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.
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