Jonathan Cahn - The Harbinger Companion with Study Guide

What specific steps can you take this week to repent of this, to overcome, to stay farther away, or to take steps to go in the opposite direction? Make this your mission for this week and write it in the space below.

Take time now to commit this to God and pray for His help and anointing.

Seal this commitment in prayer (individually, in small groups, as a class, or congregationally).

Prepare for next week (groups only): This week read, go over, and explore the next chapter, “The Harbingers: The Breach to the Gazit Stone.”

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 4

The HARBINGERS:

The BREACH to the GAZIT STONE

Warning Signs of Judgment

HOW DOES GOD warn a nation of judgment? Are there patterns revealed in the Bible? How does God warn and call us? How is an ancient pattern and template of judgment and warning actually manifested on American soil? In this study we explore what happens when a nation grows deaf to the call of God and how the warnings of judgment must become severer in their pattern and progression. In this chapter we’ll cover the pattern from Isaiah 9:10, which includes the manifestation of the Breach, the Terrorist, the Bricks, the Tower, and the Gazit Stone.

The First Harbinger:

The Breach

The breaching of ancient Israel

God’s covenant with Israel included the promise of protection from threats to its safety, security, and existence.

I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none will make you afraid. I will rid the land of evil beasts, and the sword will not go through your land. You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you.

—LEVITICUS 26:6–7

This hedge of protection, however, came with a condition—namely, obedience to God’s will.

If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them . . .

—LEVITICUS 26:3

When Israel began to turn against the Lord and His commands, His Word itself provided numerous warnings of what would befall the nation, from disease and famine to invasion by enemies and ultimately exile from the land. (See Leviticus 26:14–39; Deuteronomy 28:15–68.)

When these words of warning, delivered hundreds of years earlier through Moses, were ignored, God sent messengers to call the people and their leaders back to Him. In response to the sins of the northern kingdom, He sent prophets like Elijah, Elisha, Hosea, and Amos. Responding to the trespasses of Judah, He sent prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah with the same message of warning and repentance.

It was only when the words of both Moses and the prophets fell on deaf ears—when there was no other recourse—that God began to move against the nation’s hedge of protection:

I will take away its hedge, and it shall be burned; and break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.

—ISAIAH 5:5

Yet God in His mercy did not completely destroy ancient Israel’s hedge at first. Instead He allowed a breach in Israel’s defenses, a temporary invasion by its enemies.

In 732 BC God permitted Tiglath-Pileser III, the king of Assyria, to sack the northern kingdom of Israel. This was a warning, a wake-up call, a foreshadowing on a small and limited scale of the destruction that would befall the nation years later if it did not turn back. The same pattern can be seen in the fall and destruction of the southern kingdom of Judah. In 605 BC God let the Babylonians, commanded by Nebuchadnezzar, invade the borders of Judah. In neither case did He allow either kingdom to fall. But in both instances it was a final warning and wake-up call to return to God.

The breaching of America

To a remarkable extent America has enjoyed a similar hedge of protection as ancient Israel did. And just as God sent prophets to Israel to turn it from sin, anointed preachers have risen in America to help bring revival throughout our nation’s history. But from the mid-twentieth century onward, America’s spiritual and moral decline progressed at a pace unprecedented in her history.

By the late twentieth century, with prayer removed from the nation’s public schools, expressions of faith increasingly banned from the public square, and revivals less frequent or powerful, America had sunk even further into moral and spiritual decline. Christians who tried to call the nation back to God were mocked and ridiculed.

On September 11, 2001, America’s hedge of protection was breached. Though many were afraid to say so, across the land many saw it as a wake-up call. There was even an instinctive response throughout the nation to flock to houses of worship. It was the shadow of a revival that almost came but never did.

Without repentance, without a change of course, there can be no revival or hope. And in the months and years after 9/11, America largely returned to business as usual.

The Second Harbinger:

The Terrorist

The ancient terrorist

In dealing with the sins of the northern kingdom of Israel, the instrument that God allowed to breach its hedge of protection was the nation of Assyria. By the time the breach occurred, in 732 BC, the Assyrians had conquered much of the Middle East. They deployed a huge standing army and new means of warfare such as the movable tower, the battering ram, and wall breakers. They struck fear into the hearts of peoples across the region through the calculated use of terror, the earliest example of organized psychological warfare.

After conquering a city, the Assyrians would burn it to the ground and commit public atrocities of every kind to discourage rebellion against their rule. One of their kings, Ashurnasirpal II, even boasted: “I built a pillar . . . against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes . . . and I cut off the limbs of the . . . royal officers who had rebelled.” 1

The terrorists of 9/11

Not only spiritually but also literally, the terrorists who breached America’s defenses on September 11, 2001, are related to the ancient Assyrians who breached ancient Israel’s divine hedge. Both were Middle Eastern, Semitic people. Arabic, the language these twenty-first-century terrorists spoke and in which they carried out their attack is the sister language of the Assyrians, Akkadian, in which the attack of ancient Israel in Isaiah 9:10 was carried out.

And just as the Assyrian invasion of 732 BC would draw ancient Israel into military conflict, so too did al Qaeda’s attack on 9/11 draw America into war, eventually in Iraq, the very land of ancient Assyria, including the city of Mosul, within which were the ruins of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria.

The Key:

The Vow of Isaiah 9:10

So how did ancient Israel respond to the breach in her hedge of protection by Assyria’s incursion? The answer is recorded in Isaiah 9:10:

The bricks have fallen, but we will rebuild with hewn stone; the sycamores have been cut down, but we will plant cedars in their place. 2

—A`UTHOR’S TRANSLATION

Simply stated, ancient Israel vowed to rebuild rather than recognizing the destruction inflicted by Assyria as God’s final warning to repent.

In Isaiah 9:9 God condemned this attitude as a sign of “pride and arrogance of heart.” While there was nothing wrong with a desire to rebuild after an attack, there was plenty wrong with Israel’s refusal to search its ways, its “self-confident unwillingness to see the judgments of God,” 3its determination to silence God’s alarm, and its ignoring of His call to turn from its ways and trust Him again. The nation was vowing to continue on its course without God and against God—and to do so more strongly than ever before.