Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Before we dig into our chapters today, let's zoom out a little on this situation to make

sure we're addressing some of the possible nuances of these prophecies.

Yesterday we left off with Edem being turned into a sticky, smelly wasteland covered in

weeds and birds. It represented a kind of undoing of creation, much like the flood when

God destroyed Earth 1.0 and then opened Earth 2.0 for business. When God first made Earth

1.0, the words he used to describe it in Genesis 1, 2 were without form and void, shapeless

and empty, basically. The Hebrew words used here are Tohu and Bohu. And in yesterday's description

of that wasteland in 3411, both of those words are used again. This seems to be a very intentional move.

Genesis 1 is the only other place where that combo exists in Scripture. And in fact, the only

other time the word Bohu, void, is used in all of Scripture, is in Jeremiah 423, where he's describing

this same situation. So yesterday we read about the formless void Earth 2.0 after God's wrath was

poured out over all the nations, and today we read about how the ransom captives are brought back to

the land. So to understand this section well, we have to ask, does this refer to the time around

700 BC when this was written, or is this a future prophecy of the final days? And if you had a

chance to watch the short video we linked to about the Day of the Lord, you may be wondering,

is this a Day of the Lord, or is this the Day of the Lord? If you missed that video, we'll

link to it again in today's show notes. A popular opinion among scholars is that it's both, judgment

on the Earth then, and judgment on the Earth in the future, a Day of the Lord, and the Day of the Lord.

We've talked about how prophecies can often speak to multiple things in a layered sort of way,

and it's possible that's what's happening here. A low level reference to the immediate

scenario in the 7th century BC, and a high level reference to the future scenario still yet to come. So

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