Year 9, Day 97: Jeremiah 44-45

Theological Commentary: Click Here

This is a devastating chapter in God’s Word.  Jeremiah brings a message from the Lord to the people in Egypt.  They will die.  In fact, God even says that He is no longer watching over the people for good but for disaster.  God is watching over them, but He is watching them encounter suffering and hardship instead of looking for signs of repentance.

What have they done to incur God’s wrath?  The list is fairly long, too long to state here in its entirety.  The short version is that they did not listen to the prophets.  They did not repent.  Even when Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar, they did not repent.  They rebelled against Gedaliah, Nebuchadnezzar’s appointed governor of the land.  They went to Egypt, against God’s desire.  They now refuse to stop worshipping other gods when Jeremiah confronts them directly.  Rebellion after rebellion has brought God’s wrath.

Diving into the logic of the people shows human tendency.  The complaint that they lift up is that their life has only gone poorly for them after they stopped worshipping the queen of heaven!  Think about this for a second.  The siege itself lasts a couple years.  The invasion lasted longer than that.  This also wasn’t the first time Babylon had come!  They came years earlier and made Judah a vassal state.  Things had been going wrong for quite some time, yet the people don’t seem to acknowledge it.

This shows us an issue with perspective among human beings.  The people can’t see how bad their life is because they have been focused on their own desires to consider the splendor of God!  They didn’t know what genuine life lived under God’s ways could be like.  In a sense, this reminds us of a few chapters back when it became apparent that the besieged people in Jerusalem had slaves!  The truth is that human beings will settle for a perception of reality that isn’t the worst.  Better to be lord over a dung heap than a servant in a magnificent castle, right?

The people continue to refuse God’s ways because they want to be in charge.  They don’t know what the love of God can mean in their life because they are too focused being in control.  They want to do things their own way, so they will happily settle for a lesser reality than what could be had with God.

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