The Lord Takes Away Jerusalem's Support

Log in to take the quiz and save your progress.

1. Observe

   What kinds of people does the LORD remove from Jerusalem in verses 1-3?

   • Only soldiers and warriors
   • The mighty man, the man of war, the judge, the prophet, the diviner, the elder, the captain of fifty, the honorable man, the counselor, the skilled craftsman, and the clever enchanter — the entire stratum of competent leadership across military, judicial, religious, civic, and skilled-labor categories is withdrawn
   • Only priests
   • Only the wealthy

2. Observe

   What specific accusation does God level at Judah's elders and princes in verses 14-15?

   • They neglected temple worship
   • They formed foreign alliances
   • They have eaten up the vineyard, the plunder of the poor is in their houses, and they crush God's people and grind the face of the poor — economic exploitation of the vulnerable that has accumulated their wealth from the suffering of others
   • They worshipped foreign gods

3. Interpret

   What does it mean that God removes competent leadership as judgment (vv. 1-7)?

   • God arbitrarily punishes good leaders
   • Leaders just retired
   • The withdrawal of competent leadership is itself the judgment — not merely a context for further punishment but the punishment itself; when a society has trampled the poor and used leadership for self-enrichment, God's response is to remove the very thing they have abused; the resulting chaos where no one wants to rule (vv. 6-7) reveals what leadership becomes when stripped of its purpose; the absence of wise governance is a more terrifying judgment than any external invader
   • The leaders died of natural causes

4. Interpret

   What is the prophet's point in the catalog of ornaments (vv. 18-23) followed by the reversal (v. 24)?

   • All adornment is sinful
   • Women are uniquely sinful
   • The deliberate length of the inventory — more than twenty specific items of jewelry, garments, and accessories — exposes an obsession with display that exists alongside the crushing of the poor in the same chapter; the reversal to rottenness, sackcloth, baldness, and branding is not arbitrary cruelty but poetic justice: the very objects of pride become the instruments of shame; the prophet is diagnosing a society where the privileged are absorbed in appearance while the vulnerable are ground into the dust, and showing that God's judgment matches the sin in form
   • Perfumes are forbidden

5. Apply

   How should one respond to a society where the privileged accumulate luxury while the poor are crushed?

   • Ignore both groups
   • Pursue luxury harder
   • Honest self-examination — recognizing where one's own consumption participates in systems that harm the vulnerable, refusing the obsession with appearance and status display that the privileged of Jerusalem embodied, and using whatever influence one has to advocate for those being crushed; the chapter calls leaders personally responsible for systemic injustice (v. 14), which means anyone with any form of leadership — at work, at home, in community — must ask whether the people under their reach are flourishing or being ground down
   • Blame everyone else

6. Apply

   What does "tell the righteous that it will be well with them" (v. 10) call one to in seasons that don't feel well?

   • Pretend everything is fine
   • Deny present suffering
   • Settled trust in God's moral accounting even when present circumstances contradict it — the assurance that the fruit of one's deeds will come, that God sees and remembers, and that the eventual outcome of righteous living is well-being even when the present feels otherwise; this is not denial of complexity but the deeper confidence that the simplicity of God's promise holds beneath the complexity of life, allowing one to keep doing good without needing immediate vindication
   • Abandon doing right

Your journal

Write your own answers — they save automatically, and only you can see them.

Log in to write and save journal answers.