Burning the Scrolls
In his concluding chapter of The Harbinger, Rabbi Cahn references a prophetic event of irrevocable and devastating consequences for the kingdom of Judah, the last tribe God left behind as a remnant after the Ten Tribes of Israel were conquered and taken into captivity from which they never returned to the Promised Land. The event comes from Jeremiah 36 and, like Isaiah 9, is barely discussed in most houses of God today:
In the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah, Jeremiah received this Message from God: "Get a scroll and write down everything I've told you regarding Israel and Judah and all the other nations from the time I first started speaking to you in Josiah's reign right up to the present day. Maybe the community of Judah will finally get it, finally understand the catastrophe that I'm planning for them, turn back from their evil ways, and let me forgive their perversity and sin."
So Jeremiah called in Baruch son of Neriah. Jeremiah dictated and Baruch wrote down on a scroll everything that God had said to him. Then Jeremiah told Baruch, "I'm blacklisted. I can't go into God's Temple, so you'll have to go in my place. Go into the Temple and read everything you've written at my dictation. Wait for a day of fasting when everyone is there to hear you. And make sure that all the people who come from the Judean villages hear you. Maybe, just maybe, they'll start praying and God will hear their prayers. Maybe they'll turn back from their evil ways. This is no light matter. God has certainly let them know how angry he is!"
Baruch son of Neriah did everything Jeremiah the prophet told him to do. In the Temple of God he read the Message of God from the scroll. It came about in December of the fifth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah that all the people of Jerusalem, along with all the people from the Judean villages, were there in Jerusalem to observe a fast to God. Baruch took the scroll to the Temple and read out publicly the words of Jeremiah. He read from the meeting room of Gemariah, the secretary of state, which was in the upper court right next to the New Gate of God's Temple. Everyone could hear him.
The moment Micaiah the son of Gemariah heard what was being read from the scroll, he went straight to the palace and to the chambers of the secretary of state where all the government officials were holding a meeting. Micaiah reported everything he had heard Baruch read from the scroll as the officials listened. Immediately they dispatched Jehudi to Baruch, ordering him, "Take the scroll that you have read to the people and bring it here." So Baruch went and retrieved the scroll.
The officials told him, "Sit down. Read it to us, please." Baruch read it. When they had heard it all, they were upset. They talked it over. "We've got to tell the king all this." They asked Baruch, "Tell us, how did you write all this? Was it at Jeremiah's dictation?"
Baruch said, "That's right. Every word is right from his own mouth. And I wrote it down, word for word, with pen and ink."
The government officials told Baruch, "You need to get out of here. Go into hiding, you and Jeremiah. Don't let anyone know where you are!"
The officials went to the court of the palace to report to the king, having put the scroll for safekeeping in the office of the secretary of state. The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll. He brought it from the office of the secretary. Jehudi then read it to the king and the officials who were in the king's service.
It was December. The king was sitting in his winter quarters in front of a charcoal fire. After Jehudi would read three or four columns, the king would cut them off the scroll with his pocketknife and throw them in the fire. He continued in this way until the entire scroll had been burned up in the fire.
Neither the king nor any of his advisers showed the slightest twinge of conscience as they listened to the messages read. The government officials tried to convince the king not to burn the scroll, but he brushed them off. He just plowed ahead and ordered the arrest of Jeremiah the prophet and his secretary Baruch. But God had hidden them away.
After the king had burned the scroll that Baruch had written at Jeremiah's dictation, Jeremiah received this Message from God: "Get another blank scroll and do it all over again. Write out everything that was in that first scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah burned up.
"And send this personal message to Jehoiakim king of Judah: 'God says, You had the gall to burn this scroll and then the nerve to say, "What kind of nonsense is this written here—that the king of Babylon will come and destroy this land and kill everything in it?"
"'Well, do you want to know what God says about Jehoiakim king of Judah? This: No descendant of his will ever rule from David's throne. His corpse will be thrown in the street and left unburied, exposed to the hot sun and the freezing night. I will punish him and his children and the officials in his government for their blatant sin. I'll let loose on them and everyone in Jerusalem the doomsday disaster of which I warned them but they spit at.'"
So Jeremiah went and got another scroll and gave it to Baruch son of Neriah, his secretary. At Jeremiah's dictation he again wrote down everything that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. There were also generous additions, but of the same kind of thing.
