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Temple of YHWH
Jeremiah 7:4 “Do not trust in these lying words, saying, ‘The temple of YHWH, the temple of YHWH, the temple of YHWH are these.’” In other words, in these verses it is clear, people think their salvation lies in the Temple. They can do whatever they want outside of the Temple, but as long as they go to the Temple again, they will be ok. If things go wrong, just go to the Temple.
Click here to see our previous posts on “The Temple”, and how even Yeshua’s disciples were so impressed with the beauty of the Temple, and Yeshua responds that the Temple will be destroyed.. not a response they expected to hear. This Temple, has been destroyed in 70AD, and there hasn’t been a Temple since. Yeshua prophecied that He will rebuilt the Temple.. to understand and know where this Temple is, stick to the end of Revelation, where it is explained in the post from Revelation 11.
Queen of heaven
Jeremiah 7:18 “The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger.” Nowhere ever, have YHWH given any honor to a queen of heaven. Yet, for thousands of years, people loved and adored a certain “queen of heaven”. This was done by the Sumerians (Inanna), Akkadians + Babylonians + Assyrians (Ishtar), Greeks (Hera), Egypt (Isis), Canaan (Astarte), Rome (Venus) and the list can go on.
At the same time when people started to accept Yeshua as the Messiah after His resurrection, other cultures like the Romans, had two big problems, on how to convert their religion and convert the majority of their people seamlessly. The one problem was changing their day for rest and worship from a Sabbath, which is why they made it on their worship day Sunday. The other problem was letting go of their gods, so instead they brought their gods in, to somehow fit in and still feel familiar to the people. For example, this “queen of heaven” is a title given for Mary, the mother of Yeshua, used in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.
Fig Tree
Jeremiah 8:13 “I will surely consume them,” says YHWH. “No grapes shall be on the vine, Nor figs on the fig tree, And the leaf shall fade; And the things I have given them shall pass away from them.” . Another translation says, “what I have given them will be taken away”, because they are not bearing fruit.
Adam and Eve, took from the fruit of the tree they were forbidden to take. They became ashamed at their sin, being exposed at what they did, and covered themselves with the leaves of a fruit tree, the fig. Genesis 3:7 “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.” The symbolism of the fruit tree have been there from Genesis, with the first command, “you can eat all the others, just this one, do not eat”. Yeshua also used the symbolism of fruit and harvest a lot, he also cursed the fig tree for not having fruit (Matthew 21:18-22), and a few times He explained, for example in Matthew 13:12, why He talks in Parables, “For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him” – just like YHWH says here in Jeremiah 8:13.
Later in Jeremiah 24 Jeremiah will have a vision also about good and bad figs. The figs represent what we produce spiritually, good, bad or even nothing. We are all held accountable, since Adam and Eve had their eyes opened by the tree of good and evil. We all are confronted with good and evil everyday, and we have to make the choice everyday on what we engage ourselves in, because that will determine our fruit. YHWH’s Torah is our instruction book on how to live, and walk as closely as possible on the narrow road. There are certain things we should not do, and certain things we should not eat. We should keep the Sabbath, and the rest of the commands will be easy to follow. Yeshua kept these instructions, He taught them, and He said they are not difficult. It is a matter of each person’s heart, do we love to do them, or do we get rebellious and don’t do it wholeheartedly.
Dan Judgement
Jeremiah 8:16 “The snorting of His horses was heard from Dan“. This is the second time Jeremiah mentions Dan, the other comes from Jer 4:15, “For a voice declares from Dan and proclaims affliction from Mount Ephraim”.
Only three prophets mentions Dan: Jeremiah mentions Dan twice, Ezekiel mentions Dan’s gate in the New Jerusalem in a prophecy, and Amos makes a mention of Dan. Back in 1 Kings 12:29, we read that King Jeroboam placed a golden calf idol in the city of Dan, along with one in Bethel, after the kingdom split. The people of the northern kingdom, including the tribe of Dan, then went to worship at this altar in Dan, which became a lasting symbol of their idolatry. So the last time Dan is really mentioned, is with Ezekiel.
Ezekiel was taken into exile, around the time of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. Between this time and the end prophecies in the book of Revelation, it is not really known what happened to Dan, because the book of Revelation replaces Dan with the tribe of Manasseh (Revelation 7:4-8, the 144000 sealed servants of YHWH from 12 tribes)
The Hebrew name for Dan H1835 – dān, means to judge, contend, plead, to rule or be a master. Back in the book of Numbers, the tribe of Dan was actually the second largest tribe, but they received a very small piece of land, which they later lost. The Tribe of Dan was one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, that were exiled to Assyria. Perhaps reading Jer 8:16 again, where it talks about YHWH coming with trembling, the verse could be understood as the noise of “Judgement” sound like the snorting of horses, and in the same sentence thinking about Dan whose name means to judge, ended up as was “judged”. This is a reminder of Yeshua’s words in Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that you be not judged.“
