When God’s Hand Protects His People

The dragon was infuriated over the woman and went off to fight the rest of her children, those who obey God’s commands and bear witness to Yeshua.

Revelation 12:17 (CJB)

After Joshua led the ancient Israelites into the land promised to Abraham and all of the promises were fulfilled as stated in Joshua 23:14 (LEB): “… not one thing failed from all the good things that Yahweh your God promised concerning you; everything has been fulfilled; not one thing failed,” just as warned, the Israelites started to turn away from God. Moses had warned them; they experienced rejection firsthand for their rebellion in the desert, and Joshua also warned them.

Deuteronomy 32:23–26 (LEB): ²³ I will heap disasters upon them; my arrows I will spend on them. ²⁴ They will become weakened by famine, and consumed by plague and bitter pestilence; and the teeth of wild animals I will send against them, with the poison of the creeping things in the dust; ²⁵ From outside her boundaries the sword will make her childless, and from inside, terror; both for the young man and also the young woman, the infant along with the gray-headed man. ²⁶ I thought, “I will wipe them out; I will make people forget they ever existed.”

Joshua 23:16 (LEB): ¹⁶ If you transgress the covenant of Yahweh your God, which he commanded to you, and you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, Yahweh’s anger will be kindled against you, and you will perish quickly from the good land that he has given to you.”

After Joshua died, it did not take long for the ancient Israelites to descend into debauchery. This was the seesaw of Israel sinning against God and God patiently redeeming them for about 1,200 years. First, the kingdom would be divided; then the northern kingdom of Israel would be conquered, and the people scattered among the nations. Finally, the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by Babylon.

The prophet Ezekiel describes the rebellion happening around the temple.

Ezekiel 8:9–18 (LEB): ⁹ And he said to me, “Come and see the detestable things, the evil that they are doing here. ¹⁰ And I came, and I saw, and look, all kinds of creatures and detestable beasts; and all of the idols of the house of Israel were carved on the wall all around. ¹¹ And seventy men from the elders of the house of Israel, and Jaazaniah, the son of Shaphan, was standing in the midst of them, and they were standing before them. Each one had his censer in his hand, and the fragrance of the cloud of the incense was going up. ¹² And he said to me, “Have you seen, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in the inner rooms of his idol, for they are saying, ‘Yahweh is not seeing us; Yahweh has abandoned the land.’ ” ¹³ And he said to me, “Still you will see again greater detestable things that they are doing.” ¹⁴ And he brought me to the doorway of the gate of the house of Yahweh that is toward the north, and look! There were the women sitting weeping for Tammuz. ¹⁵ And he said to me, “Have you seen, son of man? Still you will see again greater detestable things than these.” ¹⁶ And he brought me to the inner courtyard of the house of Yahweh, and look, at the doorway of the temple of Yahweh, between the portico and the altar, there were about twenty-five men with their backs to the temple of Yahweh and their faces toward the east, and they were bowing down toward the east before the sun. ¹⁷ And he said to me, “Have you seen, son of man? Was it too small a thing for the house of Judah to do the detestable things that they did here? For they filled up the land with violence, and they provoked me to anger again, and look! They are putting the branch to their nose. ¹⁸ And so I will act in rage, and my eye will not take pity, and I will not have compassion, and they will cry in my ear with a loud voice, and I will not hear them.”

Interesting Jerusalem Post article. (click here)

God gave the southern kingdom another chance, and they eventually returned to rebuild the temple. Fast forward a few hundred years, and Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple once again.

Mark 13:1–2 (LEB): 13 And as he was going out of the temple courts, one of his disciples said to him, “Teacher, look! What great stones and what wonderful buildings!” ² And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here on another stone that will not be thrown down!”

The temple was destroyed in 70 CE as predicted by Jesus. The people were scattered and now the promise of Abraham can be realized. Through Jesus, Abraham’s seed, the whole world would be blessed.

Galatians 3:16 (KJV 1900): ¹⁶ Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.

The story of Gideon provides an excellent example of how God protects His people. We see the ancient Israelites being harassed by their neighbors because they had turned their backs on the God who delivered them from Egypt.

