Jeremiah Chapter 16 "Sympolical. No Wife." This Bible
Study is written by Roger Christopherson, and it's
transcription/ location is provided by http://www.theseason.org Jeremiah 16:1 "The word of the Lord came also unto me, saying," Jeremiah is the prophet that gave the warning to God's people as to how it would be just before the king of Babylon came, and this was only a type of how it shall also be just prior to when the king of Babylon comes in the end times comes. This is why what God is saying to Jeremiah is important to us today. God will use symbolism in warning us, yet most of His people just won't listen to him. His children even today have taken and used their traditions, instead of staying with the Word of God. The book of Jeremiah is problably the strongest warnings given by God against certain practices, and we must keep in mind that it isn't any man, but God's Word that gives us the warning. Jeremiah 16:2 "Thou shalt not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in this place. You can feel the urgency to this warning that God is giving to Jeremiah that the time is short. There isn't time to rear children before the fall of Jerusalem and the the House of Judah. Jeremiah didn't take his own children when he departed from Judaea, but he took the daughters of king Zedakiah, and transplanted them in marriage to the king line in Spain and Ireland, to eventually to rule over parts of the ten tribes offspring. Jeremiah 16:3 "For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land;" God is setting forth the family heritage, because all members of the king's family are included in this. The warning is that the land of Judaea is going into captivity. Jeremiah 16:4 "They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and for the beasts of the earth." In the eyes of the Heavenly Father, as backed up by history, the king and his sons did die a grievious death when they tried to escape from the Babylonian armies. By the time that the Babylonian army entered into Jerusalem, the ten tribes of the House of Israel had gone through the Caucasus Mountain and had dispersed throughout Europe and Asia. Even to this day, they are very forgetful of the past. The word Manasseh used in connection with them is descriptive of them, for it means "forgetful" in the Hebrew. There is no lamenting here concerning the death that takes place in the end times, because this is not a physical death. They don't even know that they are spiritually dead. Remember in Ezekiel 37 where Ezekiel was to prophesy against the valley of dry bones of the old House of Israel, and while they were prophecied to, those dead dry bones came to life. That was not a prophecy directed to the physically dead, but the spiritually dead. Jeremiah 16:5 "For thus saith the LORD, Enter not into the house of mourning, neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace from this people, saith the LORD, even lovingkindness and mercies." God is instructing Jeremiah that when this captivity takes place, don't lament or weep for them, because it will happen to them. God is going to do this to the House of Judah to correct them. God turns His back on those that do not treat Him with love and respect, by studying His Word. Now God will give the reason for the trouble that will come over the land. Jeremiah 16:6 "Both the great and the small shall die in this land: they shall not be buried, neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves, nor make themselves bald for them:" When both the rich and the poor die their spiritual death, there will be no burial, because it will not be a physical death. They will simply be moved from one location to another, and continue as they were. In the end times most Christians will actually believe that they are better off, and that the true Christ is here, because their traditions have taught them so. When Satan comes to the earth they will not know that they are spiritually dead, however any time they come to their senses and ask for the spiritual life and peace of mind, God will send it back to them. The problem then is that because of their traditions they don't know enough to even ask for that spiritual life. Mankind only fears the unknown, and when you read and study the Scriptures the unknown is revealed to you. You know the events that shall happen, and you then watch out for them. When they come to pass, you don't fear it, because you know that God has caused it to happen. There is no way that you would mourn or lament because the event that you witnessed was a fulfillment of one of God's promises. Jeremiah 16:7 "Neither shall men tear themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead; neither shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother." This means that you will not take any mourning bread, and brake it for them. This is still a tradition that has been practiced throughout all the generations of Israel. It is the getting together of family and friends to eat following the buring of the passed loved one. God is telling Jeremiah the death and captivity coming over the people he is not to show any remorse, nor follow the traditions of mourning for them. Again this is a beautiful picture of spiritual death. They don't know and realize that they are spiritually dead, and if you asked them, they would think they were spiritually alive. Though this is an historic event that happened in the flesh, it is also the type of what we are starting to face in this end generation. It is important to you and I today, because it concerns what is taking place in this generation and God's elect will have to know. Jeremiah 16:8 "Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with them to eat and to drink." You don't participate in their houses of feasting because when you go among those that are totally deceived and then you mourn, or carry on as they do with them, you would then be doing what verse seven warns us against. Though it appears to be a good thing for you that are spiritually alive, to those that are spiritually dead it would be just the opposite. This is also why we are to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. Jeremiah 16:9 "For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride." This is God making a promise to Jeremiah that what will take place will be visable to his eyes. God is telling him that he would see the illusion come over the people caused by their false prophets. He would see a gladness and welcoming joy in the hearts of the people, and a hope that they will rely on in God, but it will all be taken away and cease out ot the land. Why? Because the people have listened to these false preachers that have told them that Babylon is not coming, and they will not see the forces of Nebuchadnezzar. However my friend, we know by historical events that it did happen exactly as God foretold that it would happen. Today we know that the Bridegroom is Jesus Christ, and the bride are those that remain virgins, which are those five that have their lamps full of olive oil, the anointing oil that is