Old Testament reading: Jeremiah 3-4
I’m still trying to process Jeremiah 2, but the format demands me to continue on! God’s intense and abiding love for Judah is seen in Jeremiah 3:1. Despite her repeated harlotries with a host of illicit lovers, God pleads with His people, “Yet return to Me.” The reference at the beginning of the verse is to Deuteronomy 24:1-4. In this text, if a man puts away his wife and she becomes the wife of another, she cannot return to her first husband if he puts her away or dies. This principle was not applicable in Judah’s case. Though she had played the harlot with many lovers, God was still her only true husband, and any hope of deliverance and salvation could only be found by returning to Him. God speaks to Jeremiah concerning Judah’s gross immorality and goes so far as to say she is worse than backsliding Israel. How? Because Judah was witness to God’s punishment of Israel for her adulteries, yet she did not learn the lessons of her sister, and persisted in following the exact same path of harlotry.
New Testament reading: Matthew 24-25
Do you really want to be taken as opposed to “Left Behind?” Untold millions of “believers” have been deceived by the errors of premillennial theology. They are convinced that there will be a secret catching away of the saints prior to the revealing of the anti-Christ. This taking or catching away is commonly referred to as the rapture (cf Day 243). Matthew 24 speaks of a time when the Son of Man will come and men will be separated, one taken away and the other left. One problem with this doctrine, (aside from the fact that it is patently wrong), is that is fails to consider the context of Matthew 24, which primarily concerns the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Another is that it fails to note the immediate context and illustration, namely that of the flood of Noah. Those who were carried away in the Flood were sinners, not saints (vv 36-39). This is the example given for those who are taken as opposed to “left behind.” The truth is, premillennialist have this concept exactly backwards. Most of those taken by the Romans were killed and the rest were enslaved, while those left behind were the fortunate ones.
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