Deut 28.1-68 tells us that Moses enlarges on the blessings (understood as empowered to succeed and read it as such whenever you see “blessed”) and the curses (understood as empowered to fail and read it as such whenever you see “cursed”). The purpose of the Torah is to show us how to walk in a right relationship with the Lord and how to love him in action. But without the Torah we become “lawless” and the Torah has a reverse side to it, as seen in Matt 7.21-23, 1 John 2.3-4, 5.1-3).
v 1…”Now it shall be, if you will diligently obey the Lord your God (in the Torah), being careful to do all his commandments which I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth (Psa 47; like in the times of David and Solomon).
v 2…And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you will obey the Lord your God.
v 3…Blessed (empowered to succeed) shall you be in the city (in the land) and blessed shall you be in the country (field, villages and rural areas).
v 4…Blessed (empowered to succeed) shall be the offspring of your body (notice God mentions the blessing of children before the material blessings) and the produce of your ground and the offspring of your beasts, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.
v 5…Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl (metaphors for any vessel in which their provisions are kept, that they should never be empty).
v 6…Blessed shall you be when you come in and blessed shall you be when you go out (in all their business, either public or private, and in particular when they go out and come in from war-2 Sam 3.25, 5.1; 1 Chr 27.1; 2 Chr 1.10).
v 7…The Lord will cause your enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you; they shall come out against you one way and shall flee before you seven ways (completely).
v 8…The Lord will command the blessings upon you in your barns and in all that you put your hand to, and he will bless you in the land which the Lord your God gives you.
v 9…The Lord will establish you as a holy people to himself, as he swore to you, if you will keep (remember “keep” means to incorporate into our lives the Torah, staying true to the “tavnit” or the blueprint God has given, for a specific thing to be done, by specific people, at specific places, at specific times) the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in his ways.
v 10…So all the peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord (Yehovah is their husband-Isa 4.1) and they shall be afraid of you.
v 11…ANd the Lord shall make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground, in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give to you.
v 12…The Lord (Yehovah) will open for you the good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season (you don’t want rain out of season) and to bless all the work of your hand, and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow.
v 13…And the Lord shall make you the head (rising in reputation and dominion) and not the tail (falling in reputation and dominion), and you shall be above, and you shall not be beneath (a parallelism), if you will listen (obey) to the commandments of the Lord your God, which I charge you today to observe carefully (the condition for these blessings),
v 14…and do not turn aside from any of the words which I command you today, to the right or to the left (don’t deviate, add to or detract from).
Deut 28.15-68 now gives us the curses, which was bad news if they did not go after the blessing by obeying the Torah. These verses sadly tell us the history of Israel. At the end of the chapter, we will look at what happened to Israel before the destruction of the First Temple, and after 70 AD, and how these verses applied in the Holocaust as part of a continuing covenantal discipline and judgment.
v 15…But it shall come about, if you will not obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes with which I charge you today (the written Torah), that all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.
v 16…Cursed (empowered to fail) shall you be in the city (in the land) and cursed (empowered to fail) shall you be in the country (villages, field and rural areas).
v 17…Cursed shall be your basket and kneading bowl (the vessels where they kept their food).
v 18…Cursed (empowered to fail) shall be the offspring of your body and the produce of your ground, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.
v 19…Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out (in all their business, public or private, and in particular when they go to war).
v 20…The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and rebuke, in all you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.
v 21…The Lord will make the pestilence cling to you until he has consumed you from the land, where you are entering to possess it.
v 22…The Lord will smite you with consumption (wasting away) and with fever (hot, burning) and with inflammation and with fiery heat (inside parts, ulcers, etc) and with drought and with blight (scorching wind) and with mildew, and they shall pursue you until you perish.
v 23…And the heaven which is over your head shall be bronze (dry and hard; no moisture in it; no dew or rain being let down from it), and the earth which is under you iron (hard; can’t plough it and nothing can come through it).
v 24…The Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust (winds blowing dust and being let down again in showers of dust and powder); from heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed.
v 25…The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out one way against them, and you shall flee seven ways (completely) before them, and you shall be an example of terror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
v 26…And your carcasses shall be food to all the birds of the sky and to the beasts of the earth, and there shall be no one to frighten them away.