symbolic of the truth of God's Word. The bride of Christ has the knowledge to carry them all the way to the coming of the bridegroom at the seventh trump. So how could the voice of the bridegroom and the bride be taken away? By an imposter, a false Christ and that is what God wants us to be aware of. This is not commonly taught to our generation today, and this is also why the building if a spiritual defense against Satan and his forces when they arrive on earth in person is not stressed. Why? Because they are taught that they will not be here to face Satan the Antichrist, and they don't need the defense. Their rapture theory, and other traditions have given them a false sense of security. This is exactly as it was in Jeremiah's day. The people were relying on the false sense of security that their false teachers were giving, that there would be no captivity coming upon them. But it came and suddenly. In Jeremiah's day it was in the physical, and in this generation it will be a spiritual destruction that comes over the world. When someone believes that the true Christ is here, when in fact it is Satan the imposter, they cease to look for a Messiah, but rely on the fake that they see with their eyes. Beware my friend, there are many things taking place right now that are setting the stage for this to come to pass. Jeremiah 16:10 "And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?" God is telling Jeremiah that when he tells the people all the things that will come upon them, they will say in disbelief, why would the Lord bring all this evil against us? We are His children, and we go to church every time the door is open, what sin have we committed that would deserve such a thing to come upon us? The answer is that they did not understand God's Word, and would rather listen to false prophets that would preach te words that they wanted to hear. They were good people, and wanted to do right, but they were committed to their false pastors. Remember what was written a few chapters prior to this? The pastors talked about everything but the study of the Word of God. It was from their teaching that their traditions came, and the people replaced God's Word with their traditions. So when Jeremiah went into their place of worship and told them God's warning, it was against the traditions of those teachers in the church houses. They rejected Jeremiah's words and wanted to do him harm. This is exactly what is happening today when you go into most churches in our land, and tell the people to prepare for the spiritual destruction of Satan the Antichrist that is coming upon them, they will look at you like you are some sort of nut. Haven't you heard that we are going to escape the destruction. They even believe the destruction is a physical one, and that they will fly out of here on a cloud. Friend, they have bought Satan's fairy-tale, and are exactly as were the people of Jeremiah's day. Jeremiah 16:11 "Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law;" God is telling them exactly how it all came to pass that they should be deceived. "Because your fathers have forsaken me". It didn't happen over night, but through the process of believing a lie, and turning the lie into tradition through many generations. It gets to the point of not knowing what is of God, or what is from the heathen gods, so you have served God and other gods. This angers our Heavenly Father. They did not keep God's law, which is His Word, and you keep God's Word by understanding it, and doing what God instructs us to do. The law is a set of instructions that is set up to warn us of dangers that will come up in our paths of life. It spells out the things that will bring grief and trouble when you violate them, between you and your family, neighbors, and community. It is all good advice. If you could live by every law written, you would never be in trouble, but in the flesh we can't, and that is why we have repentance. There is nothing bad about the law, but it is the people that fall short of the law, not the Word. Paul calls the law our schoolmaster, yet people try to stay away from the schoolmaster, and then when they get into trouble they want to plea ignorance to it. God promises us that when we follow the schoolmaster it brings us blessings in our lives. Jeremiah 16:12 "And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken unto me:" This is why no one will listen to God. The Word of God is becoming unpopular to many and in some churches they do not even teach from the Old Testament. This is why a blindness has come over them, because they reject the warnings from the Prophets of God to our generation. They do not realize that the Old Testament carries more warnings to our generation then does the New Testament. For their lack of understanding of God's Word, they have substituted their traditions, which causes the imaginations of their evil heart. They don't act on God's Word because they don't know the Word, and they don't believe what it says. Jeremiah 16:13 "Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I will not shew you favour." There is irony in this verse in the Hebrew. God is telling them that if they want to worship other gods of their imaginations, then He will send them off to another land where they will do just that until they have had their fill of it. Why will this happen? Remember earlier where God had said that those that were spiritually dead were like dung to Him, so we know why they could not expect to receive any favor from God. To repeat the closing of this verse; "I will not shew you favour." It referred to the Babylonian captivity, and it also refers to the spiritual captivity of these end days when the people will be worshipping the Antichrist. Jeremiah 16:14 "Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt;" God is implying that He is going to do something even greater then when he brought the children of Israel out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea. Jeremiah 16:15 "But, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers." What God is saying here what He is going to do, is yet to come. It will happen at the end of this Earth Age. The word "Israel" is in reference to all twelve tribes, and not just the house of Judah, consisting of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, with a spattering of Levi. When this happens, the Kenites that have done so much damage to Judah will not be part of this, for at Christ's return there will be a separation taking place. Remember the parable of the tares and fig tree of Matthew 13? We are told when the seperation will take place, and by whom. Matthew 13:38 "The field is the world; and good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;" The wicked one is Satan, and his children are the Kenites, those offspring of Satan through his son Cain, who came through Satan's sexual seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Matthew 13:39 "The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels." The harvest or time of seperation of the good seed, God's children