Judges 6:1–5 (LEB): 6 The Israelites did evil in the eyes of Yahweh, and Yahweh gave them into the hand of the Midianites for seven years. ² The hand of the Midianites prevailed over Israel; because of the presence of the Midianites, the Israelites made for themselves hiding places that were in the mountains, caves, and strongholds. ³ And whenever Israel sowed seed, the Midianites, Amalekites, and the people of the east would come up against them. ⁴ They would camp against them and destroy the produce of the land as far as Gaza; they left no produce in Israel, or sheep, ox, or donkey. ⁵ For they, their livestock, and their tents would come up like a great number of locusts; they and their camels could not be counted; they came into the land and devoured it.

God did not use a crushing army to defeat the enemies or the help of a world superpower threatening to destroy all the civilians. He picked Gideon. When the angel of Yahweh came to Gideon, Gideon did not boast about how great a warrior he was; he was very humble and meek. Judges 6:15 (LEB) 15 He said to him, “Excuse me, my lord. How will I deliver Israel? Look, my clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the youngest in my father’s house.” The first thing Gideon was told to do was remove the idol of the Asherah pole and Baal altar in the village.

Judges 6:25–26 (LEB): ²⁵ Now on that same night Yahweh said to him, “Take the bull of the cattle that belongs to your father, and a second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that belongs to your father, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it; ²⁶ and build an altar to Yahweh your God on the top of this stronghold in the proper arrangement, and take a second bull and offer it as a burnt offering with the wood of the Asherah that you will cut down.

Gideon started with 22,000 troops, but God said that was too many. Through various methods, God had Gideon reduce his army to 300 men so they would know it was not by their might that they would defeat their enemies. In the end, they did not even have to fight; God confused the attacking armies, causing them to turn against one another.

Judges 7:20–23 (LEB): ²⁰ When three companies blew on the trumpets and broke the jars, they held in their left hand the torches and in their right hand the trumpets for blowing, and they cried, “A sword for Yahweh and for Gideon!” ²¹ And each stood in his place all around the camp, and all the camp ran, and they cried out as they fled. ²² When they blew the three hundred trumpets, Yahweh set the sword of each one against his neighbor throughout the whole camp, and the camp fled as far as Beth Shittah toward Zererah, up to Abel Meholah, the border by Tabbath. ²³ And the men of Israel were called from Naphtali, from Asher, and from all of Manasseh, and they pursued after Midian.

We can contrast this to how things are done today and come to our own conclusions. For example, the recent bombing of civilians in Beirut. (article here)

The temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the promise given to Abraham was realized through Messiah Yeshua (Jesus). Coming up next in God’s timeline is the second coming of Yeshua, the resurrection and the gathering of God’s people.

Isaiah 66:14–24 (LEB)

¹⁴ And you shall see and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like the grass, and the hand of Yahweh shall make itself known to his servants, and he shall curse his enemies. ¹⁵ For look! Yahweh will come in fire, and his chariots like the storm wind, to give back his anger in wrath, and his rebuke in flames of fire. ¹⁶ For Yahweh enters into judgment on all flesh with fire and his sword, and those slain by Yahweh shall be many. ¹⁷ Those who sanctify themselves and those who cleanse themselves to go into the gardens after the one in the middle, eating the flesh of swine and detestable things and rodents together shall come to an end!” declares Yahweh. ¹⁸ “And I—their works and thoughts!—am about to come to gather all nations and tongues, and they shall come and see my glory. ¹⁹ And I will set a sign among them, and I will send survivors from them to the nations: Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, who draw the bow; Tubal and Javan, the faraway coastlands that have not heard of my fame, and have not seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations, ²⁰ and bring all your countrymen from all the nations as an offering to Yahweh on horses and chariots and in litters and on mules and camels, to my holy mountain, Jerusalem,” says Yahweh, “just as the sons of Israel bring an offering in a clean vessel to the house of Yahweh. ²¹ And indeed, I will take some of them as priests and the Levites,” says Yahweh. ²² “For just as the new heavens and earth that I am about to make shall stand before me,” declares Yahweh, “so shall your descendants and your name stand. ²³ And this shall happen: From new moon to new moon and from Sabbath to Sabbath all flesh shall come to bow in worship before me,” says Yahweh. ²⁴ “And they shall go out and look at the corpses of the people who have rebelled against me, for their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

The patient endurance of the saints is to keep the commandments of God and the faith of Yeshua. This is what we should be striving to do!

Photo by Qamma Farm on Unsplash