v 27…The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors and with scab and with the itch, from which you cannot be healed (incurable diseases-v 60).
v 28…the Lord will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart,
v 29…and you shall grope at noon, as the blind man gropes in darkness and you shall not prosper in your ways; but you shall only be oppressed and robbed continually, with none to save you.
v 30…You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall violate her; you shall build a house, but you shall not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not use its fruit..
v 31…Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes (can’t prevent it), but you shall not eat of it; your donkey shall be torn away from you; and shall not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have none to save you.
v 32…Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and yearn for them continually; but there shall be nothing you can do.
v 33…A people whom you do not know shall eat up the produce of your ground and all your labors, and you shall never be anything but oppressed and crushed continually.
v 34…And you shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see.
v 35…The Lord will strike you on the knees and legs with sore boils, from which you cannot be healed, from the soles of your foot to the crown of your head.
v 36…The Lord will bring you and your king, whom you shall set over you, to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone.
v 37…And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a taunt among all the people where the Lord will drive you (an object of biting remarks).
v 38…You shall bring out much seed to the field but you shall gather in little, for the locust shall consume it.
v 39…You shall plant and cultivate vineyards, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worm shall devour them.
v 40…You shall have olive trees throughout your territory but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil, for your olives shall drop off.
v 41…You shall have sons and daughters but they shall not be yours, for they shall go into captivity.
v 42…The cricket shall possess all your trees and the produce of your ground.
v 43…The alien who is among you shall rise above you higher and higher, but you shall go down lower and lower.
v 44…He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head (rising in reputation and dominion), and you shall be the tail (falling in reputation and dominion).
v 45…So all these curses shall come on you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you would not obey the Lord your God by keeping his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you.
v 46…And they shall become a sign and a wonder (testify to the truth) on you and your descendants forever (until conditions changed and they repented).
v 47…Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things (which they had in Canaan);
v 48…therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord shall send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in the lack of all things; and he will put an iron yoke on your neck (in subjection) until he has destroyed you.
v 49…The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as an eagle swoops down (swiftly; like Babylon and Rome whose symbol was an eagle-Dan 7.4; Luke 17.37); a nation whose language you shall not understand (tongues is a sign for the unbeliever-Isa 28.9-13; 1 Cor 14.22);
v 50…and nation of fierce countenance who shall have no respect for the old, nor show favor to the young.
v 51…Moreover, it shal, eat the offspring of your herd and the produce of your ground until you are destroyed, who also leaves you no grain, new wine, or oil, nor the increase of the herd or the young of your flock until they have caused you to perish.
v 52…And it shall besiege you in all your towns until your high and fortified walls in which you trusted come down throughout your land, and it shall besiege you in all your towns throughout your land which the Lord your God has given you.
v 53…Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the Lord your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy shall oppress you (if this could happen, why is it so unthinkable that the Holocaust was God’s judgment also-Lev 26.29; Jer 19.9).
v 54…The man who is refined and very delicate among you (not just the country boys will be affected, but the rich also) shall be hostile toward his brother and toward his wife he cherishes and toward the rest of his children who remain (he will hoard whatever food is left for himself; he will look with evil upon them),
v 55…so that he will not given even one of them any of the flesh of his children which he shall eat, since he has nothing else left, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy shall oppress you in all your towns.
v 56…The refined and the delicate woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground for delicateness and refinement, shall be hostile toward the husband she cherishes and towrd her son and daughter,
v 57…and toward her afterbirth which issues from between her legs and toward her children whom she bears, for she shall eat them secretly for lack of anything else, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy shall oppress you in your towns.
v 58…If you are not careful to observe all the words of this law which are written (no hint of an oral law) in this book, to fear this honored and awesome name, the Lord (Yehovah) your God,
v 59…then the Lord will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues, and miserable and chronic diseases.
v 60…And he shall bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt of which you were afraid and they shall cling tom you.
v 61…Also every sickness and every plague which, not written in the book of this law, the Lord will bring on you until you are destroyed.
v 62…Then you shall be left few in number, whereas you were as the stars of heaven for multitude, because you did not obey the Lord your God.
v 63…And it shall come about that as the Lord delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the Lord will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you shall be torn from the land where you are netering to possess.
