Jonathan Cahn - The Harbinger Companion with Study Guide

If America continues on its present course, what do you believe it will be like in ten years? Twenty years?

What do you believe God is saying to America?

What is the hope?

Spiritual Truth

Look again at Jeremiah 33:3 and Isaiah 55:6–11. What are these passages saying?

If these things are the case, why is it a mistake for believers to be closed or to think we know all there is to know about God and His Word?

What then should be the attitude of our hearts and minds?

Mission to Apply This Week

As we begin this course, open your heart and mind to hear the calling and voice of God. Ask God to show you what He wants you to know and what He wants you to do, what He wants for your life.

Commit this week to opening your heart and mind to be able to actually listen to God, to hear from Him, even things you may never have heard before.

Pray, asking Him to lead you as never before and seek to follow His voice. (For groups, take time to allow everyone to pray individually before the leader closes by asking God to seal the prayers prayed.)

Write down your mission for the week in the space below.

Prepare for next week (groups only): This week read, go over, and explore the next chapter, “Ancient Israel: The Rise and the Apostasy.”

Write Down

1. Your thoughts, notes, and insights

2. What you believe the Lord is calling you to do

3. Your mission for the days ahead

Chapter 2

ANCIENT ISRAEL:

The RISE and the APOSTASY

HOW DOES A nation that once knew God become a stranger to Him and even find itself at war against Him? How does it forget the godly foundations on which it was conceived? How does an individual who once knew God fall away from Him? In this study we will open up the pattern, the progression, the dynamics, and the transformation that changed ancient Israel from a nation that served God to one that warred against Him.

The Mystery Begins: Ancient Israel

The mystery of The Harbinger begins with ancient Israel. Nearly four millennia ago Israel was conceived through a promise. God called Abraham to leave Mesopotamia for Canaan where He vowed to bless Abraham and make his descendants a great nation in whom “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). The Lord repeated this promise to Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, who were the fathers of Israel’s twelve tribes.

Along with the privilege of being God’s people and dwelling in His Promised Land came a sacred call to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6), a light to the nations by obeying His Torah. The Law exhorted His people to remember their God, who had freed them from slavery in Egypt. It instructed them to trust and worship Him alone. It commanded them to magnify His name, to enter into His rest, to honor and protect human life, to cherish sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage, to live with honesty and integrity, to be thankful for their blessings, and to love their neighbors as themselves (Exod. 20:1–17; Lev. 19:18). Obedience would bring untold honor and favor; disobedience would lead to calamity, from famine and pestilence to conquest by enemies and exile from the land (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).

When Israel walked with God, its people enjoyed great blessing and protection. During the reigns of King David and King Solomon, Israel’s foes were defeated, and the nation experienced tremendous abundance and fame.

The Ancient Apostasy

Yet even Solomon in the end began to imitate the surrounding Canaanite culture, building high places for Chemosh, the god of the Moabites, and Molech, the god of the Ammonites (1 Kings 11:7).

The Lord judged Solomon by splitting Israel into two kingdoms after his death—the northern kingdom of Israel, which included ten of the twelve tribes, and the southern kingdom of Judah, including Jerusalem and the Temple.

The northern kingdom is the setting for The Harbinger . The year was 732 BC, nearly two hundred years after Solomon’s death. Instead of building on its godly foundation, Israel had departed from it. Instead of sacrificing to the faithful God of their forefathers in His holy Temple, Israelites now sacrificed to cruel, capricious, counterfeit gods in unholy places. Instead of the Law being king, Israel’s kings became the law, and lawlessness ruled the land. Instead of being a light to the nations, Israel pursued their dark ways, forsaking its God.

Apostasy

What were the ways of the peoples surrounding Israel?

Excavations . . . have uncovered . . . objects connected with sorcery, fertility cults, demon exorcism, and pagan superstitions that at times propagated themselves in Israel to such an extent that legislators, prophets, and some rulers had frequently to warn the people against them. 1

Excavations in Palestine have uncovered . . . remains of infant skeletons in cemeteries around heathen altars, pointing to . . . widespread . . . [human sacrifice]. 2

[Canaanite worship] . . . was pornographic. . . . It suggested that anything was permissible, promiscuity, murder, or anything else, in order to guarantee a good . . . harvest. It ignored the highest values . . . love, loyalty, purity, peace, and security — [deeming] all these things . . . inferior to material prosperity, physical satisfaction, and human pleasure. 3

Canaanite deities ranged from their chief god Baal to Molech, a god represented by a hollow image above a fire into which parents would hurl their children, to Anat, a goddess of sexuality and violence, depicted as wearing a belt of heads and hands of human beings.

The Calls, the Warnings, and the End

God in His mercy sent the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Hosea, and Amos to bring Israel to her senses. Rejecting calls for repentance, their fellow Israelites persecuted them, branding them as enemies and apostates. Tolerating every god and goddess of the Middle East, Israel found the very utterance of the name of the God of Israel intolerable.

In 732 BC God sent a final warning by temporarily removing Israel’s hedge of protection, permitting a limited invasion by Assyria.

Unfortunately Israel failed to heed this call to return and in 722 BC was destroyed.

And the king of Assyria uncovered a conspiracy by Hoshea [the king of Israel]; for he had sent messengers to So, king of Egypt, and brought no tribute to the king of Assyria. . . . Therefore the king of Assyria . . . bound him in prison. . . . In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria . . . .carried Israel away to Assyria.

—2 KINGS 17:4, 6

For so it was that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, who had brought them up out of . . . Egypt . . . and they had feared other gods, and had walked in the statutes of the nations whom the LORD had cast out from before the children of Israel. . . . Yet the LORD [said] . . . by all of His prophets . . . “Turn from your evil ways, and keep My commandments . . . which I commanded your fathers. . . . ” Nevertheless they would not hear . . . they . . . became idolaters. . . . And they caused their sons and daughters to pass through the fire, practiced witchcraft and soothsaying, and sold themselves to do evil. . . . Therefore the LORD . . . removed them [Israel] from His sight. . . . So Israel was carried away from their own land to Assyria.

—2 KINGS 17:7–23

The Steps of Israel’s Apostasy

Created to be a light to the nations, Israel became an imitator of the nations and was exiled to the nations. How did this happen?

The apostasy of a nation is similar to that of an individual. Israel’s love and passion for God grew cold. Instead of rejoicing in and pursuing God, the people began pursuing and rejoicing in other things: comfort, security, gain, power, and pleasures. As the nation’s love for God dissipated, other gods and idols were brought in to fill the void.