3820 — The End and the Beginning
By Editor
It is impossible to take a few passages of Scripture, especially some of the obscure prophecies of the Old Testament, and make them clear in and of themselves. In all the great promises of God, it is well for us to remember what the apostle says in Eph. 3:3-6,—that in time past they did not understand these things as it was revealed later to the apostles and prophets by God's Spirit; and it is only in the light of the clearer later revelations that we may read the prophecies of God to His people in the past. Some of those prophecies were fulfilled to Israel in the restoration of Jerusalem and the return from Babylon. Some of them were dependent upon conditions. See the conditions stated in Jer. 18:7-10, and elsewhere. If Israel complied with the conditions, the promises were theirs. If they failed to comply, certainly they could not ask God to fulfil His part. Some of them, if fulfilled at all, must be fulfilled in harmony with the conditions of the new covenant, in times when all types had passed away. The book of Zechariah contains prophecies of these types. The passage under question points to that time when God's children shall have gained complete victory over all their foes, and the end of sin has come, and the beginning of the reign of righteousness is inaugurated. Other passages tell us of how all the nations shall come up against Jerusalem to fight. Those that are left of all the nations will be God's remnant which He has gathered out, and they will go from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts. All of those families that will not come up—carrying us back just a little to the time when the invitation was abroad—upon them will not fall the latter rain of God's Spirit. They shall perish. It matters not though they may belong to some great nation, like Egypt, and have received great light, they shall be smitten with the plagues. On the other hand, in God's service in that future time there shall be holiness; even everything that takes part in that service shall be holy. Then in the service of God which shall follow throughout all eternity there shall come in no more corruption. The Canaanites had crept in among the children of Israel. See Ezra and Nehemiah to show how corruption had come into the very service of the temple. But that would be so no more in the glorious reign which lies before. The passage itself shows that the long reign of sin will end, and only those will have part in the reign of righteousness who have met God's conditions.