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
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