Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Jeremiah wrote a letter from Jerusalem to the elders, priests, prophets, and all the people who had been exiled to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar. This was after King Jehoiachin, the queen mother, the court officials, the other officials of Judah, and all the craftsmen and artisans had been deported from Jerusalem. He sent the letter with Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hilkiah when they went to Babylon as King Zedekiah’s ambassadors to Nebuchadnezzar. This is what Jeremiah’s letter said: This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the captives he has exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem: “Build homes, and plan to stay. Plant gardens, and eat the food they produce. Marry and have children. Then find spouses for them so that you may have many grandchildren. Multiply! Do not dwindle away! And work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare.” This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Do not let your prophets and fortune-tellers who are with you in the land of Babylon trick you. Do not listen to their dreams, because they are telling you lies in my name. I have not sent them,” says the Lord. This is what the Lord says: “You will be in Babylon for seventy years. But then I will come and do for you all the good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. In those days when you pray, I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me. I will be found by you,” says the Lord. “I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and will bring you home again to your own land.”
One of the more trustworthy aspects of travelling by train is that the
tracks always lead to the destination.
If you lay down tracks from Charlotte to Memphis the train will always
move faithfully between those two cities.
One of the more certain terrors of travelling by train is if someone has
messed with the tracks.
The people of Jeremiah’s day must have figured someone messed with the
tracks. They were God’s favored, the chosen
people; now they were defeated captives down in Babylon. Someone had messed with the tracks of God’s promised
people.
If you rewind the story a bit you find that it was God’s own people
who had messed with the tracks of their journey. They had forgotten who they were, a nation to
be held close to God’s heart, obedient, faithful, and different from all others
on earth. And so the defeat by
Babylonian invaders, the fall of Jerusalem, and being held as slaves in a
foreign kingdom was their own doing; talk about a derailed train ride!
Against that backdrop, Jeremiah, God’s prophet, mostly viewed as an
enemy because he had warned it was coming, and from a pit that was his jail
cell, takes quill in hand and writes to the captives. His message:
It’s all good, folks; hold on; this is all part of God’s good
plans for you; trust the tracks; keep truckin’.
Good plans,
Jeremiah? Son, have you been in the new
wine again? We are captives, slaves, and
our whole army lies bloodied and decomposing on the battlefield. We lost, and we are doomed…what do you mean, good plans?
Ultimately God was in the process of purifying the thoughts of people
who had decided they could lay tracks in any direction they wanted. They’d come unglued in terms of honest lives,
cheating one another. They’d left off
taking seriously their commission to honor and worship Jehovah God with their
lives; instead, they began acting more like their worldly neighbors. They plotted course for proclaiming their own
greatness rather than trusting the tracks God had given them. God’s tracks led straight to the Temple and
the presence of God; the tracks they were laying down were for the far country.
Defeat at the hands of the Babylonian marauders was not just
political, it was theological, a mirror held up for Israel (and the rest of the
world) to see how derailed God’s people can get, and the consequences that
inevitably follow. This was not only a
good plan, it was God’s best plan for purging the kind of thought which imagines
the wages of sin can be changed.
Ultimately the good plan
of God brought just what Jeremiah wrote, hope, the one innermost emotional soul
nutrient which makes human existence possible.
Without hope no person (or nation, or species) can continue long. God’s good plan showed Israel their only hope
was in the God who had taken them from Egypt’s captivity into the land of
promise. The God of Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, and Joseph was still on the throne, and the tracks that led to that
throne room hadn’t changed location.
For You Today
We are still amid Covid-19’s pandemic, a captivity of sorts. Asking where it came from might be like Jeremiah’s
flock wondering how they could’ve been blind-sided by the Babylonians. The answer is the same – it’s still God’s
good plan for us. The antidote is more
than vaccines and masks; it’s time to get back to trusting the tracks.
[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For another post on Numbers 22 see God's Plan and I Know the Plans I Have for You
