Theological Commentary: Click Here
Jeremiah 27 is
a prophet’s worst nightmare. Imagine God
coming to you and telling you the following list of objectives. First, go to various leaders and tell them
that they need to submit to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon. Tell them that if they obey him, God will
allow them to remain in their land; but if they rebel, God will scatter
them. Then, Go specifically to the king
in Jerusalem and tell him the same thing.
While you are at it, make a point to tell them that the king of Babylon
will be taking all the valuable things of the Lord in the temple with him back
to Babylon.
Imagine how all
those conversations would go. I doubt any
leader of the people will willingly say, “Sure, I’ll pay tribute to a foreign
king every year. I’ll let the wealth and
hard work of my own people go and bless some other king and some other people.” How many of those conversations go well?
Yet, this is
exactly what God expects Jeremiah to do.
He needs to go and have those awkward conversations. He needs to go and set the record straight. He needs to go and be the harbinger of bad
news. The prophets gets to be close to
God. The prophet also gets to deliver the
truth, for better or for worse.
There’s one
other point to make in this chapter.
Once more we see that God is interested in the heart of the people and not
the stuff of the world. God won’t
protect Jerusalem because His people are there.
In fact, God won’t protect His temple because it have lavish stuff in
it. All the stuff will go away to
Babylon, and God won’t bat an eyelash at it.
In fact, God says that He will go and visit it in Babylon.
God doesn’t
much care about where His stuff is located because the whole earth is his! He’s not interested in the what and the
where. He’s interested in the how and
the why. He wants to know how the people
will respond and act and why they will behave the way that they do. The stuff simply just doesn’t matter as much
as the obedience to His ways.
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