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27 May. Jeremiah chapters 46-48
Until this point the main thrust of Jeremiah’s prophecy has been about the captivity and future restoration of Judah. But now the revelations he has turn to the surrounding nations. Many of them, he foretold, would be conquered by the Babylonians, including Egypt; while Egypt would itself have first conquered the Philistines.
The picture is therefore of a whole world (at least, the world known to the writer) in turmoil as one nation makes war against another. And always, the innocent suffer. As I write, there is turmoil in the near east as several groups battle for the country of Syria, leaving millions dead and other millions fleeing for their lives to refugee camps or other countries. Libya and Egypt (to name but two others) are likewise divided into many warring factions. This week a Libyan has committed a terrorist attack in Manchester, England killing 22 people, and a similar number of Christians were murdered in Egypt by Islamist attackers.
We cannot see now where God’s hand is in all this. No sane person who believes in a God of love and mercy could accept that any individual death was God’s fault, and yet in a fallen world where man constantly threatens violence against man (and woman), the Bible’s message is consistently that God’s hand is behind the bigger picture, as he issues judgements on entire ethnic or religious groups for their sins. We rightly pray for the victims of terror, for justice to be done and for security forces to do all they can to prevent future attacks. But when we pray for peace, and for God’s kingdom to come, we are in effect also putting ourselves in his spotlight for judgement. Is my lifestyle bringing forth the kingdom of justice, or is there anything in it that promotes injustice? Maybe not directly but indirectly through the effect my lifestyle choices of purchase and travel have on the environment or on the economies of developing countries, for example?
Yesterday was Ascension Day in the Christian calendar, and the Archbishops of England have asked all churches to pray over the next ten days for the mission of the church in our land. These days we don’t think of mission so much in the narrow sense of making individual converts to Christianity (though that is part of it) but in a wider sense of helping to steer the wider culture towards being the kind of peace-loving, justice-seeking society that God would have it be.