The One Year Bible TLB (233 page)
Read The One Year Bible TLB Online
Authors: Tyndale
November 2At the end of the seven days, the Lord said to me:
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“Son of dust, I have appointed you as a watchman for Israel; whenever I send my people a warning, pass it on to them at once.
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If you refuse to warn the wicked when I want you to tell them, ‘You are under the penalty of death; therefore repent and save your life,’ they will die in their sins, but I will punish you. I will demand your blood for theirs.
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But if you warn them, and they keep on sinning and refuse to repent, they will die in their sins, but you are blameless—you have done all you could.
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And if a good man becomes bad, and you refuse to warn him of the consequences, and the Lord destroys him, his previous good deeds won’t help him—he shall die in his sin. But I will hold you responsible for his death and punish you.
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But if you warn him and he repents, he shall live, and you have saved your own life too.”
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I was helpless in the hand of God, and when he said to me, “Go out into the valley and I will talk to you there”—
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I arose and went, and oh, I saw the glory of the Lord there, just as in my first vision! And I fell to the ground on my face.
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Then the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet. He talked to me and said: “Go, imprison yourself in your house,
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and I will paralyze you
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so you can’t leave;
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and I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth so that you can’t reprove them; for they are rebels.
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But whenever I give you a message, then I will loosen your tongue and let you speak, and you shall say to them: ‘The Lord God says.’ Let anyone listen who wants to, and let anyone refuse who wants to, for they are rebels.
4:
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“And now, son of dust, take a large brick and lay it before you and draw a map of the city of Jerusalem on it. Draw a picture of siege mounds being built against the city, put enemy camps around it and battering rams surrounding the walls.
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And put an iron plate between you and the city, like a wall of iron. Demonstrate how an enemy army will capture Jerusalem!
“There is special meaning in each detail of what I have told you to do. For it is a warning to the people of Israel.
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“Now lie on your left side for 390 days,
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to show that Israel will be punished for 390 years by captivity and doom. Each day you lie there represents a year of punishment ahead for Israel.
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Afterwards, turn over and lie on your right side for forty days, to signify the years of Judah’s punishment. Each day will represent one year.
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“Meanwhile continue your demonstration of the siege of Jerusalem; lie there with your arm bared to signify great strength and power in the attack against her.
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This will prophesy her doom.
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And I will paralyze you
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so that you can’t turn over from one side to the other until you have completed all the days of your siege.
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“During the first 390 days eat bread made of flour mixed from wheat, barley, beans, lentils, and spelt. Mix the various kinds of flour together in a jar.
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You are to ration this out to yourself at the rate of eight ounces at a time, one meal a day.
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And use one quart of water a day; don’t use more than that.
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Each day take flour from the barrel and prepare it as you would barley cakes. While all the people are watching, bake it over a fire, using dried human dung as fuel, and eat it.
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For the Lord declares, Israel shall eat defiled bread in the Gentile lands to which I exile them!”
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Then I said, “O Lord God, must I be defiled by using dung? For I have never been defiled before in all my life. From the time I was a child until now I have never eaten any animal that died of sickness or that I found injured or dead; and I have never eaten any of the kinds of animals our law forbids.”
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Then the Lord said, “All right, you may use cow dung instead of human dung.”
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Then he told me, “Son of dust, bread will be tightly rationed in Jerusalem. It will be weighed out with great care and eaten fearfully. And the water will be portioned out in driblets, and the people will drink it with dismay.
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I will cause the people to lack both bread and water; they will look at one another in frantic terror and waste away beneath their punishment.
5:
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“Son of dust, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor to shave your head and beard; use balances to weigh the hair into three equal parts.
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Place a third of it at the center of your map of Jerusalem. After your siege, burn it there. Scatter another third across your map and slash at it with a knife. Scatter the last third to the wind, for I will chase my people with the sword.
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Keep just a bit of the hair and tie it up in your robe;
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then take a few hairs out and throw them into the fire, for a fire shall come from this remnant and destroy all Israel.”
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The Lord God says, “This illustrates what will happen to Jerusalem, for she has turned away from my laws and has been even more wicked than the nations surrounding her.”
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Therefore the Lord God says: “I, even I, am against you and will punish you publicly while all the nations watch.
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Because of the terrible sins you have committed, I will punish you more terribly than I have ever done before or ever will again.
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Fathers will eat their own sons, and sons will eat their fathers; and those who survive will be scattered into all the world.
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“For I promise you: Because you have defiled my Temple with idols and evil sacrifices, therefore I will not spare you nor pity you at all.
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One-third of you will die from famine and disease; one-third will be slaughtered by the enemy; and one-third I will scatter to the winds, sending the sword of the enemy chasing after you.