v 64…Moreover, the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth; and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, which your fathers have not known.
v 65…And among those nations you shall find no rest, and there shall be no resting place for the sole of your foot, but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and despair of soul.
v 66…So your life shall hang in doubt before you ; and you shall be in dread night and day, and shall have no assurance of your life.
v 67…In the morning you shall say, ‘Would that it were evening!’ And in the evening you shall say, ‘Would that it were morning!’ because of the dread of your heart which you dread, and the sight of your eyes which you shall see.
v 68…And the Lord will bring you back in to Egypt in ships, by the way about which I spoke to you , ‘You shall never see it again (they walked out of Egypt before, but now they would be carried in Roman ships there)!’ And there shall you offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but there will be no buyer (the market was so glutted for slaves that no one would buy them, even with reduced prices-Josephus).”
LEVITICAL AND DEUTERONOMIC COVENANTAL DISCIPLINE AND JUDGMENT
These verses in Deur 28.15-68 sadly tell the history of Israel, from the time of the destruction of the First Temple, to the destruction of the Second Temple, the dispersion into the nations the last two thousand years, and even to the Holocaust. The covenantal “hedge” was removed at some point exposing the people (how could it happen unless God gave them up and removed the hedge of protection-Deut 32.30). In the 1700’s there was a move in Germany for Jews to move away from the Torah. This movement was called Reform Judaism. Jews assimilated into the nations around them and they wanted to be accepted. The Holocaust (Olah) was the result of what Moses warned about here. He pleads with the people to choose the Lord and the Torah. But after all these years, and all they have been through, they still don’t get it, and that’s the problem. But the world is like this, too. God has been rejected for 6000 years. They have no heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, the word of the Lord.
So what happened in the Holocaust? How could something like that happen? The subject of the Holocaust has caused many to ask those questions. What we are going to present will be hard to accept by many who will read this, but it is nevertheless the truth. The biggest curse of all is to have no sense of being part of a curse. From the verses found in Deut 28.15-68 we will attempt to answer the questions posed previously, “What happened in the Holocaust?” and “How could it happen?”
We ask that you read what we are going present with an open mind. We do not mean to hurt or offend anyone, or cause anyone distress. But we want to interpret the Holocaust in light of what Moses has said in Deut 28.15-68. If the God of 586 BC and what happened in the destruction and the horrors of the First Temple is the God of 1933 to 1945, then it is vain to condemn the rod of his fury as the cause, rather than the instrument of his wrath.
How could Israel be systematically destroyed by the most civilized people on earth-Germany? It was a nation that the Jewish people had a long love affair with, even to the point of celebrating Germany as the Messianic coming, because many Jews felt that if the world would be as Germany, that would be just like the coming of the Messiah! This view came about because the Jewish people had lost the Torah long before and they settled for a secular ethic and morality that impressed many. To be annihilated by that very nation is not something that can be overlooked. There is something intended for our instruction and the fact that people have not sought after or learned from that instruction almost guarantees that Israel will experience it again, and they will in the Birth-pains of the Messiah.
The Holocaust is a malignant tumor that is very significant in modern Jewish life because of the magnitude of it all. It is the most devastating event in the modern era for the whole world. If people do not assess and understand what happened by the Scriptures, all mankind will suffer a loss that cannot be estimated. Suffering and loss can open up issues of truth and reality like nothing else. The only thing that could be more tragic is to have gone through such things and not understand what all the suffering meant in the intentions of the Lord. People just can’t bring themselves to the realization that the author of all this was the Lord. There has been very little written on the question of , “Where was God and why did he allow this to happen?”
People can talk about “How” it was done by man, but cannot say “Why.” There is a great chasm between those two questions. Historians have gone over the literature and the mechanics of how this could have been pulled off. There can even be a partial answer to the “Why” when you analyze the Nazis and Hitler’s hatred for the Jews, but that does not answer the great question about where the Lord was during all this. People say that God is power and he had the ability to intervene and he should have revealed himself to deliver, but he was silent (or was he). This is a naive notion that draws on a traditional idea about God. This brings out the question that either God has a moral defect and is indifferent to suffering, or he is powerless to do anything about it. Or, as some have concluded, God simply does not exist. However, God gives the answer to the”How” and the “Why” in Deut 29.22-29. They have forsaken the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt!
