Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem three times. In the second siege, 2 Kings 24:12 tells us that “Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of Babylon, he and his mother and his servants and his captains and his officials. So the king of Babylon took him captive in the eighth year of his reign.” So the king of Babylon took Jehoiachin together with those key members of his captives in Babylon. Meanwhile, in 2 Kings 24:17 we are told that after Nebuchadnezzar took Jehoiachin to Babylon, he made his uncle Mattaniah, another son of Josiah, king in his place in Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar also changed Mattaniah's name to Zedekiah, meaning righteousness of God.
After Jehoiachin was taken into
captivity God gave Jeremiah a message concerning the people of Judah through an
open vision. In Jeremiah 24:1-3 we are told how the whole scene happened. The
prophet saw two baskets of figs before the temple of God. One basket
contained very good figs and first-ripen figs while the other basket
had very bad and rotten figs that could not be eaten. The Lord then asked Jeremiah, “What did
he see?” The prophet’s response was “Figs, the good figs, very good; and the
bad figs, very bad, which cannot be eaten due to rottenness.”
Following the vision, God then
gave him a message concerning what he saw. He told Jeremiah that the basket of
good figs represents those whom God would send into exile. And the basket of
bad and rotten figs represents those whom Nebuchadnezzar had left in Judah. If
the Lord had said nothing
further, the natural conclusion would be that those taken into exile were bad
and deserved to be punished and those that were left behind and not taken into
exile would be the approved people of God. But the opposite is true.
Jeremiah 24:5-7 tell us that those who were taken into exile were the
people God had set His eyes upon and would fulfill His purpose through them.
God was going to work in them to awaken them to bring about repentance and turn
them around and bring them back from captivity. These would be ensured of a new
relationship with the Lord.
The basket of bad figs, those
who remained in Jerusalem or deflected to rely on Egypt. They were the people
that the Lord had
abandoned and left to continue in their self-destructive devices. There they
would continue in their evil and eventually end up being humiliated horribly.
Verses 9-10 summed up their end. God Himself said, “I will make them a
terror and an evil for all the kingdoms of the earth, as
a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse in all places where I
will scatter them.” God will also send them, “…the sword, the famine, and
the pestilence upon them until they are destroyed from the land which I gave to
them and their forefathers.’”
What’s the lesson for us? We
must not mistake divine discipline for divine abandonment. Divine abandonment
is when God chooses to leave us alone. Who will God abandon? Romans 1:21 tells
us that people who knew God would not honor or thank Him but choose instead to
worship crafted idols. What will happen to this sort of people? Romans 1:24-25
say of such people “Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts
to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For
they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served
the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”
Romans 1:26-27 say that such people would end up in degrading passion.
The Bible tells us that those
who God loves, He disciplines. When we face hard times, it is part of God’s
molding process. He is shaping us to be the person He wants us to become. God
will discipline us for our good but if we do not yield to His molding, we will
end up being abandoned by Him. That will be when we will become careless,
illogical, and unreasonable and will freely indulge in a life of senseless
depravity.
No comments:
Post a Comment