Jeremiah 44:15-30. Yesterday saw a warning to the Jewish people who had moved to Egypt. Some had evidently moved there earlier and some had fled after Gedaliah had been murdered. Jeremiah was in this second group though he was certainly not there willingly. He had counseled the people to stay in Judah and Jerusalem. Because they had fled and not done what God had told them to do and because they had started honoring the false gods of Egypt, Jeremiah told them that they would be destroyed; only a few would ever return to Israel.   We also saw that part of the reason for their destruction was that they were setting a bad example for the people around them; they were not honoring the true God, Yahweh. It was important for them to understand that there are consequences for defecting from God. The consequences that they experienced on earth were a warning and a taste of what they could expect in eternity if they rejected God. That warning was for them and all who saw them; Jeremiah says all the nations of the Earth would notice.

The fact that the Jewish people now living in Egypt were honoring the Egyptian gods was a big problem. As I mentioned yesterday people living in the Ancient Near East thought that gods were local, regional, or territorial; that they only had power in their area. But the God of the Jewish people, Yahweh, is the one true God; the creator of all that exists. God wants a relationship with us; each of us. Our relationship with him is broken because of or disrespectful actions toward him. The Israelite people were to help us understand our broken relationship with God and how to get it fixed (through the Messiah, chosen one, who we now know is Jesus). When Moses led the people out of bondage from Egypt (1440 BC, about 950 years before our story here in Jeremiah) God gave him a rule book and also laid out the consequences for how they “played”. If the people would honor God by taking Him and his rules seriously then they would be “blessed” (good would be in their lives), if they rebelled and were disobedient they would be “cursed” (That is what Jeremiah is predicting here and what has already happened in Israel and Judah).

The book of Deuteronomy is sort of a contract between the original Israelites who took over the land and God who was giving it to them. It can also be looked at as a sort of constitution for their new nation. It begins by remembering the history of God in their then recent past; how he had led them and provided for them in the “wilderness” (chapters 1-4). Then the “rules” for their new nation are laid out (chapters 5-26). Next comes the actual ceremony where the people decide, the vote. Part of that ceremony included the blessings and the curses related to submitting to the deal God was offering. There were also provision on what to do when laws were broken; how to keep the contract with God “alive”. In Deuteronomy 30:19 Moses said that that day he had set before the people both “blessings and curses” and in Deuteronomy 26:16-19 we see that they had accepted the “deal”. Clearly from their history they didn’t take the whole thing too seriously and had repeatedly seem the “curses” upon themselves. Now in Egypt the refugees from Judah faced the same sort of choice to obey or not, and it looked like they were going to follow the pattern of bad choices that the Israelites had followed over their over 900 years of history. For those in Egypt the consequences would be permanent. They would not be going back to the land promised to their ancestors and neither would their children, only a very few from there would ever return.

Evidently quite a few Jewish people living in Egypt had gathered together wherever Jeremiah was giving this message (v. 15). That might be expected if a group from Judah suddenly showed up, everyone (at least as many as could get there) would probably come to hear news from home, and Jeremiah was taking this opportunity to tell them what was what. We also see that the problem involved the wives, they were burning incense in their homes and making other offerings to the false gods of Egypt and to one called the Queen of Heaven in particular. IN the Bible this “god” is only mentioned here and in Jeremiah 7:18. She is also mentioned on some ancient Egyptian monuments. Experts are not sure about the particular “god” Jeremiah is talking about is but some think it is Ishtar (Babylonian) or Astarte (Canaanite, local). And we also see that the husbands knew about what their wives were doing. In the Israelite culture the men were supposed to be leaders in their homes, here it appears that the wives were taking the lead.

