Blogging Bible Study: Digging in the Desert - Jeremiah: Judgment against Judah

 Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

So, for those who are joining us lately....I'm doing a word study.  The word is 'desert', and we've been at it since August of last year.   Up to Jeremiah now, and this is post number...4...in which we're clustering the verses by topic as we go through.  Most of the verses containing the word 'desert' have to do with judgment, and today...we're looking at verses that have to do with judgment against the nation of Judah specifically.

In the first passage, you've got to back up several verses to see that the 'you' mentioned is the nation of Judah.... Jer. 13:19 states. 'The cities in the Negev will be shut up, and there will be no one to open them.  All Judah will be carried into exile, carried completely away.'  What follows is a more detailed discussion, but the bit we're specifically looking at today is down a bit further.

"I will scatter you like chaff driven by the desert wind. This is your lot, the portion I have decreed for you, " declares the LORD,  "because you have forgotten me and trusted in false gods."  -- Jer. 13:24-25

"For this is what the LORD says about the palace of the king of Judah:  "Though you are like Gilead to me, like the summit of Lebannon, I will surely make you like a desert, like towns not inhabited."  -- Jer 22:6

For context, Judah had been threatened by Babylon, but literally all the prophets of the day were declaring that God would deliver Judah and Jerusalem out of the hands of the Babylonians...as he had done so many times previously.  Only Jeremiah had a message of doom...this was not like the other times, this was not an external threat against the people of God.  This was judgment coming from God himself, because the people had left off doing what he had required of them.  Not that they weren't following the specifics of the law, they were keeping up the sacrifices...somewhat...and the holy days and such.  They were going through the outward motions of obedience.  But he required that they serve only him, and they had added worship of pagan gods to their rituals.  Ultimately, they even turned to these idols to try and protect them against the judgment God was sending, trying to placate as many gods as possible.  At that point, their faith had fallen from trust in God to mere superstitions actions, considering the God who had called them out of Egypt and made them a nation no more powerful than the other deities they were honoring. As for Jeremiah, rather than believe he was bringing them a message from God with an opportunity to repent...they accused him of treason, of working with the Babylonians to discourage them.   But Jeremiah never wavered in his message...although he did complain to God about having to deliver it. And don't be fooled; staying consistent with his message cost him.

A wind from the desert...hot, scorching, unrelenting.  And despite how he loved the nation, God was not going to hold back his hand from their punishment.  He had told them under Moses...if they left off following his commandments and followed other gods, disasters would come, with the final one being deportation from the land they had traveled 40 years and fought many battles to win. He had warned them in the beginning, continued to warned them through the years and now was making the final appeal through Jeremiah before their cities were unpeopled and the desert reclaimed them.

We think them foolish for not heeding the message, but do we not have prophets among us today, warning us of judgment?  And do we not shrug them off as crackpot religious freaks?  What if...the disasters of 2020 are not a crazy random string of events, but are actually warnings from God that we have left off from following him?  Sure, there are some crackpot religious-sounding freaks making a noise for their own promotion...but what if there are some truth tellers in the mix?  It would be a good strategy of the enemy to drown out the true voices with so many near-misses that no one heard the real message of warning and a call to repentance.  We are not so unlike the last days of Judah.  

And I'm not really referring to a society that has turned its collective back on God.  I'm talking about those that call themselves followers of God, who are listening to the unbelievers around them and claiming their objectives and adding their ideas of holiness to the worship of the one true God.  Mixing in the surrounding culture didn't work for the people of Jeremiah's day...and it won't work for God's people now.