The Point of No Return
These events take place in 604 BC, 136 years after the events of Isaiah 9. This prophecy, you may recall from previous chapters of The Harbinger, was prompted by the Assyrian invasion of the Kingdom of Israel in 740 BC, which would end in Israel’s being completely defeated and carried off into captivity eighteen years later.
A little over a century after Israel’s demise, sister Kingdom of Judah followed the same downward trajectory of complacency, arrogance, rebellion, and destruction. A couple of reformer kings slowed things down a bit, but were inevitably succeeded by kings who undid everything their predecessors had accomplished, to the point that “faithless Israel is more righteous than unfaithful Judah” (Jer 3:11).
Jehoiakim was the last king of Judah who could have made a difference. He was the son of Josiah, Judah’s greatest reformer king. Jehoiakim was preceded by Jehoahaz, who lasted three months until he was deposed by the Egyptians. He was succeeded by Jeconiah, who lasted three months until he was deposed by the Babylonians. The final king, Zedekiah, was set up as a puppet of the Babylonians until he was replaced by governors, Jehoiakim was on the throne for a total of eleven years, and spent his reign playing the two great superpowers of his time---Egypt and Babylon--- against each other, and finding new ways to tax the people in order to finance the crushing tribute he was paying both powers so he could keep his job.
In the end, Jehoiakim seems to have been too smart for his own good. He switched allegiance one time too many, and ended up provoking an invasion by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, who laid siege to Jerusalem. Jehoiakim died during the siege, and his remains were accorded the full honors of state by being tossed to the dogs from the city walls.
While nominally observing Jewish religious customs, Jehoiakim and his advisers also appear to have held the faith of his ancestors, and the God of Israel Himself in contempt. He reserved especially vindictive treatment for God’s prophets who pointed out the injustices of his administration and the immorality of times. He ordered hit men to kidnap and execute Uriah the Prophet, who had spoken the same things as Jeremiah. And he ordered the arrest of Jeremiah and his secretary Baruch, who had the audacity to write down and read publicly a prophecy that unless the king and Jerusalem with him repented, they would be destroyed by the Babylonians. As a preview of what would happen to these two hatemongers when they were caught, Jehoiakim dismembered the scroll containing God’s own words with a knife and tossed the pieces into the fire.
To appreciate the impact of what is being done here, remember that the creation of a Bible in those days was a slow and painstaking process. You didn’t order it online or get the app on your smartphone. Paper and ink were scarce, literature was a precious commodity, and the right to publish anything was the privilege of the government and religious authorities. Jeremiah and Baruch used their connections to obtain paper, ink, and a place to write a prophecy to the leader of their nation. There were no outlines, no drafts or revisions. And there could be no mistakes or misspellings: it was the Word spoken by God and delivered directly to the king. In the end there was only one copy. And that copy was destroyed--- by the king, who then ordered the heads of those who had written it.
God would have Jeremiah write another scroll, but that was the last time God would warn Judah to repent. From that point forward it would be only prophecies of destruction.
The people could repent, their leaders could sit in ashes, and the priests could offer sacrifices 7x24.
For God, however, there was now no turning back.
By destroying God’s Word, Jehoiakim had taken the Kingdom of Judah past the point of no return.
The Tenth Harbinger: Judah's--- and America's---Point of No Return
Remember, not many witnesses were present when Jehoiakim burned the scroll. Just the king, his advisers, and his officials. The advisers were in the tank, and would cover for the king. The officials would tell Jeremiah what had happened, but they were not going to raise a ruckus if they valued their livelihoods… and their lives.
Of all who knew of the king’s sacrilege at the time, only person grasped the full meaning of what had just happened--- Jeremiah. And he was now a wanted man.
The vast majority of the Jewish people knew nothing about the burning of the burning of God’s Word. But it was a harbinger nonetheless--- the Tenth Harbinger!
For Jeremiah, that harbinger told him there was now no turning back from the disaster and calamity which he and the other bony-fingered prophets before him had been predicting for over two hundred years. The time of Jerusalem’s destruction and the Jewish exile was near because a) God’s Word had been desecrated by the leader of his people and b) there was a price on his head for proclaiming God’s Word of warning to the administration.
By every sign, America is also fast approaching this same point of no return. Let’s take a closer look.
