that promotes their belief in Jesus, and I had a conversation with one of the followers; they ‘checked’ all the right boxes. Do you believe that Jesus is God, that Jesus died on the cross, went to the grave, and rose again? I got yeses all the way through. Do you believe in the Bible as God’s Holy Word? and on we can go; you get the gist. Then, I set up a subsequent meeting with a leader in the group. When I logged into the meeting, I was shown a video of more than 100,000 people ‘graduating’ from a school with much pomp and dance.

There was a man, one whom they seemed to revere and to whom they gave flowers; he was obviously the leader, and when I pressed about who he was, it was then that I learned the whole truth.

They believe that the book of Revelation is a Parable and that this man has the interpretation. They reject Israel, believing that since they rejected Jesus, God has rejected them. So, for instance, where the 12 tribes and 144,000 are mentioned and called out by name, they do not believe they are literal Jews but that these Chinese persons can be in the 144,000 and that only these will be in the New Jerusalem.

I asked a simple Biblical question. How can God be done with Israel when Jesus is a Jew, born of the tribe of Judah, under Mary’s lineage, and thus is the oldest living male and the rightful King of Israel? It was then that I learned that they did not believe in the literal birth of Jesus; it was figurative. Sadly, these folks are not saved. Jesus was literally born, did die, and did resurrect, or we are lost as well without hope.

This bugged me over the last few weeks, and so as I am currently reading through Jeremiah and seeing all the promises that God made to them, and how He planned to preserve a remnant in Babylon so they could come back to Israel and inhabit Jerusalem. I thought we should take a look at God’s love for Israel. This will be an exhaustive look at the subject as best I can do it. I would love your responses and insights if maybe I missed something. Thanks ahead of time for all the time it will take to read these lessons.

In Ezekiel 16, we have a very detailed story of how God views Israel and, in particular, Jerusalem. By the way, we are introduced to Jerusalem in Genesis 14; it is where Abram pays tithes to Melchizedek. God views Jerusalem as his wife. God discovered her abandoned and forsaken; He had compassion on her, washed her, and wrapped her in swaddling clothes; this is a sign of deep affection and care.

God, in verse 6, commands her to ‘live.’ God sustains her, and no one can destroy her without His expressed permission.

Notice in verse 7 that God sees Jerusalem as very beautiful and that He ‘covers’ her; this is a reference to the marital act of intercourse; this is God claiming Jerusalem, in particular, as His wife.

Now we know that Israel and, in particular, Jerusalem were unfaithful to God, and some really bad things happened to them, including captivities in Assyria and Babylon. But God never abandoned Israel; while He was pronouncing the judgment on Jerusalem through Jeremiah, He made sure to include this promise from Jeremiah 31:36-38,

“Only if this fixed order departed from My presence,’ declares the LORD, ‘would Israel’s descendants ever cease to be a nation before Me.’ 37 This is what the LORD says: ‘Only if the heavens above could be measured and the foundations of the earth below searched out would I reject all of Israel’s descendants because of all they have done,’ declares the LORD. 38 ‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when this city will be rebuilt for Me, from the tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate.”

Now we know the city was rebuilt in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, but this was an eternal promise as well, one of those double prophesies. Israel today is rebuilt from the ruins left by the AD 70 invasion and the myriad of crusades that were fought over the centuries. She was basically a barren land for the better part of 1,900 years, but now Israel and, in particular, Jerusalem are rebuilt. She will never cease to exist ever again, and one day, Jesus, the King of the Jews, will sit and reign from the throne of His father David. God loves Israel, so much so that His Son came as a Jew.

I leave you with Psalm 122:6. We are called to love who or what God loves.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May they prosper who love you.”

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

How to Connect with Us

On Facebook (live broadcast of Sunday’s Message at 11 am): https://www.facebook.com/MississaugaMissionaryBaptistChurch

Join us on Zoom every Sunday (10:30 am) for Sunday Service AND every Tuesday at 8:00 pm for Bible Study: Meeting ID: 700 794 460 Passcode: 032661; https://us02web.zoom.us/j/700794460?pwd=M3NFRG91ZW5Sa2Z3amVyWkFnYXd6QT09

Online: https://www.mmbchurch.ca

Email: support@mmbchurch.ca

Chapter 13:18-25

“Pray for us; for we are confident that we have a good conscience, in all things desiring to live honorably. ¹⁹ But I especially urge you to do this, that I may be restored to you the sooner. ²⁰ Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, ²¹ make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

²² And I appeal to you, brethren, bear with the word of exhortation, for I have written to you in few words. ²³ Know that our brother Timothy has been set free, with whom I shall see you if he comes shortly. ²⁴ Greet all those who rule over you, and all the saints. Those from Italy greet you. ²⁵ Grace be with you all. Amen.”

