Chapter 43

Let’s recap here – these refugees have come to Jeremiah asking for God’s advice. They have made the very dangerous promise that “whatever God says, we will do.”

I’ll bet they’re not so happy at having made that promise now!

In fact, they are so upset that these very people, who not last chapter declared that they’d do whatever Jeremiah said regardless are now calling him a liar!

In fact this isn’t a particularly unusual thing for humans to do. Let’s face it. There is inconsistency here because the delegation went to the Prophet fairly certain that he was just going to ratify their decision.

After all, their decision – to travel to Egypt – seemed logical. There was nothing left for these people in Judah, especially after the debacle that had left the governor dead. Going away to Egypt seemed to be perfectly sensible. And these people had convinced themselves that this was what they should do.

Let’s pause here and remember that going from Judah to Egypt was a big commitment. So it is possible to be a little sympathetic for these guys – it can’t have been easy to make the decision to pull up stumps and travel what was for them a very long trip (remember they don’t have airlines – for us, this is a journey of a couple of hours, but for them it would have been weeks or even months of travel.

But the problem they had was that they had made their decision, and didn’t really want God’s advice. They wanted God’s approval of their decision.

And God wasn’t going to give it to them. Bluntly, God wanted them to stay in Judah. In effect, He was saying “Well, it’s your call. But if you stay here I will protect you; if you go to Egypt[1], I won’t.”

So ironically, these people who went into Jeremiah’s room saying that they’d do whatever the Lord said through him, left his room declaring him to not really be a prophet!

For some of these devotions it can be really difficult to come up with an application, but this one is all too easy to see.

It’s simple – we must not let what we WANT God to say drown out what He really DOES say.

The thing is, God has spoken to us through His word. And a lot of what He says is stuff we really want to forget about.

No, I’m not talking about the difficult passages on sexuality or the role of women. I’m talking about uncontroversial stuff such as do not bear false witness, honour your father and mother, do not commit adultery. That kind of stuff.

I know someone who declared that her divorce from her (totally faithful Christian!) husband was the will of God. I call bull on that – the Bible is clear that God hates divorce. So whatever it was telling her to divorce this good man, it wasn’t from God. Some might argue that it was the voice of the Devil; perhaps, maybe, but it could just as easily come from the desperately wicked mind of humanity.

God is consistent. We may wish that He’d change His mind, but He’s not going to and we need to get used to that idea. God’s will is God’s will, and we can’t change it. So we need to get our minds in order – and if God says something we don’t like, we need to realize that ultimately it is us who benefit. . . so it’s time to harden up!

[1] For some reason, every time the Israelites or the Judeans faced trouble, it was Egypt that they would always travel to. . . . as was to happen for a certain jewish boy, the son of a Carpenter . . .