and the Kenites will be at the end of this earth age, or world age of the flesh. The ones doing the seperation is not you and I, but the angels of God. Matthew 13:40 "As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world." The time of the separation comes at the close of the flesh age, and the beginning of the Millennium age, however the burning and destruction will be following the great white throne judgment at the close of the Millennium age. This is given by Jesus to John the Revelator in Revelation 20:11-15. Revelation 20:13 "And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. Revelation 20:14 "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death." We know from history today that all the tribes were removed out of Samaria and Judaea and scattered to new lands around the world. The House of Israel was scattered by the Assyrians, and migrated through the Caucasus mountains to many directions and lands, while the house of Judah was carried off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, with only a small remnant, mixed with Cain's offspring the Kenites, to return to Jerusalem. The rest of Judah also were scattered just as Israel was two hundred years prior. There are prophecies given by God that each of these peoples [Judah and Israel] will accomplish seperately, before the coming back together, and many of them are happening before our eyes today. This is not in reference to salvation, but in the fact that those events are guide posts that give us the signs of the times that we are in. Jeremiah 16:16 "Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks." There is a break in thought here. Remember back in Jeremiah 13:1-7 when God gave Jeremiah a lesson by telling him to put on that clean linen girdle [belt] and wear it without cleaning it. Jeremiah was to then go to the river Euphrates and bury it there in a hole in the rocks. What God is saying here is that no matter where you go, there is no way that you can hide from me. The people may not know who they are, but God knows who you are, and exactly where you are at. God will send His fishers of men, and hunters of men to pull those old girdles [men] out of the holes in the rocks [their hiding places] spiritually speaking. Jeremiah 16:17 "For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my face, neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes." No matter where you go or what you do your guilt stays on you and in the eyes of God. There are over five billion souls living on earth today, not counting all those souls that have returned back to the Father. Yet with each of these souls God knows the condition of every one of them, and every unrepented sin is accountable to the Father. This is why Christ came to earth, and suffered the cross, that each of these souls could repent and have a way back to the Father, and that way is through Jesus Christ. He is the only Way. Jeremiah 16:18 "And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double; because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance with the carcases of their detestable and abominable things." God will do all those things that He is promising to do. The "abominable things" are the things that they offer for sacrifice to Him, in their love for God, however they are doing it in the form of other religions and forms of idolatry. That includes all their traditions that are not part of God's plan, and the things that are placed on their altars in the name of God. The point here is which God [the true God] or god [Satan] are they worshipping? "Their sin double" means that He is going to give them a double chastisement for the sins that they do commit. The penalty for their sins will be compounded as they continue go increase in the sin. Each time that they sin, the punishment will be double from that sin that they sinned before. God is saying that before He gathers them back to Himself, he is going to correct each of them for their sinful ways. That altar of God was replaced by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and God hates for anything to be placed, or to replace as a substitute for that blood of Christ. Even in ignorance it is unacceptable to God to any form of substitution for Jesus Christ's blood on the cross. Jeremiah 16:19 "O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit." "Strength" in the Hebrew is "Oz", which is a protective strength. God is our protecting strength. Even the Gentiles will wake up to see that their inheritance is nothing but lies and emptiness. They will see that it seems like they are slipping backward continually, as they cry out, Why doesn't God answer my prayers? All, Israel and Gentile alike will in the end come to see that somebody misled them from the only way that is Christ, the blessed seed. God is showing the Gentile to be smarter then the tribes of Israel in catching on to their inheritance. Jeremiah 16:20 "Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?" This is saying that there is only one God and He is our Heavenly Father; and will God allow some man to work out his own salvation? Can man save Himself? Definitely not. We now live in the flesh bodies, and there is nothing supernatural about the flesh, outside the Holy Spirit, and all flesh is in a state of corruption and decay. There is nothing eternal about the flesh, for only the soul and spirit can have that eternal life, and eternal life to any soul can only come through the blood of Christ, and the repentance that we have in Christ. That life and understanding can only come when we believe on Jesus Christ, repent in Jesus name and turn to study His Word. Jeremiah 16:21 "Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know, I will cause them to know mine hand and my might; and they shall know that my name is The LORD." This deed that will come to pass is when they cease to call God, the God that delivered Israel from Egypt, as someone stranger to them; but they know Him personally as their own salvation and strength. They call Him my hand and my might and they will know Him as their Lord. This will not come to pass until the end of this earth age of the flesh, except in the minds of the His elect. This will come to pass when God brings the army of Satan against the House of Israel, the Christian nations for the final battle in the valley of Hamon-gog, as described in Ezekiel 39. At the end of the battle comes the healing of the people and the land, and as we read in Ezekiel 39:12, 13; "And seven months shall the house of Israel be buryig of them, that they may cleanse the land." [12] "Yea, all the People of the land shall bury them; and it shall be to them a renown the day that I shall be glorified, saith the Lord God." [13] That victory shall be so great that all the people will know that their defense was completely from God, and will give Him all the glory. When Christ comes to earth at the seventh trumpet there will be no doubt in anyone's mind that Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
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