The Bible in a Year – 26 May

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

26 May. Jeremiah chapters 42-45

In these chapters, Jeremiah goes with a group of Jews to Egypt, but reluctantly.  They were supporters of Ismael, who had led a coup against  the Babylonian puppet governor Gedaliah.  It seemed reasonable: retaliation by the Babylonians seemed inevitable if they stayed around.  But Jeremiah had a word from God that they would actually be safer if they stayed, because God would protect them if they remained in Jerusalem to keep the Jewish faith alive, whereas in Egypt they would not have God’s protection and would eventually either die of famine or be killed when the Babylonians reached Egypt.

 

Nevertheless they insisted on going to Egypt.  The reason soon became clear: these people, though Jews in name, actually worshipped a false goddess whom they called Queen of Heaven, and had no intention of dropping their allegiance and returning to worship the true God.  And the incident highlights two common human traits:

 

The first is not to believe what we are being told.  If our mind is set on one course of action then it is very hard to accept any argument against carrying on with it.  The rebels in this story asked for God’s guidance through Jeremiah and were given it, but it was not what they expected.  When they were told to abandon their plans and stay in what seemed a dangerous situation, it was too much to take, even though the instruction came from God himself.   How much harder it is to accept a lesser authority telling us that we have got the wrong idea, whether it is the doctor telling us that new guidance on ‘safe drinking’ is more restrictive than it used to be, or a spiritual director suggesting that our gifts should be leading us towards a very different type of ministry.

 

The second trait is that of seeing cause and effect where there is none.  The argument of the rebels for continuing to offer incense to the ‘Queen of Heaven’ is that when they did so before, they had prosperity, and when they stopped doing so (presumably because the religiously conservative king Hezekiah stopped them) they suffered war and famine.  Jeremiah’s interpretation is quite different: the Queen of Heaven was no real deity, and the war and famine were God’s punishment for idolatry; if they went back to worshipping Yahweh in their “promised land” then they would remain safe, if not exactly prosperous, whereas if they went back to idol worship then they would again receive God’s punishment.  But no, they insisted on going to Egypt and back to their old ways of worship.

 

Who is your Jeremiah? Who is telling you awkward truths about yourself that you find it hard to accept or act on?  And who is your ‘queen of heaven’, the established ways of living that are actually harming you?

 

P.S. I should add here that the ‘queen of heaven’ worshipped by these syncretistic Jews is nothing to do with the adoration of Mary the Mother of Jesus as ‘Queen of Heaven’ by Catholic Christians.  That is another discussion altogether and one I am not going to get into here.