Molding in Israel of Old

 
 Jehovah molds not only individuals but entire nations. For example, when ancient Israel submitted to Jehovah’s molding, it prospered. But finally it hardened itself into a course of disobedience. As a result, Israel’s Former brought “woe” upon it. (Isaiah 45:9) 

In the eighth century B.C.E., Isaiah spoke to Jehovah of the gross sinfulness of Israel, saying: “O Jehovah, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are our Potter; and all of us are the work of your hand. . . . Every one of our desirable things has become a devastation.” (Isaiah 64:8-11) Israel had been molded into a vessel fit only for destruction.
 
 A century later, as the day of reckoning drew near, Jehovah told Jeremiah to take an earthenware flask and accompany some of the older men of Jerusalem to the Valley of Hinnom, instructing him: “You must break the flask before the eyes of the men who are going with you. And you must say to them, ‘This is what Jehovah of armies has said: “In the same way I shall break this people and this city as someone breaks the vessel of the potter so that it is no more able to be repaired.”’”—Jeremiah 19:10, 11.
 
 In 607 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar devastated Jerusalem with its temple and carried off the surviving Jews into captivity in Babylon. But after 70 years in exile, repentant Jews were able to return to rebuild Jerusalem and its temple. (Jeremiah 25:11) However, by the first century C.E., the nation had again abandoned the Great Potter, and finally it stooped to the ultimate crime of murdering God’s own Son. 

In 70 C.E., God used the Roman World Power as his executioner in wiping out the Jewish system of things, pulverizing Jerusalem and its temple. Never again would the nation of Israel be molded by Jehovah’s hand as something with “holiness and beauty.”


Let renegade Christendom, foreshadowed by ancient Israel, be warned of similar judgment from Jehovah.—1 Peter 4:17, 18.