Week 26 - Jeremiah 29-31, 1st John 4 (June 19-July 1)
Notes
Jeremiah 29:2: a decapitating exile
Jeremiah 29:2 (This was after King Jehoiachin and the queen mother, the court officials and the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the skilled workers and the artisans had gone into exile from Jerusalem.)
Not all of the Jews of Jerusalem were taken into exile.
In choosing persons to take as hostages in the exile of 597, Nebuchadnezzar naturally took members of the royal family and their advisers among the nobility and priesthood. Craftsmen (see 10:3) and skilled artisans might have been useful to the king's ambitious building plans, but they also represented the relatively wealthy middle class of Judah. Most importantly, the skills of craftsmen and artisans were generally passed on through families, generation to generation, and often comprised trade secrets. The Babylonians would desire to preserve these and benefit from them. This same respect for the guilds is seen in Utnapishtim's inclusion of artisans in his ark in the Gilgamesh flood story. (IVP Bible Backgrounds Commentary, P.662)
But you wouldn’t really want to be one of those left behind in the homeland if you heard Jeremiah’s pronouncement about them
Jeremiah 29: 16 but this is what the Lord says about the king who sits on David’s throne and all the people who remain in this city, your fellow citizens who did not go with you into exile— 17 yes, this is what the Lord Almighty says: “I will send the sword, famine and plague against them and I will make them like figs that are so bad they cannot be eaten. 18 I will pursue them with the sword, famine and plague and will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth, a curse and an object of horror, of scorn and reproach, among all the nations where I drive them.
JEREMIAH 29:7, a surprising command
Babylon is evil, there is no equivocation about that in scripture. But the Israelite captives who are taken there are given a surprising command:
Jeremiah 29:7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
They were supposed to seek the well-being of their wicked captors - even to pray to God for it. There is an immediate connection to our modern context where we - as followers of Jesus - are surrounded by wickedness and untruth. We are called to be holy and righteous and to stick out like salt or light on a hill - but through all of that, God wants us to work for the good of our wicked world. There are those who would want you to abandon our world, who would tell you that it is too dark and evil to raise your children there or to work among the unredeemed; they might encourage you to withdraw into your own family or Church and the let the world around you burn. That is not God’s instruction to the captive Israelites here, and it is not his will for us now. As lovers of God and followers of Jesus, we can and should work for the good of our world - even and especially when it is filled with evil.
Jeremiah 30:2 ‘jot this down’
This is a picture of Jeremiah 31 from the Aleppo Codex which dates to the 10th Century AD - This and the Lenningrad Codex represent the Ben-Asher Masoretic Tradition which is foundational to our knowlege of the Old Testament text. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to “write down” his words was was carried on for centuries by scribes who coppied the text
The book of Jeremiah is one of the few prophetic works in the Bible that makes explicit mention of writing down the words of Yahweh to the prophet. Jeremiah was aided in this task by Baruch, a professional scribe (see 36:2-4). I
In this passage the word translated as"book" is a general term for a written docu-ment, and in that time period it meant a scroll. Papyrus scrolls were in use in Egypt from the third millennium, and the climate of Egypt has allowed for the preservation and recovery of numerous documents. In Mesopotamia, where clay tablets had long been the favored medium, scrolls are attested beginning in the Neo-Assyrian period (eighth century). Israelites were probably using scrolls during most of the Old Testament period, but little evidence has been recovered prior to the second century Dead Sea Scrolls (of these, over 90 percent are parchment). The oldest example is a few lines of a letter dated to the seventh century B.C. found in the caves at Wadi Murab-ba'at. An average papyrus scroll would contain about twenty pages of papyrus sheets glued together. The resulting scroll would be about fifteen feet long and about one foot tall. Parchment (using animal skins) was much less in use during the Old Testament period
Jeremiah 31:15: A Voice in Ramah
Jeremiah 31:15 This is what the Lord says:
“A voice is heard in Ramah,
mourning and great weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
In Jeremiah 31 those words describe the forlorn inhabitants of Judah who are destitute after the Babylonian invasion. They appear again in the New Testament
Matthew 2:16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”
Ramah is a town in Judah just 11 miles away from Bethlehem. Here God’s word compares the murderous act of Herod to the destruction brought to Judah and her children by Babylon in the time of Jeremiah.
1ST JOHN 4:18 No Fear
18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
Recently, I have been reflecting on this verse personally. I’m convinced that so much of the “culture war” that we fight as Christians and so much of the reputation that Christians have in our modern world for being “unloving” or “hypocritical” is from actions that we take as believers that are driven by fear. When we see our nation, our society, or our school districts accepting untrue beliefs or behaving in unrighteous ways - we (as the broad Church of all Believers in general) have a tendency to act in ways that are unloving or to speak to people or about people in ways that are unloving, and I think that the root cause of this phenomenon is fear.
We fear what will happen to our nation if our side doesn’t win the culture war
we fear what will become of our children if they learn un-true things in school
we fear what will become of the church if this or that law is passed
we fear what will happen to the lowly or unprotected if one political party or the other takes power
What would our love for people and our society and our world look like if we did NOT fear? What would it look like if we trusted these worries to God and focused on showing people the kind of love that is being so beautifully depicted as we read through 1st John? It would not accept the evil or untruth of the world, but wouldn’t the absence of our fears change the way that we respond to and regard the people responsible for them? do we trust God enough to drop our fears and regard our enemies with love?