Jeremiah 37 – 41

Verse 37:2 shows the problem with new rulers:

Neither young Zedekiah nor his inexperienced advisors nor the people of Judah themselves listened to what the Eternal said through His prophet Jeremiah.

As Jack Nicholson as Col. Jessep in A Few Good Men said, “you can’t handle the truth”. Unfortunately, most new leaders can’t handle the truth; they want what tickles their ear and be happy. We can see this in almost all the new leaders of our time, it’s become a narcissistic job, where image is more important than leadership. Case in point is our current occupant in the White House. The White House traditionally has a dog, and this was no different except for the occupant named the dog after himself.

Anyway I don’t want to drift too far down the rabbit hole of today’s political scene and rather notice it was no different then. Verse 37:19 was Jeremiah’s Jack Nicholson moment:

I told you nothing but the truth about Babylon from the beginning, so why am I in this cell? Meanwhile, your so-called prophets keep telling you, “Don’t worry, the king of Babylon will never attack you or this land,” and they go unpunished?

We naturally want to hear what we want. If someone today came to you and said sell everything the market will crash tomorrow, where everyone else is buying like there is no tomorrow and making good money who would you listen to? Would it be the “gloom and doom” or the “happy days are here again” advisor?  If someone said you would win the lottery tomorrow, while another said your fortune would dissolve if you did that, would you buy the ticket or not? Zedekiah is not different than the majority of us, he wants to hear the good and ignore the bad.

We do the same with Jesus’ teachings. We take the good and dismiss the bad. We focus on “praying in Jesus’ name” to get blessings, yet oddly forget that all the money is His and we should at the very least tithe. Sure we can say “the church is spending too much on the building, the staff or fruitless projects, we should give the money directly to the poor!” We feel good and then oddly forget giving to the poor. I think of Robert Morris’ teaching about giving. At one time he gave a house, two cars and emptied his bank account only to have God out give him. See God want’s obedience and not fellowship.

As you finish the reading it’s painful to see how the king wants to obey, but ignores God and loses. We can learn a bunch from this story and must sometimes feel the pain before we start to follow God’s prompts anyway. But keep stories like this in the back of your head to really understand what God can do if we do not obey fully.