I am thankful for all of the responses to the lessons. Wow, it is good to know that they are being read, and it thrills me! If you had told me 13 years ago, when we began this as a ministry of our church, that God would take us across the world and we would meet Christians via email from every corner of the world, I would have laughed and wondered. But God is great; He takes the little that we do, and He makes it bigger than we could ever imagine.

As we come to the end of the Hebrew series, I am a bit sad; I love this book. It opens an understanding of the Old Testament that, sadly, too many Christians do not get. We can understand what the sacrifices are about, and with that knowledge, we can better understand why Jesus died, how He died, why He died when He did, the power of His death, the importance of His sayings on the cross, and more importantly His role, not as our sacrifice but as our High Priest who intercedes for us daily.

Unlike human high priests who are fallible, Jesus is perfect, and as such, His sacrifice is perfect, and that perfection is offered to us freely in Him. Unlike human high priests, Jesus, via the indwelling Holy Spirit, is with us all the time and walks alongside us to help us (Hebrews 4:14-16).

We find Jesus in Genesis 14, the High Priest of Salem, the King of Salem, the King of Peace (all the same person), who meets Abraham, receives tithes from him, and offers him bread and wine. We can see Jesus in the entire narrative as we understand the book of Hebrews more and more. Unfortunately, we have a lack of exegetical teaching in many of our pulpits. There are a lot of encouragement and self-affirming messages, but few get into the nitty-gritty of the scriptures and challenge us to be holy, like God is Holy.

Paul asks his readers to ‘bear with the word of exhortation,’ put up with me calling out to you. Please hold on and take seriously what I am telling you. Don’t hate me; take the message from God through the power of the Holy Spirit and live it out. Too many Christians leave church mad at the pastor for preaching the truth because it hits too close to home, but it is God doing it, not the preacher. God knows your secrets, not the preacher. All too often, the preacher is dealing with his own sinfulness and weaknesses; he has no clue what yours are.

The whole idea of Hebrews was to show the Jews that Jesus is God, the Messiah, and that He was and is the One they were looking for. He is the One we are looking for as well. Our Savior, our Friend, our Redeemer, and our High Priest. Jesus is the answer.

If you got nothing else out of the study in Hebrews, I hope that you got this: Jesus is your salvation; He has bought and secured your eternity forever. The plan was never a ‘b’ but has always been the plan. Jesus came to die and resurrect for your sins, not His own, but yours and mine. There are no options for salvation, Jesus and Jesus alone.

Live your life to please Jesus; all else will flow from this. If you seek Him and His glory first, He will do things in your life and reveal Himself to you in ways that cannot be forgotten. He will show Himself in ways that show you His majesty and power but never diminish His kind and gentle love for you. Jesus will be your friend in the real and tangible sense of the word. Too many Christians do not have a true friendship with Jesus; He is their friend, but they are not His. They still view Him as this distant Savior, not an intimate and close friend, one to whom they need not ‘try’ to hide anything. See John 15:14-16,

“You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not understand what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because everything I have learned from My Father, I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will remain—so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you….”

Jesus longs to treat you and me as friends and to have that kind of intimacy with us. That begins with obedience to His words, and obedience begins with an honest and deep appreciation for the redemption we have in Jesus. An appreciation for the price that was paid, an appreciation for the violence He suffered on our behalf, and an appreciation for the hundreds of years of God superintending the free will of man to make sure Jesus came at the right time, to satisfy the wrath of God so that you and I can be redeemed.

The last thing I want to mention – and this is a response to a conversation with people who say they trust Jesus as Savior but do not see the importance of Israel in the end times – is what I say: Jesus is an Israelite. He is the legal King of the Jews, and as such, God cannot be done with the Jews. Jesus will return as a Jewish King to a Jewish people who will receive Him this time, and He will reign over the whole world from the throne of David in Jerusalem, Israel. There is simply no way around that conclusion except that you read something into the scriptures or take something away.

Live to please God; this should be our sole objective.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

How to Connect with Us

On Facebook (live broadcast of Sunday’s Message at 11 am): https://www.facebook.com/MississaugaMissionaryBaptistChurch

Join us on Zoom every Sunday (10:30 am) for Sunday Service AND every Tuesday at 8:00 pm for Bible Study: Meeting ID: 700 794 460 Passcode: 032661; https://us02web.zoom.us/j/700794460?pwd=M3NFRG91ZW5Sa2Z3amVyWkFnYXd6QT09

Online: https://www.mmbchurch.ca

Email: support@mmbchurch.ca