Scripture Daily

Context No. 758 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 44:7-14: in context

7“Therefore now the LORD, 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, 8in 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? 9Have 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? 10They 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.’ 11“Therefore the LORD of Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘Behold, I will set my face against you for evil, even to cut off all Judah. 12I will take the remnant of Judah that have set their faces to go into the land of Egypt to live there, and they will all be consumed. They will fall in the land of Egypt. They will be consumed by the sword and by the famine. They will die, from the least even to the greatest, by the sword and by the famine. They will be an object of horror, an astonishment, a curse, and a reproach. 13For I will punish those who dwell in the land of Egypt, as I have punished Jerusalem, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence; 14so that none of the remnant of Judah, who have gone into the land of Egypt to live there, will escape or be left to return into the land of Judah, to which they have a desire to return to dwell there; for no one will return except those who will escape.’”

After Jerusalem was burned, a group of survivors fled down to Egypt for safety, dragging Jeremiah along with them, against everything God had told them. And once there, in their place of refuge, they went straight back to the sin that had ruined them at home: burning incense to other gods, to the queen of heaven. Through Jeremiah, God confronts them with a question full of grief. Why do you do this great evil against your own souls, he asks, to cut off from yourselves man and woman, child and infant, until nothing of you is left?

Then he presses the memory. Have you forgotten the wickedness of your fathers and your kings, the very wickedness that brought Jerusalem down around you? You have not humbled yourselves even to this day. It is the tragedy of the unlearned lesson. These are the people who watched their city fall for exactly this, who barely escaped with their lives, and who, safe at last in Egypt, took up the identical practice again. God says the remnant that went to Egypt will be consumed there, and will not return to the land they ache to see again. The sin did not just offend God. It was aimed, the whole time, at their own souls.

The survivors fled to safety and immediately resumed the very sin that had destroyed their home. What ruined me once that I have quietly picked back up, even in the place I ran to for a fresh start?

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