October 5, 2020: Day 44 – Jeremiah 44

There is a pretty intense interchange between Jeremiah and the people of Israel in this chapter.  Jeremiah tells the people, especially and probably exclusively the people of Israel who are in Egypt, that their time in Egypt will be marked with destruction.  He gives them the history of them not being willing to listen to his words and their continued sacrifice to foreign gods and their desire to leave their home land to come to Egypt where they thought they would be safe.  He tells them, you will not be safe in Egypt, you will die, all of you, women, children, and men.  He chastises them for leaving their home land without a remnant and just fleeing without taking any consideration to the fact that God had given them that land for all eternity.  But they chose to leave it and settle in Egypt.

The people actually respond!  They say, you know, all that you are saying, that we should not worship other gods, that we should turn back to the Lord or else we will be destroyed, we are not going to listen to you.  Look at vs.16 where the people say: “We are not going to listen to you.”  In fact, they go one step further.  They said because we stopped worshiping other gods, and specifically because we stopped offering sacrifices to the queen of heaven then destruction has befallen us.  They had been worshiping Aphrodite and Venus and they thought that because they had turned from these false gods to the Lord that they now found themselves in a foreign land, in Egypt.  They promised to go back to worshiping these false gods and were convinced that then everything would be made right.

Don’t we often rely upon that which is false and turn away from God and attribute our success to either our own skills or the alignment of certain factors that have nothing to do with God?  That is not what God would want from us.  He wants us to align ourselves with him.  Now, we are not promised that we will have success if we align ourselves with God.  In fact, in the New Testament we are told that we will face even more persecution and hardship if we are truly a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Who wants that?  So there is no I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.  But we do know that Jesus has saved us from sin and given us eternal life.  So we have that going for us.