Jeremiah [Part 2] - Jerusalem, Capital of all Believers

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom. We did a couple of lessons on Jeremiah, and the last lesson was mainly concentrated on Jeremiah chapter 2, where God speaks to Jerusalem and says, “I remember the kindness of your youth, the love of your betrothal, your marriage to me when you went after me as if in the honeymoon, in the wilderness, in a land not sown.” I spent most of the time on this concept of Israel being the bride, the wife of God. It’s a very big theme, and I did it in one lesson. I want to continue immediately after that to the next chapter, to Chapter 3 of Jeremiah, because it’s still dealing with Jerusalem.

Now, a few general words about Jeremiah that I haven’t said before: Jeremiah is a Messianic prophet, just like Isaiah. Isaiah has several, six or seven or eight prophecies that are Messianic, talking about the Messiah, the era of the Messiah, the time of the Messiah, the mission of the Messiah. Jeremiah is very similar; he's got a lot of Messianic texts, but it also has Jerusalem as a center theme. In Jeremiah, most Christians know Psalm 122:6, “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem,” and alter the translation. It is not perfect from the Hebrew point of view because it says, “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem,” so the Christians read, “so that you may prosper.”

Christians all over the world pray for the Peace of Jerusalem with the wrong motives, so that they will prosper, and their prosperity is interpreted physically, financially, worldly. But that’s not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew word shalom, the root there, is “you should have rest, you should have peace,” the same root as shalom. So those that love Jerusalem will pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, and God will give them His peace. That’s the meaning of the text from Psalms 122:6.

But now we are in Jeremiah, and I will read to you some verses from chapter 3 and then chapter 4 of Jeremiah, not the whole chapter, just a few verses. Chapter 3, verse 17 says,

The proper name of the Lord, the tetragrammaton.

Talking about the pagans, the idolaters. They will stop following their intuition, their hearts, their culture, their evil intentions and motives. That’s Jeremiah 3:17.

But if I jump right now to Jeremiah 4, that continues the theme of Jerusalem, and read to you two more verses, then I want to concentrate on this whole concept of Jerusalem as the center of the earth, as the Throne of the Lord, as the capital of the believers worldwide. Chapter 4, I’m going to read chapter 4, verse 3, 4, and 5:

That’s already chapter 4, verse 10. I’m going to read it anyway:

That wind is to destroy. The people of Judah and Jerusalem and the land of Israel were taken to exile to Babylon not so far after Jeremiah. Then, in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, they returned to the land. Then in 70 A.D., after the death, burial, and resurrection of Yeshua and sitting on the right hand of God, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Only in 1967, when Israel took over the whole city of Jerusalem in fulfillment of prophecy, only then Jerusalem was in the hand of the people of Israel, of the nation of Israel.

That means that over 2,000 years, dear brother and sister, Jerusalem was in the hands of the Gentiles, of non-Jews. Only in 1967, Jerusalem, the whole city, returned to the hands of the Jews. I believe that this is the fulfillment of Luke 21, and of Romans 11, and of Isaiah 66, and many, many texts in the prophets, in the Psalms, and in the New Testament that portray the beginning of the salvation of Israel and the fullness of the time of the Gentiles, like Romans 11:25 and 26 say.

But we see that these prophecies in Jeremiah, similar ones in Isaiah, similar ones in the other prophets as well, have three elements. The first element is a kind of a wake-up call to get to work: start plowing, start plowing. Don’t plow in vain, don’t plow for nothing. 'Plow, break up the fallow ground, the unplowed ground, and stop sowing seeds in the thorns'. We have the parable of Yeshua in Matthew 13 about the four soils and the sower who sowed the seed in the different soils. One of the soils was the thorns. It’s a place where the seed can grow; it’ll start growing, and then the thorns will shade it, keep the sun away from it, and choke it to where it cannot produce fruit.

So the prophet here is calling for a wake-up call, predicting a return to the land from the exile, predicting the need to be effective in our work in this land. The example is agricultural, sowing and reaping, and warning not to sow among the thorns. But the next text, the next verse, is talking about,

Why?

'Circumcise your hearts.'

Now this concept of circumcising our hearts is a very big concept. It didn’t start with Jeremiah; it started way back in the law of Moses. Circumcision started in Genesis with Abraham, in Genesis 17, where God commands Abraham to circumcise his son Isaac and himself. Ah, that’s difficult to do. Abraham must have been a tough guy; he was able to circumcise himself. But then, in the book of Deuteronomy, we have twice this command of circumcising our hearts.

