The tragedy of those who destroy themselves (Jeremiah 44)

Many today say that they cannot believe in a God who sends people to hell. This view conjures up the picture of people who awaken to the truth after they die and plead with God for mercy, but He sternly refuses to listen and thunders at them that it is too late, they missed their chance and now they will be tormented forever. C. S. Lewis, in his imaginative book, The Great Divorce, however, depicts heaven and hell differently. In it, people who are in hell are given a chance to take a bus ride to heaven. Some go but find heaven unbearable. Such people are portrayed as small, shrunken and ghost-like, without substance, while heaven is solid to the extent that the reality of even a blade of grass gives these ghosts blisters on their feet. They do not think the place attractive at all and they find reasons not to stay. Lewis does not claim special revelation about heaven that God will give us a second chance. Rather, his point is that those who end up in hell choose it and even if given the option they would not want the heaven God offers.

Causing harm to oneself

Likewise, the sad story of the remnant who escaped to Egypt is the story of people who refuse the chance to live and flourish. That blessing awaited them in the land of Israel but it could only be accessed by trusting God. It is not that God shuts them out of blessing, but that they do so themselves. The Lord through Jeremiah recounts the people’s idolatry as the reason why Judah and Jerusalem were destroyed (Jer 44:1-6). There is almost a pleading tone when God says, ‘please don’t do this hateful thing’ and a persistence in sending prophet after prophet to awaken the people (v.4). Although the prophecy affirms God’s judgment using the terms anger and wrath, it becomes clear that in some sense this is a result of people’s choices. The people who fled to Egypt and now worship idols cause great harm to themselves and will effectively destroy themselves (Jer 44:7-8). Their actions carry built-in consequences because that is how God created the universe. True Life is only found in Him and those who seek life and prosperity in other things will cut themselves off from Him, the source of Life.

Rejection and self-deception

Even now, however, God is speaking to them and hoping for a change of heart. The latter is not mentioned explicitly, but it is in the nature of prophecy. Judgment may sound like it is final, but prophecy is never mere information. Rather, it implicitly appeals for a response (most evident in Nineveh’s repentance on Jonah’s preaching; Jonah 3:4-10). The description of the terrible future is God’s rescue attempt to goad the people into action. Their answer is tragic in its obstinacy (Jer 44:16). As we have seen earlier (see my post, The trap of self-deception), there is also a self-deceiving rhetoric to justify their actions. They argue that bad things happened to them because they stopped worshipping the queen of heaven (Jer 44:17-18), a fertility goddess known under various names as Ishtar/Astarte. The reference is probably to Josiah’s reform when the land was cleansed of idol worship around 621 BC (2 Kings 22-23). It is after his time that Judah’s political instability increased and culminated in the exile.[1] Given the terrible determination of the remnant to go against God’s will, Jeremiah repeats twice more God’s Word of destruction that awaits them (Jer 44:20-23, 24-30). If he hopes for repentance, it is sadly to no avail.[2]

Whom do we trust?

While the Bible is emphatic about God’s sovereignty that He brings people to judgment, the flipside of the coin is that when we choose sin, we choose our own destruction and spin a tale of justification why our actions are right. God does not will our ruin and this episode with its dire description of Judah’s fate is actually His last-ditch attempt to rescue His people from themselves. Sadly, it is the nature of sin to make itself indispensable until we feel that letting go of it would ruin us when the very opposite is true. It is sin that causes ruin and God who gives Life. Can we trust Him?

---

[1] Josiah died tragically in 609 BC when he tried to block Egypt from joining the Assyrians against the emerging power of Babylon (2 Kings 23:28-30). In the next twenty years or so Judah came under the orbit of first Egypt, then Babylon ending in two invasions by the latter, two sieges of Jerusalem and eventual exile. The logic of the remnant’s reasoning that all this happened because they stopped worshipping the queen of heaven is faulty, however, because the fact that two events follow each other does not mean that there is a causal link between them (e.g. if I go out in a raincoat and then it rains, it does not follow that my wearing a raincoat caused the rain).

[2] Hophra mentioned in v.30 was the Pharaoh whom Judah called in for help against the Babylonians during the siege of Jerusalem (Jer 37:5) and under whom the remnant from Judah settled in Egypt. He was deposed in 570 BC in a military coup and killed a few years later.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with others.