Zechariah 14:16The MessageAll the survivors from the godless nations that fought against Jerusalem will travel to Jerusalem every year to worship the King, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, and celebrate the Feast of Booths. If any of these survivors fail to make the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship the King, God-of-the-Angel-Armies, there will be no rain. If the Egyptians don’t make the pilgrimage and worship, there will be no rain for them. Every nation that does not go up to celebrate the Feast of Booths will be hit with the plague. Egypt and any other nation that does not make pilgrimage to celebrate the Feast of Booths gets punished. See the chapter |
“But not so fast! I’m God, your God! Your God from the days in Egypt! I’m going to put you back to living in tents, as in the old days when you worshiped in the wilderness. I speak through the prophets to give clear pictures of the way things are. Using prophets, I tell revealing stories. I show Gilead rampant with religious scandal and Gilgal teeming with empty-headed religion. I expose their worship centers as stinking piles of garbage in their gardens.”
Behind and underneath all this there is a holy, God-planted, God-tended root. If the primary root of the tree is holy, there’s bound to be some holy fruit. Some of the tree’s branches were pruned and you wild olive shoots were grafted in. Yet the fact that you are now fed by that rich and holy root gives you no cause to gloat over the pruned branches. Remember, you aren’t feeding the root; the root is feeding you.