Year 6, Day 77: Jeremiah 24

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Protection

• Protection: In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray that God might deliver us from evil – even the Evil One.  Sometimes we need God’s protection from the sin around us.  Sometimes we need protection from the sinful people around us.  Other times we need protection from the sin that lies within ourselves. In any case, Jesus’ point is clear.  We need protection from the Father to make it through each and every day.

When I was growing up, the Babylonian captivity was always an enigma to me.  After all, why would God let His own people go into captivity?  Why would God let some nation that worships other gods triumph over His own people?  From the perspective of a naïve child, this makes no sense.  The strongest God should have the strongest people, after all.

It is chapters like Jeremiah 24 that are lost on the naïveté of childhood.  What I didn’t understand is that God was actually protecting His people by ushering them into captivity.  In captivity the faithful would be pressed into faithfulness.  In captivity, the faithful would have to choose to remain faithful.  We know that great pressure makes the best diamonds.  We know that good steel is only make through much exposure to fire.  In the same way, faithful people are built under the pressure of trials and persecution.  That’s why the good figs in Jeremiah’s parable are the people who are already exiled.

On the other hand, we hear that the bad figs are the ones who remain in Jerusalem.  The good figs are removed so that the bad figs can spoil all the faster.  The good figs are removed so that the bad figs can prove what they really are.  The exile happens to forge strong faith out of the faithful and to expose the faithless for what they really are.

How does this all come back to protection?  As a child, I saw the Babylonian exile as a place of doubt in my understanding of God’s desire to protect His own people.  As an adult, my perspective has changed.  The exile is a means for protecting the faithful from the rottenness of the rest.  God is protecting His people even in the midst of an exile.

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