The first time in the book of Deuteronomy, this command comes is in Deuteronomy 10:16. God commands, “You circumcise your hearts and don’t harden your neck. Stop being a stiff-necked nation. Circumcise your hearts and stop being a stiff-necked nation.” But the same text appears again in Deuteronomy 30:6. From Deuteronomy 10, 20 chapters later, toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy, already God changed his mind. He said to himself, “Listen, I know you guys, you’re not going to do it, so in chapter 30, verse 6, it says, ‘The Lord God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your seed, of your offspring, so that you can love God, Jehovah, your God, with all your hearts and with all your souls, in order to have life.’”

Now this text is very important, and I need to parse it out for you. The first time, God said, “You circumcise your hearts so that you will have good, so you have a life that is led with purity of your heart and within your hands.” By the end of the book of Deuteronomy, God says, “I know these people; I better do it myself. Nobody can do it as good as I can for you. I’ll do it for you. I’ll circumcise your heart. I’ll circumcise your heart so that our relationship will be based on love with you and with your children, with your seed, not on fear but on love, so that you can love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul in order to have life.”

But these people are alive. What kind of life is he promising them? He’s promising them eternal life, not only existence. But living, according to the New Testament, if you don’t have God in your life, you’re not living; you’re existing, like a dog, like a lion, like a crocodile, like a hippopotamus, like a monkey. You’re existing; you’re eating, you’re pooping, you’re buying, you’re selling. But that’s not a life. Without God as your anchor, as your savior, as your Lord, it’s not a life; it’s existence.

How do I know that? In the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 10 and 11, further down, says to the Gentiles that they were dead in their trespasses until they got saved by the sacrifice and the blood and the program that God made through his son Yeshua, Jesus. “You were dead before. Now you came alive. You were strangers; now you were brought near. You were outside of the covenants of God; now you’ve got the covenants of God. You are outside of the Commonwealth of Israel; now you’re in the Commonwealth of Israel.” That’s Ephesians 2. You were dead, and anybody in biblical terms that doesn’t have God in his life is like any animal alive, kicking, biting, hunting, doing everything but with a disconnect between our heavenly Father, the Creator, the Father of all mankind, and their lives.

So when in Jeremiah says,

Why? “Because of the evil of your doing,” the evil of your heart. That’s why you need to circumcise your hearts. We see this concept in the book of Deuteronomy twice: chapter 10, verse 6, then chapter 30, verse 6, and chapter 32, verse 22. It appears several more times in the prophets, the same concept of the circumcision of the heart. So, my dear brothers and sisters, Jeremiah is in concert, in agreement with Isaiah because Isaiah 2 predicts that the Gentiles, the nations, will say to one another, “Let us go up to Jerusalem. Let us go up to the house of the Lord, for the Torah came from Jerusalem and the word of the Lord from Zion.” Yeah, Isaiah, I’m going to go there to make sure I’m quoting it right. Isaiah, chapter 2. Let’s go. Again I’m going to read a couple of verses: Isaiah 2:1 and 2.

Jeremiah is saying the same thing in different words. And not only Jeremiah; we’ve got the same teaching in Isaiah 66. Again, we’ve got the same teaching in Zechariah 14, where all the nations will have to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Sukkot, of Tabernacles. We’ve got it in many, many places in the scriptures, this same theme. So when you think about your faith, your relationship to God, to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the God of Israel, and you think about your relationship to Jesus, to Yeshua, you should remember your relationship to Yeshua doesn’t put you in touch and committed to Rome or Constantinople or Elkhart, Indiana. It puts you in touch; you are connected spiritually and with your heart with Jerusalem.

And if your church teaches differently, you should draw conclusions. Yes, you should draw conclusions, because I could show you throughout the whole Bible, from the Psalms, from the Ecclesiastes, from Lamentations, from the Torah, and all the prophets and all the writings, that the Lord is coming back to Jerusalem, and this will be the center of the world. Yes, Jerusalem, that war-torn Jerusalem, discarded Jerusalem, the suffering from terrorism Jerusalem, will become the capital of God’s people worldwide.

And so you should start now. You should put Jerusalem at the height of your affairs. You should pray for the Peace of Jerusalem; you shall pray for your brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. You should pray for the Lord’s purpose to be done in Jerusalem and all these promises of God to be fulfilled. May God bless you, my dear brothers and sisters. This is Jeremiah; he’s not the only prophet that says similar things about this. But right now, we’re studying Jeremiah, and you see the connection of Jeremiah’s thinking with the law of Moses, with Isaiah, and with the other prophets. May God bless you, enlighten you, and fill you with his Spirit and with his love, so that you would really prosper, both in the spirit, in the flesh, and in every other way that God will bless you. In Yeshua’s name.