When king Ahaz hears that the Syrians have joined forces
with Ephraim, he is filled with fear. He
knows he can't win against these combined forces. Because of his reaction, the people are also
afraid. The Lord sends Isaiah out to the
king to tell him not to worry about this alliance. The aim of this is to set up a king of their
own choosing, Tabeel. Isaiah is given a
prophetic word that this act will fail to accomplish its goal and within a
relatively short span of time both the king of Syria and the nation of
Ephraim/Samaria, the northern kingdom of Israel, the other tribes of Jacob,
will both pass away. The appeal is not
to military might but to faith and the word is that if the king is not firm in
faith as opposed to his might or an alliance he might make, then he is not firm
at all. All firmness springs from faith,
but we always need to have faith in the right thing or that firmness is no more
than folly.
We don’t know for sure why Judas chose to betray Jesus. We can conjecture based on the little we know
about him. He was a zealot and also the
treasurer of the group. The zealots
wanted Jerusalem restored to Jewish control.
They longed for a return to the good old days of the Maccabean kings,
those warriors who defied all odds against them and led a revolt against the
Seleucid Empire in the second century before Jesus. Judas may have been frustrated and
disappointed in Jesus' failure to do this work and may have wanted to force
Jesus' hand to be who Judas believed and wanted Him to be. That begs the question, however, as to why he
would then have chosen to betray Jesus when there was no crowd. We will never know for certain what his
motives were. Jesus gives the disciples
a prophetic sign that they will know where they will have the feast, a man
carrying a water jar. Who generally
carried water jars in that culture? A man
would have stood apart in this work, easily spotted, as this was "women's
work." On this day, however, he
would receive great honor for doing so.
Paul reminds the Thessalonians what Isaiah reminded the
king, that God is in control. They need
not be concerned when things begin to look out of control with the appearance
and the rise of the man of lawlessness. This
is all activity of satan and these things have to be as signs of the end. Some will be deceived by his actions and his
false signs but this is because of a strong delusion from God. This is like the hardening of Pharaoh's heart
in that from our perspective the effect seems supernatural. How could anyone have seen what Pharaoh saw
and not let the people go and believe in Moses' God? When we read apocalyptic literature like here
and in the Revelation but also in the prophetic works like Isaiah we can ask
the same questions. How can people
persevere in unbelief? We see in our day
those who can deny anything as a work of God so we shouldn't be surprised at
this. Whether it is a work of God to
cause it or not we can't truly know. If God
didn't spare His own people, the nation of Israel, from judgment, however, why
would we believe He would spare those who have denied Him?
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