Few look to the Scriptures for an explanation. In place of that, organizations raise up Holocaust museums because it is hoped that with education another Holocaust can be averted, with “Never Again” being the rallying cry. But the Holocaust came at the hands of the the most educated people at the time. This shows how misplaced the faith of the Jewish people is at this time, still convinced that the education of man will avoid a repetition of the horrors experienced, while ignoring the explanation and warnings of Moses in the Scriptures.
The Jewish people have not followed Moses for over two thousand years. For example, in Poland, the ones who were most religious (Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox) suffered the greatest because what men said was exalted over what Moses said (John 5.39-47). What men think is impressive does not mean God thinks that way. Being “religious” does not necessarily mean “knowledgeable.” Israel failed to understand the calamities in 70 AD. To do so would have laid the groundwork for teshuvah (repentance) in the truth. But they did not, resulting in Rabbinic Judaism. Yeshua, and that revelation alone, saves us from mere concepts of God and the things man conceives. Israel did not conceive of the concept of God, nor are we the standard of what we think he is. He reveals himself in his terms, at his will. He is not our image. A God in our image does not make demands and is convenient. Each denomination has a god in their own image. Yeshua 2000 years ago tried to penetrate this man-made system, and they killed him. He contradicted every category that was held dear. Born in a stable (Sukkah), with parents of no reputation, grew up in Nazareth (that was despised by many), lived a hidden life for 30 years, died as a criminal near a refuse dump-that is our God. Certainly God was “nobler” than that.
Yeshua was the burning bush and people turned away from him and refused to see it. By refusing to “see” the holocaust of Yeshua, the next holocaust was inevitable. By refusing to interpret their own catastrophes correctly (that their actions set in motion) they made themselves subject to the next…and so on. The worst deception of all is an erroneous view of Yehovah, in his severity and his goodness. To miss that you miss the Lord; to know him in truth, in his judgments, as well as his mercies. This is not “theology”, it is reality.
To understand the tragedy, we must understand how the Jewish people celebrated the Germanic civilization. They had an exalted view of man, and illustrious civilization committed a horrible act, the systematic annihilation of European Jews. And it was this civilization that the Jews idolized and admired above all others. But the music, the culture, the education did not save them. The biblical expectation of Messiah and prophecy was lost. For many “emancipated Jews” Germany itself became for many the Messianic fulfillment. The Jewish celebration of man was validated by the humane German civilization in which they lived. This is why, we believe, God necessarily required Germany to bring the devastation of the Holocaust on them. When Israel worshipped Assyrian gods, God used the Assyrians against them. When Israel worshipped Babylonian gods, God used Babylon against them.
To be a German Jew was the highest dignity that they could have hoped for. When Polish Jews came to Germany as immigrants, German Jews would look with contempt on them for being crude, religious. They had long beards and side-locks called “peyot.” They were farmers and workmen. German Jews thought they were superior (Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, etc). They lacked the understanding of human depravity and did not anticipate the evil that fallen man could do. German civilization became the very instrument of their own destruction. And still, the Jewish people and Judaism celebrates Jewish life as superior morally and ethically. They have no concept of sin and do not think they have committed a transgression of a kind that would justify the Holocaust. But these events must bring them to the realization that it was their failures as men in relation to Moses and the Torah, and Yeshua, that brought this upon them. Israel acts like everyone else and other nations, contrary to what God had planned for the nation (Deut 4.6-8). Biblical destiny will be fulfilled despite this. God’s word, his name, his covenants and his honor are at stake.
God’s view of man can be seen in such verses as Ecc 7.20; Psa 53.3-4; Psa 130.3, 143.2. However, nobody wants to agree with him. The sinful flesh does not always exalt itself in rape, murder or thefts. It can express itself through intellect, music, art, business, science and accomplishment. But the human flesh is rotten all the way through. The sinner refuses to see himself as a sinner. There is self-exaltation of Jewish life in the area of human accomplishment and brilliance that is a lie. What will it take to test this character and reveal these flaws. Failure to yield to the word of God regarding our human condition is pride, and this requires judgment to fall. So, being a sinner makes it hard for us to recognize ourselves as sinners. If man is going to see himself as a sinner, we must confront God as a righteous judge. This revelation is contained in the crucifixion of Yeshua and the Holocaust. It is in the depths of despair, darkness and affliction that man realizes he is a sinner. Even sin refuses to call itself sin. The greatest revelation of sin is the price God paid for the propitiation of sin in the “Olah” or “holocaust” of Yeshua. What reveals sin as sin is the judgment that results from sin. What reveals the mercy of God was his own willingness to bear the price himself. What is the price of refusing to consider that act? We have lost the one great provision sinners have to understand their condition, and the price paid for them. To dismiss either the cross or the efficacy of the one “raised up on the cross” is the same mindset the Revisionists use to dispute or reject the historicity of the Nazi Holocaust.
