Zedekiah, king of Judah (597-587 B.C.) consistently expected that God would bring a last minute reprieve, and he and his people would not be conquered by the Babylonians. He underestimated the sin of his people, and he underestimated God's power to deal with that.
For this reason, the prophet Jeremiah consistently has to warn him that there will be no reprieve. Into exile they will go.
A thought on why Ezekiel 40-48 are such important chapters.
The other day I was reading 2 Chronicles 6:36-39, the prayer that Solomon prays when he dedicates the new temple he's just built. If the people are exiled, they can pray towards the city and the temple and God will hear.
I'll just park this here for future reference.
Sometimes you see writers say that certain parts of the Bible are written in the "apocalyptic" style of writing.
Recognising the "genre" of part of the Bible can be very important when it comes to reading it properly. For instance, parables and historical narrative communicate in very different ways; you'd completely misread the gospels if you confused them.
When you have something you do not want to forget, do you write it on your hand? Some people write things on the palms of their hands; others write things on the back; others don't do this at all.
I owe to my friend John Goulding the following observation:
In Jonah 4, God provided a plant to shield Jonah from the heat. The verb "to provide" is a key-word in Jonah - it's
In our Christianity Explored group last week, we were discussing Jesus' predictions of Peter's denials, and of his own suffering, death and resurrection, as a prelude to a very good session on Jesus' resurrection.
One of the members of the group asked a question about a detail that I had never noticed before in Mark's text:
There is a real danger that we are so familiar with John the Baptist fulfilling Isaiah 40:3 that we lose sight of the staggering implication this has for Jesus.
So France comments:
I've just read Palmer Robertson's treatment of the book of Jeremiah in his The Christ of the Prophets
John Mackay is very helpful in his commentary on Jeremiah (volume 2)
John 2:16 reads, "Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade."
In the parallel incident in Mark 11:15-19, Jesus says “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” He quotes Isaiah 56:7, but the cross references in my ESV point me to Jeremiah 7:11 for the latter half of that verse, “Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”