In verses 16-17 the people answered that they were not going to listen to Jeremiah, they were going to keep on honoring the false gods. Just as they had done back home and just as their ancestors had done back home (Jeremiah 7:18). In verses 18-19 the people insist that life was better when they were honoring this false god and things only got bad when they stopped. The funny thing is, when you read the history in the Old Testament, they almost never were faithful to God and were almost constantly honoring false gods. In Hosea 8:7 a prophet was talking to the Israelites about false gods and the trouble they would experience for honoring them. Hosea told them that they were “sowing wind and would reap a whirlwind”. Sowing is the process of scattering seeds in a field. Reaping is the process of harvesting or gathering what has grown in the field from what you have sown. Hosea used the picture of scattering hands full of wind (a ridiculous idea) for their worship of false gods. What they would “reap” would be a “whirlwind”. The word means a violent storm or wind and is based on a word that means to completely destroy. Some Bible teachers use this idea of sowing and harvesting and say there are laws to the harvest described in the Bible. From this verse we see that you reap what you sow (wind and wind), you reap more than you sow (wind and a violent storm), and of course you reap at a different time than when you sow (generally, after the plant has grown). What the people talking to Jeremiah were failing to see was this last part. They may not have seen trouble on the day they were making their sacrifices to the false gods but trouble did come because of that and not for honoring the one true God. We need to be careful that we don’t fall into the same trap and think that sin will never have consequences or even worse that it is good (see Isaiah 5:20).

Just because God is patient doesn’t mean that he will forget. In verses 20-23 Jeremiah make this very point. In a very direct way Jeremiah spoke to all the people, men and women, or at least all who were saying that they were going to keep on honoring the false gods. It is kind of unusual that God addressed the women (remember the men were supposed to be their leaders) as well as the men. I think we need to understand we cannot hide behind each other we all are responsible for our own relationship with God. (see Genesis 3:1-19) In verse 21 we see that God does know all the cheating we do on him. We also see Jeremiah mention that this has been going on for a long time (“you and your forefathers” (ancestors)). In verse 22 Jeremiah tells them that God finally decided enough was enough. So that is why Jerusalem and Judah were destroyed.    When he says that God could not endure it any longer that does not mean that God is weak, like “God couldn’t take it anymore so he went and blasted those guys.” It’s kind of interesting that some people say that God is weak because he doesn’t “blast those guys”. You’ve probably heard some say “If there’s a God how could he let THAT happen?” God is patient that’s why. If he just came in blasting all the evil people all that would be left on earth would be a bunch of smoke (see Isaiah 53:6). But God doesn’t want people to perish so he gives us time to turn back to him, remember that often Jeremiah said, “If you will turn back …” (See also 2 Peter 3:9).

In verses 24-28 Jeremiah makes this whole message very personal. Again he talks to the men and the women. He repeats their “vow” or promise to dishonor him and to honor false gods. This is important because it was thir promise to God to blow him off. God sees and knows all that we do and just how serious we are about it. The answer to them is very scary, “Never again will you call out my name. I am making sure harm will come to them and no good. The word for “harm” means something that is unpleasant, we might say God is going to make sure their lives “suck”. In verse 28 we see two things; first a few will escape, so there is a little hope, and second this punishment would result in the people recognizing that God really is God and what he says will happen will happen.

In verses 29-30 God told them he would give them a “sign” so that they would see that he really is God and is going to do what he says (see 2 Peter 3:1-10). There would be very little waiting for this. Pharaoh Hophra became king of Egypt in 589 BC (just three years earlier) and he was overthrown and executed in 570 BC. Maybe 15-16 years from the time of the prediction. In verse 30 Jeremiah mentions Zedekiah and Nebuchadnezzar and I think there are two reasons. First by bringing up Zedekiah being overthrown and killed by Nebuchadnezzar Jeremiah ties these two predictions together. Just as certainly as that happened this new one would too and also that old history is just like this future even, proof of God’s power and control. The second reason I think it is important is because Jeremiah already told the refugees that they would not escape Nebuchadnezzar, that he would set up his throne on Hophra’s patio in Tahpanhes. But it would not be Nebuchadnezzar who would kill Hophra it would be others who were his enemies. I think by mentioning Nebuchadnezzar God makes it very clear that he remembers Nebuchadnezzar is out there, but by not saying that Hophra would be killed by Nebuchadnezzar God makes it clear it will be by another. At least when Nebuchadnezzar finally came and then left an Hophra was left alive no one could say that Jeremiah’s prediction failed or that he meant that Hophra was going to be killed by Nebuchadnezzar andjust didn’t mention him.

