Therefore by this the guilt of Jacob will be atoned for,
and this will be the full fruit of the removal of his sin:
when he makes all the stones of the altars
like chalkstones crushed to pieces,
no Asherim or incense altars will remain standing.
Isaiah 27:9
Observation: In this passage, Isaiah is prophesying about the restoration of Israel from exile, and how the exile will remove their sin and the Lord will not strike them and destroy them the way he will eventually destroy those who have taken them into exile. In this, he confirms that one of the benefits of this exile will be the removal of the false alters of Israel, how the alters to false gods will be destroyed and removed, as will the Ashera poles in the high places.
This is an interesting point, that by removing Israel from their land, they will not only understand and receive correction for their actions, but those mechanisms by which they sinned will also be removed. They won't have to see the error of their ways, then face the temptations to continue sinning. God is wiping it away, so they will return to a clean slate.
Application: I have gone down several small rabbit holes recently about some of the false conversations about God and Jesus prevalent these days. It seems one of the common ways satan is using the internet to attack humans is by having "scholars" openly promote the false lies of antiquity - lies we have well established are and were lies - and write scholarly opinions wondering why modern believers have attempted to hide and bury these things.
Well ... we got rid of them because they were and are lies ... but that isn't what these scholars would have the world now believe. I have seen recent writing about things like the gospels of Thomas and Mary and Judas (again!). I have seen a study of the names of all the 'gods of Caanan' that included Yahweh just side-by-side with a dozen others. I have seen an essay that claims the books of 1//2 Samuel and 1/2 Kings were originally published as just a historical record about the city of Jerusalem, and that was all the Israelites were trying to communicate ... that they worshipped and lamented their capital city. Just this morning, when I searched the word "asherim" to confirm it was the same as an Ashera pole (it is the plural form), I saw several articles wondering why the male-dominated middle ages decided to reject Yahweh's wife from its pantheon of worship. Many of these writings are on Wikipedia, a source that the current generation thinks is valid because it's crowd-sourced ... and therefore is must be true or someone would have corrected it.
It is this false information that we all must address in the name of Jesus. However, we must not address it by fighting over the facts ... we must address it by communicating THE fact, the gospel that God loves us so much that he sent Jesus to die for our sins, so we may have everlasting life through simple faith. All the lies will be addressed within the hearts of individual believers once they first believe. Until someone learns to listen to the still small voice of God, all the lies are loud fights with millions of voices shouting into the ether ... where unbelieving hearts actually listen to them.
The internet and social media is not our battleground. Our battleground is individual hearts.
Prayer: Lord, the world is dark, and seemingly getting darker. Please help us all, all your believers, remember that your light shines from within us, and the dark cannot overcome the light. Therefore, the lies, no matter how loud and prevalent, cannot overcome the truth of Jesus. Amen.
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