Jeremiah 51:27-33

“Set up a standard in the land!
Blow the trumpet among the nations!
Prepare the nations against her!
Call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz!
Appoint a marshal against her!
Cause the horses to come up as the swarming locusts!
Prepare against her the nations,
the kings of the Medes, its governors, and all its deputies, and all the land of their dominion!
The land trembles and is in pain;
for the purposes of Yahweh against Babylon stand,
to make the land of Babylon a desolation, without inhabitant.
The mighty men of Babylon have stopped fighting,
they remain in their strongholds.
Their might has failed.
They have become as women.
Her dwelling places are set on fire.
Her bars are broken.
One runner will run to meet another,
and one messenger to meet another,
to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken on every quarter.
So the passages are seized.
They have burned the reeds with fire.
The men of war are frightened.”

For Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel says:
“The daughter of Babylon is like a threshing floor at the time when it is trodden.
Yet a little while, and the time of harvest comes for her.”

An amazing and unique thing about the Jews is that they got to read the news before it happened! They were privileged to know that some time after God gave them over to Babylon, Babylon would also be destroyed. They even knew how wide spread it would be and that it would involve the Medes. If God desires, we will eventually be reading the book of Daniel. We will get a little bit of an inside look into this history as it unfolds, but for now we are reading about what Israel was supposed to know beforehand.

I have been observing that many important things in our world are treated as if they are not important at all. As I consider some of those things, I’m actually astonished at myself and others. It’s pretty clear that we have either deceived ourselves about how things really are, or that someone else has helped produce that deception. As Christians we know the causes if we are studying our Bibles. In Jeremiah’s time, He was being mistreated by his own people. Instead of hanging on every word he spoke, they were locking him in jail and throwing him in a well. Jeremiah actually knew the future. Had they listened, they could have avoided the severe events that were going to change their lives forever. Somehow they were deceived into thinking that Jeremiah’s words weren’t that important. I see the same thing with how the Bible is being treated in Europe, Canada and the United States today.

There are a lot of English Bibles available. Not only are they in print, they are available for free on multiple web sites on the Internet. You can even listen to the Bible read to you for free. The western world is saturated with Bibles, yet it is pretty clear that most of the people in these cultures are not very interested in actually reading it. At the same time, there are people who don’t know how to read and others who don’t have a printed Bible available to them. They don’t have enough money to have the Internet. These people are longing for the same English Bibles that the western world is ignoring. Some of them would be happy to have a little piece of the English Bible available to them. Others don’t even have the Bible in a language that they understand at all. It’s important for us to remember the truth and snap out of the deception that keeps us from seeing the value of the words of God. They tell us about our future. If we don’t pay attention, the future will still come, but we may not be ready.