I think it is very sad that these people completely turned their backs on God. God had been there for them for centuries and had been patient. They missed the point of God being patient and thought he was powerless. They had become so convinced of that that they totally ignored all of the signs, all of the judgments in the past. And they ignored all of the times called them to come home to him. We need to be careful that we don’t miss God because of some ideas we have about him either. We need to look at the evidence he has given us and then respond to him.

God thank you for evidence, from your creation, to our conscience, to every word you have sent to us in the Bible. Help us learn and understand your messages to us. Help us see your love and protection. Help us understand your discipline or punishment. Help us turn back to you when we have turned away. Help us never get so stuck in what we think that we miss the opportunity to return to you. Thank you for your patience help me never mistake it for powerlessness, lack of love, or the inability to act. Thank you for Jesus.

Jeremiah 44:1-14.  Yesterday we saw the end of the Southern Kingdom, Judah, sort of.  Although God had promised a certain piece of land to Abraham’s descendants and a forever kingdom to the house of David, it was never really about the land it was about the people.  God is about people, there will be a kingdom, a real place and it will be forever, but without people and a king it really would just be a bunch of really pretty sticks and stones piled up together.  Both the Southern and Northern Kingdoms will return, reunited in a new nation of Israel, Jeremiah has said that repeatedly, but he has spent most of his time trying to show the people what they needed to do to be a part of that.  Their constant disrespect, disobedience, and rebellion against God had put them at risk.  God is not a despot (an evil ruler who forces people to be a part of his kingdom), people who do not want to be under his care can spend eternity on the outside.  The people of Jeremiah’s day had a difficult choice to make, God brought an outsider into their lives to rule over them for a time, would they submit to him?  For over 100 years Judah had faced foreign invasion and had been making alliances with foreign kings instead of trusting God to keep them safe (the book of Isaiah contains many warning to king Hezekiah about 100 years earlier).   So now God was going to let them see what foreign control could be like.  God had given them options through Jeremiah; submit and stay in the land, submit and go into exile in Babylon, submit or die in your towns, but they wanted to do what they wanted to do.  The last little remnant ran away to Egypt and yesterday Jeremiah informed them, “You can run but you cannot hide, Nebuchadnezzar, the servant of Yahweh, is coming to a town near you.”  And this last little group would die in the place they though that they could escape to, only a very few would live to return.  But God would fulfill his promises, there would be a kingdom, still will be, but first the people and that is what God is still working out in history.

In today’s reading we will see that God’s love for people extends past the few he promised a little corner of the world to, they were just the seed of a great and forever kingdom.  Remember God promised Abraham that in his seed all of the kingdoms of the world would be blessed (Genesis 12:3; 22:18; 26:4).  That word contains the idea of something we are thankful for, God is going to give the world something good.  A guy named Paul wrote a letter to churches in an area known as Galatia in the first century AD.  The people in those churches were non-Jews (the Bible uses the word gentile for people who were not born as Jews).  They had put their trust in Jesus as the only way to have their relationship with God fixed.  Some people insisted that they needed to obey the Law of Moses to really have a relationship with God.  In Galatian 3:1-18 Paul brings up the promise to Abraham and explains that ultimately the promise was fulfilled in a single “seed” or descendant of Abraham, specifically Jesus the Chosen One (that is the meaning of Messiah or Christ).  If you have been reading along in Jeremiah you know that sometimes prophecies (and in a way isn’t that what that promise was) have more than one fulfillment.  The nation of Israel was a blessing because through them the world learned about sin and God and the whole mess (see “The Old Testament Connection”), but ultimately Jesus was the real blessing.  The thing we all need to be thankful for, the good news (the meaning of “Gospel”) is that through Jesus’ sacrifice God made peace with each of us possible.  But, like the Jews of Jeremiah’s day, we can reject God and go our own way, but the end of that path is death, forever separation from God and all of his goodness.

