Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! they say of me, Doth he not speak parables?
The verse records the prophet's distressed complaint that his hearers dismissed his message as parables. They treated his words as obscure figures and as unclear or unreal tales instead of taking their warning to heart and heeding its reproof. The question does not mean the message is necessarily unclear, but expresses resistance and failure to recognize how God works when a message from God challenges established beliefs. The verse applies to people, including leaders, who dismiss a prophetess's warnings and reproof as idle tales instead of recognizing and heeding them.
In Noah's time scoffers contemptuously dismissed the warning in this same way. God's warning that He would destroy the world by a flood in one hundred and twenty years seemed fanatical, impossible, and incompatible with the familiar order of nature, though God had given them time to repent. The verse describes how people meet God's warnings of coming judgment in the last days before Christ's second appearing, calling them impossible and dismissing them as mere stories. Such unbelief and mocking laughter to scorn does not prevent their fulfillment.
Sudden destruction comes as a snare upon all unready dwellers on earth, eating and drinking and planting and building, unprepared for the Lord's appearing. At that time the world is absorbed in pleasure-loving, amusements, gains, traffic, moneymaking, dishonest practices, luxury, extravagance, wine-drinking and reveling, and robbing the poor, steeped in iniquity as Sodom. Meanwhile the church follows the world and ministers cry peace and safety in the blind slumber of security.
The verse records the prophet's distressed complaint that his hearers dismissed his message as parables. They treated his words as obscure figures and as unclear or unreal tales instead of taking their warning to heart and heeding its reproof. The question does not mean the message is necessarily unclear, but expresses resistance and failure to recognize how God works when a message from God challenges established beliefs. The verse applies to people, including leaders, who dismiss a prophetess's warnings and reproof as idle tales instead of recognizing and heeding them.
In Noah's time scoffers contemptuously dismissed the warning in this same way. God's warning that He would destroy the world by a flood in one hundred and twenty years seemed fanatical, impossible, and incompatible with the familiar order of nature, though God had given them time to repent. The verse describes how people meet God's warnings of coming judgment in the last days before Christ's second appearing, calling them impossible and dismissing them as mere stories. Such unbelief and mocking laughter to scorn does not prevent their fulfillment.
Sudden destruction comes as a snare upon all unready dwellers on earth, eating and drinking and planting and building, unprepared for the Lord's appearing. At that time the world is absorbed in pleasure-loving, amusements, gains, traffic, moneymaking, dishonest practices, luxury, extravagance, wine-drinking and reveling, and robbing the poor, steeped in iniquity as Sodom. Meanwhile the church follows the world and ministers cry peace and safety in the blind slumber of security.