Tuesday, April 19, 2016

A MESSAGE TO BABYLON: A SHATTERED HAMMER



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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“The noise of battle is in the land, the noise of great destruction! How broken and shattered is the hammer of the whole earth! How desolate is Babylon among the nations!”

“I set a trap for you, Babylon, and you were caught before you knew it; you were found and captured because you opposed the Lord. The Lord has opened His arsenal and brought out the weapons of his wrath, for the Sovereign Lord Almighty has work to do in the land of the Babylonians. Come against her from afar. Break open her granaries; pile her up like heaps of grain. Completely destroy her and leave her no remnant. Kill all her young bulls; let them go down to the slaughter! Woe to them! For their day has come, the time for them to be punished.”

Jeremiah 50:22-27

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Babylon had been an instrument of God’s judgment for quite some time and had run roughshod over many nations including the Israelite’s southern kingdom of Judah and its holy city of Jerusalem. They had hammered and hammered so much that the Lord considered the Babylonians to be the hammer of the whole earth but that was coming to an end. The hammer, Babylon, was going to be shattered and as we have seen through earlier verses comprising God’s message to Babylon in Jeremiah 50, Babylon was now going to see what it felt like to be the nail as it would be pummeled by the Persians and other nations who joined the fight. Look again at this word of God:

“The noise of battle is in the land, the noise of great destruction! How broken and shattered is the hammer of the whole earth! How desolate is Babylon among the nations!”

“I set a trap for you, Babylon, and you were caught before you knew it; you were found and captured because you opposed the Lord. The Lord has opened His arsenal and brought out the weapons of his wrath, for the Sovereign Lord Almighty has work to do in the land of the Babylonians. Come against her from afar. Break open her granaries; pile her up like heaps of grain. Completely destroy her and leave her no remnant. Kill all her young bulls; let them go down to the slaughter! Woe to them! For their day has come, the time for them to be punished.”  Jeremiah 50:22-29

It was a bleak picture. The once powerful, dominant empire of Babylon was going to be the scene of mass destruction. It would be left broken and desolate with nothing left standing as the Lord promised complete obliteration as no remnant would be left after God’s punishment. They would be all led to slaughter.

All and all, Babylon’s day had come and it would be a day that no one would have thought could be possible, no one that is except for the Lord Himself. He knew the ways of the Babylonians and knew they sinned against Him without remorse. They chose to oppose the Lord and so He set a trap for them, catching them before they realized what was happening. He opened up His arsenal and unleashed His weapons of wrath upon the land of the Babylonians, turning them into a distant memory and making an example out of them, an example of what happens when any nation or kingdom chooses to go up against the Lord, rejecting Him, His will, His word, and His way.

Now ask yourself, “How many countries today match that description? How many mighty, powerful countries choose to reject the Lord to include His will, word, and way?”

They exist and we all know it. And to those nations who fit this category, the Lord has a message for when the hammer of the Lord strikes, it breaks any other hammers of the world, shattering them and bringing them down before Him while showing the whole world that anyone who opposes Him will pay the price for doing so.

No one thought Babylon would ever fall. It did.

So did every other great empire after them. All of them had one thing in common: they became so possessed with power that they felt they could stand alone and do what they wanted to do minus the very Lord who had blessed them to gain the esteem they enjoyed in the first place.

In the end translation, we see first-hand in the story of the Babylonians that the Lord gives but the Lord can also take away when we fail to place Him where He belongs, and that is first in everything. It’s time for all nations to learn from the mistakes of the past, turning from sinful self-reliance to total loyalty and submission to the Maker and Master of all nations, the Lord God Almighty.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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