| Jeremiah 24 |
I could easily do a whole series on passages from Jeremiah -- these are some of the most frightening passages in the entire Bible! Granted, some of our favorite passages come out of Jeremiah as well -- God always follows a judgment with a promise of hope -- but Jeremiah has the unhappy task of rendering some of God's harshest messages to his people. This week, I want to look at the passage that started it all for me: Jeremiah 24. I still remember the day I first studied this passage and realized what it was saying -- somehow it seemed to go against everything I thought I understood about God's work in the lives of the Israelites! I had to start rethinking all my notions about what God was after in our lives! (Which is a good thing, by the way!) Let's look at this passage: The king of Judah has been taken captive by the king of Babylon, along with all of his officials and craftsmen. This must have been a major crisis for the Hebrews: the northern kingdom of Israel had already been conquered by Assyria, and now what was left of the glorious land of promise was being overrun by the Babylonians. Why had God rejected his people? In this respect, many of the Hebrews who had escaped the captivity must have seen this as a sign on God's favor on them. So when Jeremiah receives a vision of two baskets of figs, one basket of "very good figs, like first-ripe figs" and another of "very bad figs, which could not be eaten due to rottenness", we would expect that the good figs are those whom God allowed to remain in Judea. Certainly we would do this today if our country were conquered by foreign aggressors, yes? But what God shows Jeremiah is exactly the opposite! " 'Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the captives of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of Chaldeans. ...But like the bad figs which cannot be eaten due to rottenness -- indeed, thus says the Lord -- so I will abandon Zedekiah [the replacement] king of Judah and his officials, and the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and the ones who dwell in the land of Egypt. And I will make them and an evil for all the kingdoms of the earth, as a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse in all places where I shall scatter them. And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence upon them until they are destroyed from the land which I gave to them and their forefathers.' " Do you hear what God is saying? The people who escape capture will be destroyed from the land! They will be the laughingstock of all who encounter them! What seems intuitive to us, that God rewards the faithful by preserving them in the promised land, is exactly the opposite of what God was doing! The promised land was no longer the place where God intended to meet his people! Imagine how you would react if Billy Graham (or the spiritual leader of your choice) were to announce that the United States must surrender itself to Russia (or Iraq or China or the enemy country of your choice), and that those of us who remained would incur God's wrath? This is exactly what God here tells the Hebrews who have been left in Judah: if you are to find my favor, you must give up everything you hold dear, because it has gotten in-between you and Me and I won't accept that situation any more. If you look over to chapter 29, you'll see a similar idea expressed to those who are in exile: live in Babylon, pray for your new cities and neighbors, and make your peace with your captors. Can you imagine us being told that today? ******* I said earlier that with every message of judgment, God provides a message of hope. If God is here telling the people who think they've escaped God's wrath that they are merely in the eye of the storm, then what is the message of hope for those who have lost their homeland and everything they knew in life? Let's look back at chapter 24, verses 6-7, which I skipped over before. Here is the message of hope, the place where God affirms his faithfulness to his people, even in the midst of his apparent rejection of them: " 'For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them again to this land; and I will build them up and not overthrow them, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. And I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart.' " Read this carefully, for it encapsulates so many of the themes of the Bible: it is God who does the work, who establishes us, who builds us up, who does with us according to the goodness of his will. In fact, it is God who gives us more love for him, more thirst for him, more faith in him. We can hold on to all that God gives us, but as someone once pointed out (I'm sorry, I can't recall the source right now), sometimes God has to loosen our grip on his knees so that he can lift us up to show us his face! Had the Hebrews abandoned God? Yes. Had God abandoned them? Only apparently. God still had great things in store for them, and the land was still theirs to have. But just as God had to purify the nation of Israel of their unbelief by making them wander 40 years in the desert after the Exodus, so here must God purify Jerusalem of those who have placed their land and autonomy ahead of the God who gave them both. God, who desires to reconcile the entire world to himself, had to show that he was not the god the Israelites were worshipping, in order that the nations might not confuse him with their own gods. But God also promises to bring his people's hearts back to him, and his people back to their land. It will take 70 years, and most of the people will not live long enough to return home, but it will happen. God will remain faithful, and the world will see it. As believers, we must not be too hasty to interpret our situations as signs of God's favor. As Thomas Aquinas pointed out, sometimes God punishes the wicked by granting their desires, and sometimes he rewards the faithful by refusing their requests. What do we hold onto in place of God: our country, our job, our family, our house? All of these things can become idols if we refuse to let go of them at God's command. This is a truly scary passage because it points out how easily we connect God's favor with God's gifts. It shows how much we rely on our intuitive interpretations of the circumstances of our lives. It forces us to let go of our preconceived notions of God in order to accept a God who acts freely and according to the wisdom and love of his own heart. And it forces us to examine our own lives to see what we hold more dear than we hold God himself. If it leads us to rejoice with fear and trembling, then it has achieved its purpose. Truly it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God! S.D.G.! in Christ, steve |