The Surrogate War on Religion
The Obama Administration has not publicly declared war on Christianity---it would not be politically expedient to do so…yet. But it has been waging a proxy war on Bible believers through its refusal to signal that the protections enjoyed by Christians under every preceding administration in this country are still extended to the church. Gestures such as:
…not showing up for the National Day of Prayer,
· …inviting Muslim community leaders to the White House to celebrate Ramadan while notably absent from any dais with Christian leadership of the nation,
· …defending a female law student’s right to speak in favor of abortion, while refusing to do the same for a single mother’s right to speak against same-sex marriage.
· …not showing up in court to defend the law of the land (Defense of Marriage Act)
· … declining to condemn the increasingly horrific persecutions of Christians worldwide, particularly in Islamic nations, and domestically by leftwing hate groups.
can all be deftly explained away by administration prevaricators as insignificant, misunderstood, taken out of context, and blown out of proportion.
But one thing is very clear. Leadership communicates just as powerfully
· …by what it says and by what it does NOT say
· …by what it does and by what it does NOT do
· …by whom the leader will meet with AND by whom the leader does not have time for.
It is one of the basic rules of power. Otherwise why would analysts spend so much time studying group photographs of repressive regimes? They are looking for clues to who is up and who is down. It’s all about proximity to the leader.
The verbals coming from the White House may be spinnable, but the signals are unmistakable: Biblical belief is down, and completely out of the picture in the current administration. The president questions its value as an ethical and legal standard, and will not oppose if you attack.
And attack they have. The years of the Obama Administration have witnessed a combined, frontal assault on religious freedom and expression by surrogate organizations driving an agenda of publicly funded abortion, same-sex marriage, freedom from religion, and suppression of any dissent as “hate speech” and “bullying”. This collective “Death Lobby,” along with its enablers in the Democratic Party and RINO Party have so gained the upper hand in government, in public schools, in higher education, in the mainstream media, and in major corporations that anyone who dares to speak the words of God in America’s public square today is harassed, bullied, shouted down, insulted, assaulted, jailed, thrown out of work, and ostracized from the community.
Just as the prophet Jeremiah was before them.
The Tenth Harbinger: Breaking of the Two Seals
Persecution, however, is not news. Israel had a long history of persecuting it prophets, as does America.
What is news is the criminalization of Biblical faith. Where those who dare to speak God’s Word publicly are not just harassed, intimidated, vandalized, and assaulted, but are officially designated under law as criminals.
The second thing Jehoiakim did to cause God to finally turn his back on Judah was to order the arrest of Jeremiah the prophet and his secretary Baruch.
Prophets had been persecuted and harassed in Israel and Judah for years, largely through surrogates of the king. But until the fateful events of December, 604 BC, no arrest warrant had ever been issued for a prophet.
In fact, Jeremiah 36:26 is the first time an arrest is ever mentioned in the Bible!
Up to that time, public morality, enforced by the elder rulers had served as a check upon suppression of those speaking Gods Word to those in power. Just a few years earlier, when Jeremiah was about to be sentenced to death by an ecclesiastical mob for “prophesy[ing] in the Lord’s name that [the temple] will be like Shiloh and this city will be desolate and deserted,”
Some of the elders of the land stepped forward and said to the entire assembly of people, “Micah of Moresheth prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah. He told all the people of Judah, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says:
“‘Zion will be plowed like a field,
Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble,
the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.’
“Did Hezekiah king of Judah or anyone else in Judah put him to death? Did not Hezekiah fear the Lord and seek his favor? And did not the Lord relent, so that he did not bring the disaster he pronounced against them? We are about to bring a terrible disaster on ourselves!” (Jeremiah 26:16-19)
In the matter of only a few years, however, public morality had been intimidated into silence, while the king and his advisors displayed no twinge of conscience in criminalizing God’s spokesmen. David’s own descendant, sitting on the throne God had established for him, was not only destroying God’s Word, but was now using force of law to outlaw the speech of those entrusted with upholding his administration of God’s Law for the people.
From that point, the only way to save the Jewish nation was to destroy it completely, beyond its ability to save itself, and rebuild it from a remnant of a remnant. It would be a handful so tiny and feeble that even the most godless observer would to conclude that something supernatural had taken place.
There are two components, or seals, to the Tenth Harbinger, that distinguish it from “garden-variety” persecution. The opening of these two seals combined to push the Kingdom of Judah past the point of no return. And it will do the same to the United States of America:
1. The desecration/destruction of Scripture
2. The criminalization of Biblical faith
Next, The First Seal--- Desecration of Scripture