Chapter 19

Note - if you happen to have read this via email before and haven't received a second email with an updated version, this is what last night's commentary SHOULD have looked like if I hadn't fallen asleep several times at the keyboard!

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I have mentioned the Valley of Hinnom (or the valley of Ben Hinnom) before in my commentary. This dark and evil place had been the site of temples to Molech and Baal[1]. Now Jeremiah is saying that it will become a place for discarding rubbish and burying bodies.

To be sure, we know that this one happened. The Valley of Hinnom indeed became a place of horror, with the fires to burn the bodies of the dead, and various nasty biting creatures.

But when Jeremiah writes, this is still in the future.

In the future, moreover, where the city of Jerusalem is to be destroyed.

Whilst a lot of this book is heavy going – the full scale of the destruction is heartbreaking, and Jeremiah’s gloomy predictions just keep on coming – this chapter at least is quite understandable, and one is left thinking “Well yeah, that’s fair enough.” I mean, Human sacrifice – especially the sacrifice of babies – is reprehensible, and most of us would be quite against it.

Once again – here we have a running theme – God would cease His judgement if the people of Israel would simply repent.

Really, they’re choosing the hard way. But make no mistake, it’s what they choose. So generally we say “Well, God, yeah – fair enough.”

But there’s a point which deserves a little consideration – It is hard for us to think whether or not we would have accepted the deal or not. Do you sacrifice your child in return for blessing? Or do you take the stand that requires you to go against others when their minds are made up?

I want to think I’d have been in group 2 above, but realistically I have to ask if I really would have done so. You see, I have a tendency to be a coward. Generally I’m happy with that description. I’d rather people said “He IS a coward” than “He WAS very brave”.

Yes, what the people of Israel were doing was horrendous. How can you get otherwise normal parents to be so devoted to a god that they’d be willing to literally place their screaming infant onto the white-hot hands of a specially heated statue – killing the child! How could they do that?

Or, to put it another way: Can you imagine how powerful must be any social pressure great enough to make that happen?

Okay. NOW we are in the right place to ask ourselves whether or not we’d do what the people of Israel did. It was still evil, it still is unbelievable that people would let things get to this place (and incidentally, it also helps us to understand the depth of God’s anger against His people, that they’d leave HIM behind, and sacrifice their very children to this horror of a God!); but we now understand that the pressure to conform would have been enormous.

NOW you may understand the cost to stand up against it. Evil though it was, I suggest that many of us might have gone along with it anyway, simply because it takes a lot of guts to stand up and be counted. One may also say that it takes Him.

To live a life willing to go against the mainstream in such a big way requires supernatural intervention. More than that, in this case, one would be risking not just their social standing but potentially their life (bear in mind that priests willing to sacrifice babies would have no compunctions killing an adult who resisted them!).

To do this takes strength that comes from God.

What things might we face in our own life that needs US to take a stand against? I’ll leave that to your own mind, but I’ll bet there are things that all of us would see as great injustices. How many of them do we ignore because we’re afraid?

Time to pray. What would God have us take arms against?

[1]The word “Baal” is Aramaic for “Lord.” There were three or four gods worshiped under this title, but the most popular (and therefore the one that we assume is intended in most of the Bible’s references) would be Baal Melqart, a lightning God. This would seem to fit with Elijah’s challenge to the Prophets of Baal, given that the contest was to bring down fire from heaven!