Jeremiah 44:1-10
The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the Jews who lived in the land of Egypt, who lived at Migdol, and at Tahpanhes, and at Memphis, and in the country of Pathros, saying, “Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘You have seen all the evil that I have brought on Jerusalem, and on all the cities of Judah. Behold, today they are a desolation, and no man dwells in them, because of their wickedness which they have committed to provoke me to anger, in that they went to burn incense, to serve other gods that they didn’t know, neither they, nor you, nor your fathers. However I sent to you all my servants the prophets, rising up early and sending them, saying, “Oh, don’t do this abominable thing that I hate.” But they didn’t listen and didn’t incline their ear. They didn’t turn from their wickedness, to stop burning incense to other gods. Therefore my wrath and my anger was poured out, and was kindled in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; and they are wasted and desolate, as it is today.’
“Therefore now Yahweh, the God of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘Why do you commit great evil against your own souls, to cut off from yourselves man and woman, infant and nursing child out of the middle of Judah, to leave yourselves no one remaining, in that you provoke me to anger with the works of your hands, burning incense to other gods in the land of Egypt where you have gone to live, that you may be cut off, and that you may be a curse and a reproach among all the nations of the earth? Have you forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, the wickedness of the kings of Judah, the wickedness of their wives, your own wickedness, and the wickedness of your wives which they committed in the land of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? They are not humbled even to this day, neither have they feared, nor walked in my law, nor in my statutes, that I set before you and before your fathers.’
This sure was a depressing time in the history of Israel. When we were reading through the history books, the story goes by pretty fast, but when we hear the emotions of God as recorded by Jeremiah, and feel the events as they unfold, from God’s perspective, it really shows us how bad things had become.
We are in the 43rd chapter of Jeremiah and we also read through all 66 chapters of Isaiah and God spent page after page warning Israel and Judah that they would be destroyed. First, God took down Israel. Judah saw it but they still sinned by disobeying God and purposefully choosing to follow strange gods. Then, God finally took down Judah and Jerusalem, but left a remnant of Judah behind. Now, even they, after moving to Egypt, started to worship other gods! I hope it is obvious that this doesn’t make any sense.
In our world there are many people who refuse Jesus and the Bible because it isn’t logical and reasonable and contains miracles and things that can’t be real. These claims are false as I am constantly exposing, but the thing that is really absurd is that these same people believe in evolutionism which isn’t logical or reasonable and contains things that have never been seen to happen before. When a belief contains things that have never happened before, we call those things miracles. They are being hypocritical and are refusing God, just like this remnant of Judah was doing. When you won’t listen to reason and, instead, accept a false set of gods in place of the real God, it is a scientific fact that you are going to be destroyed as demonstrated by several experiments recorded here in the Bible. God clearly holds us accountable for our behavior under these conditions. Just because our world’s miracles are different and our gods are even stranger, doesn’t mean that we are any better than the remnant of Judah or that we will escape God’s punishment.