Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Big Four? (Sword, Famine, Pestilence, and...)

Reading further into Ezekiel than I did for my previous post on "The Big Three," I found an interesting reference in Ezek. 14:21, "For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?" So another category of judgment that might be added to the previous three is the noisome or harmful (noisome = grievous in Rev. 16:2) beast. Even though pestilence typically comes from pests (living creatures; hence its name) as I mentioned in "The Big Three," its context is disease, whereas that of the noisome beast is animal aggression (cf. 2 Kings 17:25).  In light of this, maybe there's a Big Three at the core of God's types of judgments, with a fourth added sometimes depending on the circumstances. "...how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (Rom. 11:33b)

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