In today’s reading in verses 1-6 Jeremiah begins what is to be his last recorded message.  He is talking to all the Jews living in Egypt.  Some Bible experts think that these are Jews who moved there before the fall of Jerusalem and doesn’t include the ones who wound up in Tahpanhes.  But he specifically includes that town and he describes a great disaster that includes Jerusalem.  I’m not sure how this could be any other time than after the fall of Jerusalem.  Besides the point that Jeremiah seems to have spent all of those last days in and near Jerusalem, most of them locked up.  Remember the guard wouldn’t even let him go to his home town (that’s how he wound up in the cistern the first time), and he condemned the idea of looking to Egypt for safety.  It would not have looked very good if he had gone there even if he was going to preach to a group already there.  Lower Egypt is the part by the Mediterranean Sea.  Upper Egypt is more southern part of the country, by Ethiopia.  We usually think of North as up and South as down but that is not how it works there.  In verse 3 we see that the trouble that came on Judah was because they acted in an evil way.  The “evil” actions are described for us; the people where honoring fake gods.  The word translated as “serve” or “worship” in that verse means “to work for someone; make yourself their slave”.

In the Law of Moses there is a rule about setting slaves free after so long.  Sometimes slave wanted to stay with their “master”.  When a slave was to be set free if they wanted to stay permanently they would be brought to a door and their ear would be put by the door post and pierced.   That was the sign that they wanted to be a permanent slave, a servant of that master forever.  It was a sign of respect for that master, they appreciated living in his house and under his protection.  The Israelites were making themselves slaves, sadly of dad lifeless statues and ideas that could never care for them.  That make God mad!  Remember he loves people and wants the best for us forever, and he has the power to back up that desire, he can and will take care of those who decide to be his servant forever.  Because of their bad decisions and bad example to the world (remember they were supposed to be a “blessing” to the nations around them, and they had accepted the deal (see Joshua 24:15-17) God was mad.

You can think that “pouring out his anger” is a bad thing for God to do but in a way it is merciful.  Suppose you are a professional fighter, MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) king of the world, and you have a teenage child who thinks they can take on the whole MMA universe.  You warn them not to go there, you know they are not fighting material, but they keep ignoring you.  You just might take them into the ring for a little training match and give them a taste of what is coming if they keep ignoring you.  I think that the invasions over the years were just a taste of what life on the outside of God’s kingdom will be like.  Someone once said that this life is the closest believers in Jesus will ever get to Hell and closest non-believes will ever get to Heaven.  I raised five children and was a child myself once (some people think I still am).  It would be nice to think that you can talk to everyone and they will see the light and do the right thing but in reality we don’t and sometimes need a little taste of the downside of bad decisions.  That is why punishment exists.  God loves us and that is why he punishes.  And remember he has given us the ability to make choices, not every harsh part of our lives is a direct result of his actions, sometimes he allows us to see and feel what we make of life (actually I think that is most of the time), yet somehow he is able to use it to teach us too.

It seems pretty complicate; wanting us to come to him freely, giving us freedom, knowing we will misuse our freedom and act badly, knowing when to step in and how much to do, I’m glad the loving creator of the universe has to make those decisions and not me.  When I consider how cool the world God made for us is and how awesome life can be (even after we messed it all up) it’s hard not to be impressed with God’s love, and then when you realize he became a man and was punished for my evil, that is astounding.  We have a loving powerful God and can and should trust him.