God is a God of judgment. “Where was God?” people ask. “Why was he silent during the Holocaust?” Either God is dead, or we accept the testimony of Moses and the Torah that God’s silence is in proportion to our sin. The Holocaust was God’s judgment, not an accident or a result of an aberration of “antisemitism.” God works through nations as rods of chastisement (Isa 10.5), and this brings a fear of God as judge. Without this, we have no fear of God and cannot answer the “Why’s” of the Holocaust. We have lost the perspective of God as judge. His wrath and judgment makes his power known, and this is an offense against our calculated religious sensibilities of the way we would like God to be in our own mind. One holocaust is meant to teach us and save us from another “fire.” How far will God go to teach us this, to save us from the “lake of fire?”
So the question is, what was God judging?’ Elie Wiesel was a survivor and a spokesman on the Holocaust. He was asked to consider that the sufferings of Israel’s history were prophesied in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. He answered, “I refuse to consider that.” His answer is a summation of man’s self-exaltation over God. It begins with the word “I” in his answer. Human arrogance exalting its opinion, it’s thought and its will above God himself. To refuse to consider the word of God in the Torah is a sign of sin and apostasy. The root cause of the Holocaust is God’s judgment on the sin of self-exaltation by man at the expense of God’s word, man’s opinion over God himself.
Israel’s history is connected to their covenantal obligation in the Torah. If Israel was banished from the land for failing to live in his covenantal demands, how can Israel unilaterally repossess the land without first considering the God of Mount Sinai and his covenant? Lev 26.14-46 speaks of the “vengeance of the covenant.” Acknowledgement of sin, and the sins of the fathers, and realizing that the punishments were just and righteous, is when God will remember his covenant (Lev 26.39-42). We need to see a “whole people” brought into judgment. We are joined to the past, and unresolved sin. Israel needs to break the continuum of sin. The justification for the relentless hunt for Nazi criminals becomes, ironically, Israel’s own indictment in itself. God’s indictment of Israel can be found in Jer 7.24-26. God brings the past into the present with the words, “until today.” It is in acknowledging their personal guilt and responsibility in the acts of their fathers that they can break ourselves away from them. What Israel has suffered historically is the judgment of God, consisting of exiles, persecutions, pogroms, forced conversions, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, and terrorism. These should be viewed in the larger context of covenantal unfaithfulness. Jeremiah hints at this unbroken continuum of sin in Jer 8.5. Israel was involved in the murder of Yeshua (Acts 3.13-15), and this has been cruelly exploited by Israel’s enemies, but it still remains true. This truth has not been spoken to the Jewish people kindly, in a redemptive way, with hearts that understood that it was their sin also that implicated them in his death. There is a great sin that needs to be acknowledged (Hos 5.15; Jer 3.25). God is waiting to comfort Israel. A broken spirit and a contrite heart he will not despise (Psa 51.17).
