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.