In verses 1-5, then, God is reminding the Jews in Egypt about what just happened.  Judah was destroyed because of honoring false gods.  Now, in verses 7-10, we see they are in danger themselves because they are starting to honor the “gods” of Egypt.  He warns them that they will bring disaster on themselves.  In the example the people had lost the land, now they were in danger of losing themselves.  He uses the idea of a remnant, a little group of survivors who might return to the land.  Their actions though might result in no one ever going back.  Although the land isn’t really the point, a relationship with God is, the land represented God to them and was a starting point in getting his message through to them, and after all the land was part of the deal.  In verse 8 we see that what Israel does, good or bad, has an impact on the world around them.  A popular saying a few years ago was, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”  That is a stupid and dangerous attitude.  Our actions always have an impact, on us and others.  Sometimes people like to talk about “victimless crimes”.  Underage drinking, smoking marijuana, and things like that.  At the very least we are a victim as we teach ourselves how to be rebellious against authority; we miss the spiritual side of our actions.  But we also miss the emotional effects and even the physical effects too.  All of the “freedom” we have given consenting adults (and even young people) in our society has left behind a trial of broken heart, broken homes, and diseased and broken bodies.  Doesn’t sound too victimless to me.  Our actions affect us and others and Israel was misleading the world about Yahweh, a situation he would not tolerate; the stakes were too high, the worlds eternity was at stake.  In verse 9-10 God uses another example, this time from the more distant past of the Israelites, the example of their kings and queens and even ancestors.  It wasn’t all distant past though, some of it had been pretty recent, since their kings and queens had a real habit of dishonoring God, and even their own personal lives back home had been ones of disrespect for Yahweh.  Verse 10 makes it sound like God is talking about people still back in Judah dishonoring him, that is why some experts think this message was to Jews in Egypt before the fall of Jerusalem, but the earlier description seems to indicate that Jerusalem had already fallen.

In verses 11-14 we see that God has decided to destroy all Judah.  Again we see that it sound like there are people still back in Judah that the disaster is going to come to.  But verse 13 again has the punishment in the past.  In verse 4 we saw that God had sent messengers to warn the Jewish people “again and again”.  Jeremiah had been one of those messengers and the ideas in verses 11-12 are not new, Jeremiah may actually be quoting his previous warnings, a sort of “I told you so” moment, a reminder of what God had said, things that were now a reality.  Verse 13 then is a warning based on the truth of the earlier warnings that trouble was on it’s way to the Jews in Egypt, all of them, not just the new refugees.  Just because some of the Jews in Egypt had settled down didn’t excuse them from honoring God.  God’s reach was way beyond the land as they would soon learn.  Another old saying is, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.”  Honoring Egyptian “gods”, though, was not an option.  In verse 14 they are warned that almost none of the Jewish people who had gone to Egypt would ever see their homeland again.

God is real and God is good.  And there is only one of him.  God also has standards, they are not necessarily all of the laws he gave to the Jewish people before they enter the land.  Those laws were standards for a purpose, to show us we all fail God and need forgiveness and help (Galatians 2:16-21; Romans 3:20).  Now that doesn’t mean that we can throw those rules away, they still teach us about God and what he expects.  God still doesn’t want us to honor false gods, God still doesn’t want us lie, God still wants us to be faithful to our wives and husbands, and so on.  We don’t need to follow Jewish festivals anymore, we don’t need to be circumcised to be believers either (that was a big issue in the letter to the Galatians).  Ultimately God wants hearts turned toward him (Psalm 51:17) but a heart turned toward God will result in actions that please God (Micah 6:8).  The reality of who God is (holy, pure) means that certain actions offend him and can separate us from him.  The realty of God (he is loving) also means that he wants and has a plan to fix the problem, that fix is Jesus (Isaiah 53:6, John 3:16, John 14:6).  The reality of life is that we have a choice to make, we can put our ear to door post of God’s house and become his servants, enjoy his provision, be under his protection or we can live on the outside where we will be horrified (the Bible uses ideas like complete darkness, unquenchable fire, and uncontrollable sadness to describe life outside of God’s kingdom.  It is called Hell and it is real).  God keeps on talking are you listening.

God I hope many more people respond to you.  I hope no one thinks that just because they live in one place or another that they are subjects of the “gods” of those places.  You are the one true God and have left plenty of evidence of who and how you are (Romans 1:20) help people listen to your world and your words (found in the Bible) and not to the words of their neighbors, kings, queens, or ancestors.  Thank you for showing me the way back.  Let my life speak well of you, and not in a, “Wow!  Look what happens when you turn your back on Yahweh.” kind of way.  Let my life be pleasing to you.