A marginal knowledge of Scripture and of God testifies against Israel. Israel has chosen to believe a secular, socialized or political explanation for the Holocaust, rather than find an answer in God’s word. Deut 32 has what is called the “The Song of Moses” and it is a specific warning prior to coming into the land about the Holocaust. It forewarns of judgment. In seeking to understand the Holocaust, Israel does not connect it to the Scriptures. There is a controversy going on as to why the Allies did not bomb the concentration and death camps and the railroad tracks. The answer is found in God. When he brings a judgment he will bring it with totality and fullness of intention, through men or despite men. “I will hide my countenance from them” means no man can deter it (Deut 32.23-25). This song should be known by heart. It would have saved Israel from the destruction that is spoken about and predicted there. Israel preferred a kind of religion that they believed was “definitive Judaism”, but it did not provide biblical awareness. The tragic absence of that forewarning is the testimony of Judaism’s failure to produce the desired effect. Interpreting the Holocaust as the consequence of sin is totally incompatible with modern Jewish self-assessment. The way that they see and justify themselves is not going to save them from judgment that will come according to the Lord’s terms. If you want to see his judgments, then look at the Holocaust of Israel and the Messiah. That is God judging, and if you don’t to see God there, you don’t see. If we have a complaint about seeing God there, then our own complaint itself is a testimony that what he says of our condition is true. And not to see God in our judgements results in our blaming of men. Man thinks that if God delays and withholds his judgments, that the calamity, when it comes, is no longer related to sin.
God’s judgment as mercy can be his final provision to unwilling men, when every other grace to get our attention has failed. Then he will restore us in mercy. The nations will see this (Ezek 36.35-36). If they don’t repent then they, too, will receive his judgments. Israel is the people of the covenant, and with it comes the greater judgment and the passage of time means nothing, God has not changed. His mercy is to call us to repentance before the fulfillment of what is prophetically declared in his word.
That covenant is also called the “New” (or renewed) Covenant that is ratified in the blood of the Messiah, and it is promised to a restored nation (Jer 31.31-34). Israel in the very near future is going to suffer devastation on a wider scale in what is called the “Birth-pains of the Messiah” or “tribulation” period. Demonic hatred (a return of the ancient shedim/gods which is behind all idol worship) will be released in every nation, not just one like in Germany. There will be no place to hide. That is why the Jewish people are told to return back to the land. There will be a sifting in the last days (Amos 9; Ezek 20.33) but God will restore Israel because God has chosen Israel to be a statement of our humanity. Israel is a “witness people” to demonstrate himself, if not by their virtue, then by their vices. God wants to convert Israel to himself, not to Replacement Theology Christianity or any other so-called religion. Jeremiah and Ezekiel adhere to the recognition of calamity as judgment because it was only there, in concordance with his own word, that the revelation of true hope can be found (Jer 31.16-17). God is waiting for Israel to acknowledge the death of his Messiah, and set in motion their salvation (Ezek 39.22). If they plead an exemption in any manner, then they are lost and without hope.
Like the prophets of doom Jeremiah and Ezekiel, one must present, unsparingly, the case for the catastrophes of Israel as being the wrath of God according to his word, especially in our passages in Deut 28.15-68. This view from Deuteronomy has been validated by history. The state of Israel known today will fail. Suffering before the glory is the axis of Israel’s prophetic expectation. Isa 51-52 reads like the crucifixion of a nation, at God’s hands with terms like the “cup of his fury”, “the rebuke of thy God” and “at the hand of the Lord.” Yehovah calls Israel to “awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem (Isa 51.17-23, 52.1-2).” God’s most severe judgments are always redemptive, his severity is his mercy (Heb 12.5-11). His chastening is not his final word (Jer 31.10-17). There is hope (Isa 54.1-3; Zech 8.22; Isa 55.5; Isa 56.7-8; Isa 60.1-3). Their “light” is not human or Talmudic brilliance, but they will “know the Lord” in a redemptive way with an imputed righteousness of God (Isa 60.21, 61.11, 62.3-5; Psa 102.12-22).
Finally, what about personal restoration? Peter made it clear the culpability of all Israel in Yeshua’s death, whether they were present or not, willing participants or not (Acts 2.36-38). Yeshua said we are implicated in the sins of our fathers when he rebuked the Pharisees from Beit Shammai in Matt 23.29-36. Only true repentance can save us (Rom 10.12-13, Acts 4.12, Matt 1.21) and only in Yeshua (John 1.29; 12.27). Yeshua is the prophesied Messiah (John 5.39-47; Isa 52.13 through 53.12). We must humble ourselves and confess Yeshua to be saved (Rom 10.9-13). If the God of 586 BC and the Babylonian Captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem, the Temple and the deportation of the Jewish people to Babylon is the God of 1933 to 1945 and the Holocaust, then it is vain to blame the rod of his anger as the cause (Germany and the Nazis), rather than the instrument of that wrath.
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