DAY 312

TRUST ENOUGH TO FOLLOW

Jeremiah 40, 41 & 42 and Hebrews 4

“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16

You might be thinking, “OK, it is done, they have been carried off to Egypt.” Yes they have, and while the Book of Jeremiah goes to chapter 52, we will between now and tomorrow finish the “chronology of the events.” Today we begin reading about the people who are left in the burnt-down city of Jerusalem, and we read about Jeremiah.

I am going to try and break it down into pieces a bit.

In chapter 40:1-6 we see Jeremiah offered freedom by the captain of the Babylonian guard. Jeremiah chooses not to leave, but rather to stay with the new “governor” of his land, Gedaliah—and to stay with the people the Babylonians did not think worthy of deporting.

Then in 40:7-12 we see this Gedaliah emerge as a peaceable and honest man. What a thankless and quite frankly impossible task of representing your people to the conquering power—and the conquering power to your people. Yet we see soldiers return as well as other people. He must be inspiring some degree of confidence.

But in 40:13-16 we see how fluid the situation is when a charge is brought against a fellow named Ishmael. What could Gedaliah make of it? Should he believe that Ishmael would kill him or not? He chose not to believe and in the end it cost him his life—he was governor for only three months.

In 41 I see two things all revolving around flight. Before I get to that, Bible commentators have researched all those ancestors of Ishmael and concluded he was of royal descent—another would-be king even in a barren, burnt out wasteland. After he assassinates Gedaliah he now finds that he must flee and so he does. But so do the people who had risen up against Ishmael. Under the leadership of a person named “Johanan” these people who had chased Ishmael to the Ammonites now themselves fear reprisal from the Chaldeans (same as Babylonians) and so they get themselves staged to flee to Egypt.

Before they do we read in 42:1-2 they do something smart, they go to Jeremiah and ask him to pray to God…what a good idea! That the Lord our God may show us the way to go—whether good or bad. And God says…stay in this land, do not go to Egypt, or bad things will happen.

You will have to check-in tomorrow to see what happens, but let me ask you a question: “When it is really bad, and when you are scared, do you trust God?” That is similar to the question I asked yesterday. In part because there is a thread that runs through the book of Jeremiah—several actually, and one of those threads is trusting human reason over godly direction. Godly direction can be hard, it can be scary, and it doesn’t always lead to the “easy path.” Godly direction leads to the right path. Part of the story of the people of Jeremiah’s day is that they seemingly trusted human reason over God…and they were destroyed. What might I need to put before God—and what might you need to put before Him? It seems to me that which we trust is what we have confidence in.

“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16