The Exile of Ancient Divided Israel

from the book YHWH Is Calling

“The Lord said also to me in the days of

Josiah the king: ‘Have you seen what backsliding

Israel has done? She has gone up on every high

mountain and under every green tree,

and there played the harlot. And I said,

after she had done all these things,

‘Return to Me.’ But she did not return.

And her treacherous sister Judah saw it.

Then I saw that for all the causes for

which backsliding Israel had committed adultery,

I had put her away and given her a certificate

of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah

did not fear, but went and played

the harlot also. So it came to pass,

through her casual harlotry,

that she defiled the land and committed

adultery with stones and trees.

And yet for all this her treacherous sister

Judah has not turned to Me with her

whole heart, but in pretense,’ says the Lord.”

Jeremiah 3:6-10 (NKJV)

I believe I wrote to you earlier about how the northern and southern kingdoms of ancient divided Israel fell into apostasy, abandoning obedience to the Word of God. As a result, God exiled the unfaithful sisters of Zion, each to their own fate.

The people of the southern kingdom of Judah (today's Jewish people and those associated with them, such as the tribe of Benjamin at that time) were once able to return to Israel and rebuild the Second Temple, which was also destroyed after the death of Jesus, just as He had foretold during His life.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, the people of Judah were once again exiled from their land. This time, they were scattered across the world. A significant sign of the progress of God's plan of salvation, as written in the Holy Word, is that in the last century we have witnessed the birth of the State of Israel and have seen how, according to the Holy Word, the Jewish people are returning from all over the world to the land promised to them by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (which, within Israel's current borders, does not yet encompass all the territories included in the Almighty's promise).

Less well known is the significance of the exile of the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of ancient Israel, which took place around 700 BC, for our present age. The descendants of ancient Ephraim were the largest tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel, and thus, in the Word, the northern kingdom is often referred to as Ephraim (in some places it is called Israel, but in certain contexts, Israel is used to describe the entire people descended from Jacob, as well as the spiritually united Israel, so the context must always be considered). Life in the northern kingdom became increasingly unjust, immoral, and lacking in the fear of God before the judgment of exile, and so God eventually declared through His prophets that He would carry out their expulsion from the land.

For the sake of yourself and your loved ones, remember all that I have already shared in my previous letters about my more challenging task of illustrating to the people of Finland the similarities between Finland’s current state and the ancient state of Ephraim, which led to punishment. I have received a prompt from the Lord to publish this part of the message as a separate whole, making it publicly available as a warning intended for all nations. It is important to remember that the loss of the land did not come as a surprise to Ephraim either; through His prophets, God had warned about the consequences of apostasy centuries earlier, even before they entered the Promised Land. Ephraim was exiled from the Promised Land once the nation's collective sin had reached its full measure. As described in the passage from the book of Jeremiah quoted earlier, the southern sister Judah later followed the northern sister into apostasy, much to the Lord’s sorrow, yet turning into a blessing for the pagan nations that received them.

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Scriptures taken from the New King James Version:

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