Seriously cursed and scattered

Among the curses God promises disobedient Israel in Deuteronomy 28 is, "Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy them; for they shall go into captivity."

“When you get to Hosea, he talks about their births, and their wombs and how even conceiving is going to be taken away from them,” explains Jordan. “They’re going to lose the ability to bear children. With children in the womb, they’re going to be aborted, and there’s going to be sterility where He’s going to cut the nation down and that’s just part of the judgments He’s given them back here.

“Verses 45-46 says, ‘Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee. [46] And they shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for ever.’

“So when they come upon them, it’s a sign; it’s something that demonstrates, ‘Look, I told you it was going to happen; I told you what would happen if you broke the covenant and now here it comes!’ It’s a sign of God keeping His Word. They’re going to SEE the judgment.

"In verses 34-35, God says, ‘So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.
[35] The LORD shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the top of thy head.’

“A sign is something you can see and God’s literally going to bring that judgment on them just as He told them He would.

“Verse 47-51 says, ‘Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things;
[48] Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.
[49] The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand;
[50] A nation of fierce countenance, which shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:
[51] And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy sheep, until he have destroyed thee.’

“You read that and you say, ‘Whoa, that sounds pretty serious!’ That’s what Hosea is talking to them about coming to pass.

“Hosea 9 says, [2] The floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail in her.
[3] They shall not dwell in the LORD's land; but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean things in Assyria.

“Notice they’re going to be scattered among the Gentiles and they’ll no longer be in ‘the Lord’s land.’ This is one of those verses that helps you to see God’s attitude about the land of Israel.

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“We call it the land of Palestine sometime because the Roman Empire gave the name ‘the land of Palestine’ to the land of Israel. Over 200 times in your Bible, the God of the Bible is called the God of Israel. The land of Israel is ‘the Lord’s land.’

“The name Palestine got attached to the land in the 2^nd Century. The Romans were so frustrated with the rebellious Israelis in the land of Israel in 70 A.D. that when Titus came in and destroyed the temple and so forth, he didn’t deport the Jews; he just tried to bring them under control.

“In 115 A.D. they rebelled again and in 135 A.D. they rebelled again, and the last time the Romans literally took the Jews and uprooted them, and deported them out of the land, and renamed the land after Israel’s enemies on the northern coast; the Philistines. That’s where the land of Palestine got its name.

“Now, that means the original inhabitants of the land of Palestine were Israelis. When you hear about the Palestinians in our day, that is a political term that developed in the mid-1960s and ’70s.

“Yasser Arafat is actually the one who made that a real popular thing, talking about the Palestinian people and a homeland for them and all that stuff.

“All of that is the result of the meddling of the Europeans who won World War II. They went into the Middle East and gave so many square acres to each one of these different countries and drew these (border) lines arbitrarily. The land of Iraq, for example, is really ethnically, and historically, three different nations of people in there.

“After World War II, by the way, Yugoslavia, if you remember Tito, they drew it so you had the Serbs and the Albanians and all. You have people who HATE each other and that’s why we wound up with Bill Clinton as president bombing some of them dudes, trying to make them not kill each other.

“Tito, a communist dictator, ran Yugoslavia for years because he had the gun. But there’s a lot of politically artificial things going on, and they actually had the land and stuff for the Palestinians to be in but Jordan wouldn’t give it to them.

“You see, all this political stuff you read about now has nothing to do with what you read in the Bible. When you read Joel 3 about the Palestinians, you’re not reading about the same Palestinians you’re thinking about from the news today, who are trying to get people to be anti-Israel. You’re reading about things in the land of Israel.

“The reason he uses the title in Hosea about ‘the Lord’s land’ is you go back to Leviticus 25:21, when you’re looking at the Levitical laws and regulations, and God says, ‘Then I will command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years.
[22] And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store.
[23] The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.
[24] And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant redemption for the land.’

“Israel had to tend to the land. They were in possession of God’s land, and the way they treated that land, and the reason they’re cast out of that land so the land can enjoy its Sabbaths, is because they they were His stewards and possessors (the ones through whom He was going to inherit that land) but were violating God’s land.

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“II Chronicles 7:20 says, ‘Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a proverb and a byword among all nations.’

“You need to think about that. Because when all the nations of the earth, here it is 2,000 years after the time of Christ, and the nation Israel is still a curse word, a byword, in the tongues of the nations.

“You know, there’s a sense in which Israel is a miraculous nation. The 'burning bush' is the symbol in the nation; they’re burned but they’re not consumed.

“I’m trying to think of the guy’s name but one of the apologetics he used for proving the Bible is the Word of God is the nation Israel; the Jew. Because God said they would never cease to exist and there’s every reason in the world for that nation not to exist.

“There’s been 3,500 years of people trying to destroy Israel off the face of the earth and they’ve never gotten them destroyed. Why? Because God said He’s going to preserve them, but He didn’t say He was always going to preserve them in their land.

“He’s telling them, ‘If you don’t worship me, I’ll put you out of MY land which I’ve given you.’ And that’s exactly what’s happened.

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“Ezekiel 36:6 says, ‘Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen.’

“He tells them, ‘Go prophesy to the mountains and the rivers.’ In essence, God says, ‘Go explain to the land why I’m going to do what I’m going to do.’ Because He’s going to send judgment in there and the enemy’s going to wipe out the land. He’s going to make the land not bring forth fruit, the land’s designed to be harvested. He’s going to stop it from doing its job!

“He says, ‘Go explain why that’s happening and how long it’s going to be.’ Verse 16 says, 'Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
[17] Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman.’

“To understand that, you’ve got to go back to Leviticus 15. When a woman had an issue of blood, she was to be removed out of the camp and was to be unclean for a period of time. In order for her to come back in, she had to do some things. There was a ritual for her to be purified. She had to be baptized; she had to be washed.

“He says, ‘I’m going to remove Israel out of the land because they’ve defiled the land with blood.’ Verse 18 says, ‘Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and for their idols wherewith they had polluted it.’

“When He talks about the blood, He’s not talking about warfare. He’s talking about the thing of shedding the blood of the innocent; the idolatry. They’ve defiled themselves and the land by shedding the blood of the offerings that they’ve made to these idols.

“It turned out they're offering the blood of their own children it gets to be so bad! But instead of offering the blood of the Levitical offerings, they’re offering this defiling blood.

“So he says in verse 19, ‘And I scattered them among the heathen, and they were dispersed through the countries: according to their way and according to their doings I judged them.’

“The Lord’s saying, ‘I’ve literally gotten them out of the land so they could quit defiling the land.’ ”