Most
Bible commentators are united in their understanding that the first
four verses of Jeremiah 30 refer to the second regathering of the Jews
to Israel, but there are many who still think that the rest of the passage,
referring to the Time of Jacob's Trouble, down to verse 8, is still
future. Verses 1-4 read as follows....................
1.
"The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord , saying. 2. Thus
speaketh the Lord God of Israel saying, Write thee all the words that
I have spoken unto thee in a book. 3. For lo, the days come, saith the
Lord, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and
Judah, saith the Lord: and I will cause them to return to the land that
I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. 4. And these
are the words that the Lord spake concerning Israel and concerning Judah..........."
Note
that the Lord is commanding Jeremiah to write certain words that He
had given him .....words which will throw light on and explain what
He has already told Jeremiah in the above passage, words which will
explain WHY He intended to bring Israel back from their captivity. Those
words continue, as follows................
"
FOR thus saith the Lord; we have heard a voice of trembling, of fear,
and not of peace. Ask ye now, and see whether a man doth travail with
child? Wherefore do I see every man with his hands on his loins, as
a woman in travail, and all faces turned into paleness? Alas! for that
day is great , so that none is like it: IT IS EVEN THE TIME OF JACOB'S
TROUBLE; but he shall be saved out of it. For it shall come to pass
IN THAT DAY, saith the Lord, that I will break his yoke from off thy
neck, and will burst thy bonds, and strangers shall no more serve themselves
of him........."
It
is clear then, that a time would come when the people of Israel would
endure great trouble which would cause them enormous pain and fear,
which the Lord instructs Jeremiah to depict as the pain and fear of
a woman in "travail", or in childbirth. David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Paul
and John all use such an expression to depict pain and suffering and
indeed Isaiah speaks of such suffering and pain in relation to the rebirth
of the State of Israel , in our day. We read...
"Shall
a nation be born at once? for as soon as ZION TRAVAILED , SHE BROUGHT
FORTH HER CHILDREN.......and when ye shall see this...(the birth
of the State of Israel in one day) .. your heart shall rejoice.........."
(Isaiah 66:8,14)
Thus
it becomes clear that the Prophets saw a time in the future when the
people of Israel would be in great pain and be suffering great anguish
and fear, BEFORE the nation sprung to a re-birth....the TRAVAIL
CAME FIRST as in childbirth and then the JOY of the birth, the
bringing forth of "her children".
The
history of Israel since the nation rejected the Messiah it had been
educated to expect, is a non stop horror story of pain and suffering,
commencing in earnest in AD 70 and coming to a mind boggling climax
in Europe in 1945, when the greatest disaster ever inflicted on any
race of people, came to a shattering conclusion. After ignoring the
instruction of their own Prophets and their own Rabbis in Europe, to
"flee from the Land of the North", we well know that over SIX MILLION
JEWS PERISHED at the hands of the "hunters and fishers"
who had been sent to fish and hunt them back to the Land promised to
their Fathers....(Jer 16-16)). But...the great pain and the suffering
of nineteen hundred years, the travail of millions, was to bring to
birth the new State of Israel and millions of Jews have poured back
into the land, truly commencing the fulfilment of the words...."As
soon as Zion travailed, SHE BROUGHT FORTH HER CHILDREN.".....(Isaiah
66:8)
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PAIN...SORROW...SUFFERING,
FIRST:
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The
meaning therefore, of Jeremiah's words and phrases immediately become
clear......he was foretelling the terrible TIME OF JACOB'S TROUBLE,
which was in the distant future, to his day, a "time of trouble such
as never was upon the (Jewish) earth", which would eventually cause
the Father to reverse the "captivity" of His people among the nations.
Their pain and sorrow and suffering was to be the reason for His mercy
in returning them to their Land. The pain and suffering was to be the
cause of their regathering, NOT the other way round. The Lord told Jeremiah
to write His words about the regathering and then the reason for that
regathering. He foretold of a day when the "yoke" of suffering and the
"bonds" of adversity would be removed and "strangers" would no longer
control the destiny of the Jewish people. This came to pass in 1948...the
Jewish Fig Tree came back to life and Israel was reborn in a day. In
1967 they regained their age-old precious capital...Jerusalem. Today,
over four million Jews refurbish it and plant the land and rebuild the
cities
The
mighty King David was allowed to peer into the future and he saw a time
when the Lord would..."arise and have mercy upon Zion: for the
time to favour her, yea, the set time is come"...(Psalms 102:13).
That time has come and the Father promises that His people will never
again be uprooted from the land. (Jer.24:6)
Whilst
the enormous and grand scale of the TIME OF JACOB'S TROUBLE has
finished, as they await the coming of Messiah, it is obvious that they
have to face many vicissitudes, just as they did when they first entered
the land. But the Prophet Isaiah assures us. "So shall the Lord of
hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion...as birds flying, so will the
Lord of Hosts defend Jerusalem....." (Isa. 31:4-5).
