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 Edom 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.

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