40 The Parable of the Sword

The nation Israel God says that He is against them. As a result of their gross sins he will bring judgment against them. He is their adversary since they turned against them. The central point in this message is that He as their antagonist will bring a sword out of its sheath and will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked. In other words when the Babylonians come for the final time acting as God’s sword unsheathed they will indiscriminately kill all that are in their path. This will include the righteous as well as the unrighteous. Some think that this contradicts God’s discussion in chapters 14, 18 and 33 that only the unrighteous would be cut off. In fact the translators of the Septuagint were so perplexed that they changed the word righteous to unrighteous so as to comply with the text in the other three chapters. The issue though is how God views what He is doing compared to what people view what He is doing. The sword is not just an army coming, but God’s own judgment; and as the fire devoured both the green wood and the dry (Ezekiel 20:47), so He would cut off out of the land the righteous and the wicked. The judgment was, as already declared, to be plainly His judgment.