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Then at last my anger will be appeased. And all Israel will know that what I threaten I do.
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“So I will make a public example of you before all the surrounding nations and before everyone traveling past the ruins of your land.
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You will become a laughingstock to the world and an awesome example to everyone, for all to see what happens when the Lord turns against an entire nation in furious rebuke. I, the Lord, have spoken it!
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“I will shower you with deadly arrows of famine to destroy you. The famine will become more and more serious until every bit of bread is gone.
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And not only famine will come, but wild animals will attack and kill you and your families; disease and war will stalk your land, and the sword of the enemy will slay you; I, the Lord, have spoken it!”
6:
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Again a message came from the Lord:
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“Son of dust, look over toward the mountains of Israel and prophesy against them.
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Say to them, ‘O mountains of Israel, hear the message of the Lord God against you and against the rivers and valleys. I, even I the Lord, will bring war upon you to destroy your idols.
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All your cities will be smashed and burned, and the idol altars abandoned. Your gods will be shattered; the bones of their worshipers will lie scattered among the altars. Then at last you will know I am the Lord.
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“‘But I will let a few of my people escape—to be scattered among the nations of the world.
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Then when they are exiled among the nations, they will remember me, for I will take away their adulterous hearts—their love of idols—and I will blind their lecherous eyes that long for other gods. Then at last they will loathe themselves for all this wickedness.
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They will realize that I alone am God and that I wasn’t fooling when I told them that all this would happen to them.’”
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The Lord God says: “Raise your hands in horror and shake your head
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with deep remorse and say, ‘Alas for all the evil we have done!’ For you are going to perish from war and famine and disease.
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Disease will strike down those in exile; war will destroy those in the land of Israel; and any who remain will die by famine and siege. So at last I will expend my fury on you.
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When your slain lie scattered among your idols and altars on every hill and mountain and under every green tree and great oak where they offered incense to their gods—you will realize that I alone am God.
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I will crush you and make your cities desolate from the wilderness in the south to Riblah in the north. Then you will know I am the Lord.”
Although God’s promise still stands—his promise that all may enter his place of rest—we ought to tremble with fear because some of you may be on the verge of failing to get there after all.
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For this wonderful news—the message that God wants to save us—has been given to us just as it was to those who lived in the time of Moses. But it didn’t do them any good because they didn’t believe it. They didn’t mix it with faith.
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For only we who believe God can enter into his place of rest. He has said, “I have sworn in my anger that those who don’t believe me will never get in,” even though he has been ready and waiting for them since the world began.
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We know he is ready and waiting because it is written that God rested on the seventh day of creation, having finished all that he had planned to make.
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Even so they didn’t get in, for God finally said, “They shall never enter my rest.”
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Yet the promise remains and some get in—but not those who had the first chance, for they disobeyed God and failed to enter.
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But he has set another time for coming in, and that time is now. He announced this through King David long years after man’s first failure to enter, saying in the words already quoted, “Today when you hear him calling, do not harden your hearts against him.”
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This new place of rest he is talking about does not mean the land of Israel that Joshua led them into. If that were what God meant, he would not have spoken long afterwards about “today” being the time to get in.
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So there is a full complete rest
still waiting
for the people of God.
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Christ has already entered there. He is resting from his work, just as God did after the creation.
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Let us do our best to go into that place of rest, too, being careful not to disobey God as the children of Israel did, thus failing to get in.
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For whatever God says to us is full of living power: it is sharper than the sharpest dagger, cutting swift and deep into our innermost thoughts and desires with all their parts, exposing us for what we really are.
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He knows about everyone, everywhere. Everything about us is bare and wide open to the all-seeing eyes of our living God; nothing can be hidden from him to whom we must explain all that we have done.
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But Jesus the Son of God is our great High Priest who has gone to heaven itself to help us; therefore let us never stop trusting him.
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This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses since he had the same temptations we do, though he never once gave way to them and sinned.
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So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive his mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.
O Lord, what a variety you have made! And in wisdom you have made them all! The earth is full of your riches.
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There before me lies the mighty ocean, teeming with life of every kind, both great and small.
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And look! See the ships! And over there, the whale you made to play in the sea.
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Every one of these depends on you to give them daily food.
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You supply it, and they gather it. You open wide your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied with all your bountiful provision.
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But if you turn away from them, then all is lost. And when you gather up their breath, they die and turn again to dust.
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Then you send your Spirit, and new life is born
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to replenish all the living of the earth.
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Praise God forever! How he must rejoice in all his work!
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The earth trembles at his glance; the mountains burst into flame at his touch.
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I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will praise God to my last breath!
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May he be pleased by all these thoughts about him, for he is the source of all my joy.
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Let all sinners perish—all who refuse to praise him. But I will praise him. Hallelujah!