Famine, Plague, Sword, Wild Beasts
If they ask you, ‘Where will we go?’ tell them: This is what the Lord says:
Those destined for pestilence, to pestilence;
those destined for the sword, to the sword.
Those destined for famine, to famine;
those destined for captivity, to captivity.
(Jeremiah 15:2)
In the prophets’ warnings to Israel there are four terrors that God says repeatedly he will send on his people because they have turned away from him: Famine, Plague, Sword, and Wild Beasts.[1]
Now, there are a number of Christians, particularly of the progressive persuasion, who believe that the Old Testament isn’t relevant today; that anything to the left of Matthew either isn’t to be trusted or is simply there for historical purposes.
But Famine, Plague, Sword, and Wild Beasts are not exclusive to the OT. And therefore, a warning that they are coming on the Church cannot be simply dismissed as OT legalism or prophetic nonsense that Christians no longer have to be concerned about. These same four terrors turn up again in the book of Revelation as something God unleashes on the earth.
Behold, a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
(Revelation 6:8)
These four terrors aren’t just part of some eschatological assize far off at the distant end of time. They’re coming upon us now. Admittedly, they may also come in another form at another time (prophecy often has multiple fulfilments before its ultimate completion) but they are certainly coming now. We are living in the real-time playing out of biblical prophecy.
In the period just prior to Israel’s total captivity, God spoke through Jeremiah and Ezekiel and warned them that these four things were what he was going to bring on them. Why would he do that? Why punish people who claimed to love him?
If you’re like me and you have some difficulty mentally processing this kind of judgement you should read Ezekiel 14 where God talks about these four weapons of Death. At the end of the chapter God tells Ezekiel that once he meets the remnant who come through this judgement, he will understand why it was needed. God says to him: “You will know I have done nothing … without cause.”
In both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, God gets very specific about what the people have done, but he summarizes like this:
Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense
(Jer 3:10).You have not followed my decrees or kept my laws but have conformed to the standards of the nations around you.
(Ezk 11:12).
The people had made an outward show of returning to God but their hearts were more interested in other things; so interested, in fact, that they became no different than the godless people around them. What was their heinous sin? It was the sin of behaving like ordinary people.[2]
Let that sink in for a minute. It wasn’t just what they were doing that was wrong, but that what they were doing, or failing to do, had removed their distinctiveness as the people of God. They were no longer different, separate, godly. They were just like everyone else.
This was, in effect, a breaking of their covenant with YHWH. And so, because of that breaking of covenant God sends four terrors that only a remnant survive.
Let me be clear about these things: Behind each of the four weapons of Death lies a spirit. So the things I am about to discuss – famine, plague, sword, wild beasts – are most certainly Satanic in origin. But behind that spirit stands God, not as passive observer, but as the one who holds ultimate control. As I have intimated many times before, God hands us over to what we choose. If we choose a famine of deafness to his word, that is what he will give us. If we prefer delusion over reality, deception over truth, God will hand us over entirely to it. Satan is simply the instrument God uses to give us what we have already chosen. God will even send us false prophets to confirm what we really want to hear (Ezk 14:1-11).
If, on the other hand, we truly desire his will, and are willing to yield ourselves to it, I believe all of this can be averted.
But I’m not sure enough of us actually want that.
Famine
When I was 17 the Lord told me he was sending a famine on the earth. Not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the word of the Lord. (Am 8:11-12). Since that day, I can honestly say I have seen that message thoroughly fulfilled.
At first I thought he meant that the word of the Lord would disappear. And it largely has. It’s not that there aren’t good preachers and good sermons. But good sermons aren’t the same as the word of the Lord.
In my youth there were an enormous number of gifted Bible teachers who were able to take scripture and break it open, making it clear and giving the meaning so that … people understood what was being read. (Neh 8:8). Only a handful of teachers like this remain.
But what has almost entirely vanished from the pulpits of the Church are those with the word of the Lord; those who valued God enough to put aside things of less importance; who took the time to wait on God until he spoke. They aren’t the kind who simply come up with a Sunday sermon or teach the general meaning of a passage. They hear what God is saying to us today, in our times, for our situation. Those people, although they exist, do not inhabit the pulpits of the Church.
