Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel,
The Lord’s so-called Major Prophets of the Old Testament.
The lives they lived and books they wrote were TOTALLY AWESOME!!
Yet one era in which they lived was TOTALLY GRUESOME!!
These men ‘bridged’ the days The Lord promised,
then sent His Judgment,
On ancient Judah whose lifestyles before Him were dismal.
They lived in Jerusalem at different times,
And the two pairs may have known each other, 1
Jeremiah witnessed Jerusalem’s destruction,
Daniel and Ezekiel were ‘slaves of distinction’.
Captured on Nebuchadnezzar’s order,
And they were taken as young men, both in their prime. 2
I wonder what they thought about Jerusalem,
When by foreign troops, folks were brutalized,
When livelihoods shockingly ended and starvation spread,
And across the city, cannibalism reared its head? 3
As promised, The Lord sent troops barbarized!
That’s Israel’s and Judah’s … parallelism. 4
Ponder this…
David built Jerusalem. Solomon built its Temple.
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed both, just as The Lord’s had planned.
‘Bookends of Jerusalem’, titles these men earned.
It’s what The Lord put in their hearts for which to yearn,
Two were His builders; one was the battle ax in His Hand. 5
Two kings highly treasured, what the other burned and trampled.
Thus, The Lord brutally ceased His ‘Grace between the stones’--
Grace between Jerusalem’s construction and destruction,
He inserted a long pause before Grace would be rekindled.
To us, that sounds radical! To Him, it’s His ‘sin reprisal’,
A repeating lesson throughout His Bible instructions,
But one that now is only heard in a few ‘church zones’. 6
Now, in front of our eyes, has another bookend been placed,
Like Nebuchadnezzar’s bookend against Jerusalem??
As The Lord fingered FDR to start a new world order,
Has He fingered DJT to be its ‘destruction trigger’,
By his America First policies and nativism,
And by diminishing the USG with such great haste??
With a rare ‘quadfecta’ government, he is blessed. 7
So, to revamp the government, he is determined,
Threatening allies, making decision on a whim.
With broad tariffs, inflation will increase, not trim.
To many onlookers, it all seems un-disciplined.
Of things, many people fear he’s making a mess.
Might that be what, for us, The Lord intends,
Like when Judah, He declared to upend?
Will U.S. hegemon roles come to an end,
And its dollar lose all its ‘reserve’ friends??
Might hyper-inflation be what impends,
When, like with Judah, to us Grace suspends???
In ‘the fullness of time’, this Modern Era,
Will come to its designated end.
And by a new world order, it will be replaced.
As Judah refused The Lord’s prophets to embrace.
Now we sit in ...‘the seat of her end’.
Will we learn from her, or suffer her saga?
No, I’m not hinting a foreign invasion,
Nor being captives in another nation.
I am only signaling a ‘book-enders’ lesson:
To voices of ancient prophets, Judah didn’t hearken!
The Lord has prophets in this era, Modern,
Who hear, and are called to share what He portends.
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1 Isaiah and Jeremiah may have been contemporaries. Similarly, Daniel and Ezekiel may have been contemporaries in Judah and Babylon. This does not mean they knew each other.
2 Daniel and Ezekiel were captured at different times during the 3 Babylonian sieges against Jerusalem, in response to Nebuchadnezzars command to capture Judah’s well-educated and wise men. See: Daniel 1:3-4.
3 Just as The Lord had predicted in Jeremiah 19.
4 About a century before Babylon invaded the 2 southern tribes in Judah and Jerusalem, Assyria had invaded the 10 northern tribes in Israel, and captured many slaves for Nineveh.
5 Jeremiah 51 summarizes the complex relationship The Lord had with Babylon, using it to judge many other nations, and later to be judged by other nations. The Lord uses evil, to punish evil.
6 In many churches today, seldom is the concept of The Lord’s harsh judgments on persistent, unrepented sinfulness heard.
7 A political quadfecta occurs when one U.S. political party dominates the Senate, House of Representatives, Executive, and the Supreme Court which aims to rule independently. In the past century, this level of unified government occurred with 5 Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Bush (#2) and Trump); and 4 Democrat presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson).
