19 October 2010

Oct 19

Reference links:
Old Testament

Today's reading starts out with nothing new: Jerusalem will be punished and restored. However, this passage does contain an interesting bit. Jeremiah declares that a descendant of King David will always sit on the throne of Israel. Generally, Christians take this descendant to be Jesus. However, if the statement about David's descendants is to be taken at face value, it seems the same should be done for the parallel statements in the same passage:
For this is what the Lord says: David will have a descendant sitting on the throne of Israel forever. And there will always be Levitical priests to offer burnt offerings and grain offerings and sacrifices to me.
Then this message came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “This is what the Lord says: If you can break my covenant with the day and the night so that one does not follow the other, only then will my covenant with my servant David be broken. Only then will he no longer have a descendant to reign on his throne. The same is true for my covenant with the Levitical priests who minister before me. And as the stars of the sky cannot be counted and the sand on the seashore cannot be measured, so I will multiply the descendants of my servant David and the Levites who minister before me.”
The Levitical priests and their offerings are promised the same longevity as descendants of David. Yet I have never heard anyone bring that up when discussing Jesus as a fulfillment of prophecy.

After that we read a warning for Zedekiah followed by a tale of broken promises. The people of Judah, at the urging of king Zedekiah, freed all of their Hebrew slaves. However, some people later changed their minds and made the slaves come back. This upset God who decided that further punishment must be heaped upon Judah. I thought Judah's fate of destruction had already been sealed.

New Testament

False teachers are bad. They will teach things contrary to what the author of this letter teacher. The recipient of the letter should teach his fellow believers and develop his spiritual gifts.

Psalms and Proverbs

Gossip is bad as is listening with quarrelsome folks.

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