What inhabits the pulpits of our churches are men and women who want us to feel better about ourselves, who preach a blather of forgettable clichés, and whose messages amount to little more than spiritualized life coaching. Their sermons are like sausages – the cheapest meat, ground into mulch, squeezed into a 25-minute casing, and tied off neatly at the end.
Sausage Sermons. Come back next week for more.
So, yes, there are very few who have the word of the Lord for their church today. But that’s not actually what God says to Amos. What he actually says is that there will be a famine of hearing. That is, even if someone happens to have the word of the Lord, Christians won’t be able to hear it. And this is what we have been living through for the past 30 years. The Church is in a famine. People are wandering
from sea to sea,
And from north to east;
They shall run to and fro,
seeking the word of the LORD,
But shall not find it.
(Amos 8:12)
Week after week they skip from church to church, podcast to YouTube video, looking for something to satisfy, but in a time of famine, it’s slim pickings. And as the food supply runs out people become increasingly desperate for nourishment.
Does anyone have it?
If one were to have such nourishment, don’t you think people would stop church hopping? Wouldn’t they turn up more than once a month? You know, when people are getting fed they don’t go grazing somewhere else; they keep coming back to where the food is. But our churches are a revolving door. And those that aren’t are often simply a morgue.
God addresses the people’s lack of hearing in Jeremiah 6, putting the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the leaders:
They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.
My intention is not to stir up animosity toward church leaders. There are good men and women laboring diligently, giving their best, and sacrificing themselves for the kingdom of God. But the number of leaders – pastors, prophets, elders, influencers, bloggers, and others – who have put a Band Aid on the sickness of the church, who have said “Peace, peace, things are not as bad as they seem,” when they most clearly are, who have delayed to act because of fear, who have failed or refused to deal with the root causes of the plague now spreading through the Church, who have not opened deaf ears or blind eyes because of their own wilful deafness and blindness, who have instead tickled those ears with innocuous sermons and bland words of grace – the number of those leaders is unbelievably large. And a day of reckoning is coming for them.
If, in this day of opportunity, when many are fearful of what is taking place, when more are tuning in to church broadcasts in the hope of hearing words of life – if all we can give them is an ear-tickling and innocuous sermons delivered in the same powerless manner in which we live our lives, then we are of all people most lamentable, and covered with shame.
This, above all times, is the time to return to the word of God, to proclaim it boldly, unashamedly, with the authority of one who knows it because they have lived it. It is the time to stop believing the half-truths of people who are simply too cowardly to deal with the tough bits of scripture, who have caved to social pressure instead of taking God at his word. Ultimately, faith is a choice: to believe God or not. It really is that simple; not to believe some of God, or the nice bits of God, or the red letters, or the Jesus stuff. GOD. Entirely. Absolutely. Devotedly.
The crowds followed Jesus until he said something they couldn’t handle. Then they walked away. It was at that moment that Jesus tested his disciples: Is this too hard for you to handle, too?
What say you, reader? Are there some parts of God’s word that are too hard for you to handle? Do you just walk away from those? Disown them? Pretend they aren’t there? Explain them away?
Will you circumcise your ears? Or will you be like the crowds, and believe what feels nice to believe? Are you happy with the feel-good preaching – messages of affirmation that prop up your poor sense of self-worth? Sausage Sermons?
As in the days of Amos, there is now a famine in the church of hearing the word of the Lord. In Chapter 4 of Amos, God lists all the ways he has tried to turn his people’s hearts back to him. Guess what they are: Famine, Plague, and Sword. But after each one he says, “Yet you have not returned to me.”
I wonder how many ways God has tried to turn you and I back to him. Our problem, like Israel’s, is that we don’t realize we’ve wandered away. We can’t tell that we are blind. We don’t know we are deaf. And so God says, “There will be wailing as I pass through your midst” (Am 5:17). If the famine doesn’t turn us, the plague might. If the plague doesn’t work, perhaps the sword.
But if none of them do – God help us.
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