sign in sign up
<<
Home , 2 Kings 25, Ahikam, Gedaliah, Shaphan

Treason, False Prophets, and Political Machinations, those and more happy topics, this week on The Backdrop

Music

Hey everyone, Curtis here, this is the Backdrop podcast for Pomona Valley Church where we are continuing our journey through the book of . This week we are going to be focusing on chapter 26-28, so we’re skipping ahead a bit here, but will come back to chapters 24-25 in future weeks, because of how well they fit topically with chapter 29. Our chapters this week are the last ones of what is basically the first half of the book. And then, with chapter 29, and especially chapters 30-33 we enter into a whole new phase of Jeremiah’s message. But for now, Jeremiah is closing out this first part with a bang.

Let’s start in chapter 26, which, as I mentioned in my sermon this weekend is likely a re-telling, from a more narrative point of view, of the same incident that we saw in chapter 7. In the earlier version, the focus is on the message, in this version the focus is on what happened as a result. Now, to set the scene a bit here, we’re told that this scene happens at the beginning of the reign of King Jehoiaqim, which would be somewhere around 609-608-607 BC, something like that. So, some historical background to help us get our bearings. In 609 BC, the Assyrian empire, long the dominant power in the region, fell. That same year, and not coincidentally, the armies of Egypt marched North to take advantage of this power vacuum. At that same time, not coincidentally, an emerging power in began to exert more of its own influence.

In other words, Judah, and their long reigning, popular, and good King are caught in the middle. The armies of Egypt are marching through their territory, and Josiah leads a group of other nearby nations to fight them. Their side is routed, King Josiah is killed, and his son Jehoahaz comes to power. Jehoahaz last 3 month on the throne until Pharaoh Necho from Egypt, presumably on his way back South again, comes BACK through Judah, doesn’t like that Jehoahaz is on the throne, gets rid of him and puts his brother, Jehoiaqim on the throne. Meanwhile, Babylon is gaining in power, to the point that 4 years later, in 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar, who was then the Crown Prince, leads the Babylonia armies South to the city of Carchemish, which is on the Euphrates river near the border of modern day Syria and Turkey, so just a bit north of , and there he soundly defeats the Egyptian armies, and solidifies control of the entire area North of Egypt for Babylon. That is, again, four years into Jehoiaqim’s reign in Judah.

So this is the kind of turmoil that is going on “at the beginning of the reign of Jehoiaqim”. And you can imagine the uneasiness that was probably omnipresent in Judah at this point. Furthermore, this chapter tells us that Jeremiah is to go and speak “to all the cities of Judah” at the temple, to “all the people coming to worship there”. This probably indicates that one of the major, yearly festivals is going on, otherwise it’s unlikely that people from all over Judah would be at the temple. In other words, Jeremiah is going to a location that is THE heart of the self-identity of Judah, during one of THE major yearly celebrations of that self-identity, while that self-identity is under serious THREAT from the powerful nations around them. And the message is, this self-identity is all about to come crashing down. It didn’t go well.

One commentator I read compared this to someone walking through downtown Los Angeles on July 4th, 1942, saying something like “this city and all its people will be lit on fire by the Japanese, just like they lit fire to our ships in Pearl Harbor”. The one tweak I would make to that is that you have to imagine that instead of a great power, like America, Judah is completely outgunned and surrounded by much more powerful nations, which only enhances the point, I think. To the people in the Temple, it would have been clear, Jeremiah was committing treason, at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place. And so the people react about how you might expect, they seize him and say “you shall definitely die!” I think something VERY similar would have happened in our July 4th analogy, actually.

So what we have is that the word of Yahweh is silenced in Yahweh’s temple. Ironic, yes, but hardly an isolated incident over the long, checkered history of God’s people. What words from God today, I wonder, are not welcome in the places where we claim to revere the word of God? How can we continually work to hear those words, and not react with hostility to them?

In any event, much like the case would be hundreds of years later with Jesus, the chief priests and religious leaders stoke resentment amongst the crowds, to try and get Jeremiah executed for his treasonous words. Jeremiah speaks up and says, “hey, I’m just speaking the words of Yahweh, it’s up to you if you want to add my innocent blood to your crimes.” And then we are told that the public sentiment swings the other way. Specifically we are told that the “officials”, which probably refers to the various elders of the clans and villages, prevent Jeremiah’s execution. One commentator I saw wondered if this might be a sign that the elders from the far flung villages of Judah had less loyalty to the monarchy and the temple centered in than the priests did, and if those competing loyalties might be part of what is going on here.

But the elders bring up the precedent of the prophet Micah, who had been active during the time of a few generations earlier. Micah’s message was almost identical to Jeremiah’s, they say, quoting Micah 3:12, and Hezekiah didn’t put him to death, and look, Jerusalem survived. So, if we don’t put Jeremiah to death, therefore, Jerusalem will survive. The problem here, of course, is that they’ve drawn the wrong causal relationship. It was the *repentance of the people in Hezekiah’s day that allowed them to survive, not their not having killed Micah. And then the chapter ends by telling us that Ahiqam son of was decisive in protecting Jeremiah from death. This is interesting because in , Josiah sends Shaphan to the Temple, where the priest informs him that he has found the scroll of the . Shaphan brings the scroll back to Josiah, reads it to him, and this sets off the religious reforms that Josiah makes (and his sons abandoned) to re-dedicate Judah to Yahweh. In fact, Shaphan and his son are specifically mentioned along with a couple other royal officials as the ones leading these reforms, reforms that align completely with the message of Jeremiah. And now that same Ahikam shows up, protecting Jeremiah.

THEN, even more interesting, in , we read the story of Nebuchadnezzar destroying Jerusalem and the Temple, taking the people into exile, and setting up a man named , son of Ahikam, son of Shaphan, to be the governor of what is now a province of Babylon’s empire, and Gedaliah’s message is strikingly similar to Jeremiah’s that we will see in chapter 29 “Do not be afraid to serve the Chaldeans. Stay in the land and serve the king of Babylon, that it may go well for you.” Within the year, Gedaliah has been assassinated and many of the people who are left flee to Egypt taking Jeremiah, against his will, as we will see later in the book, along with them.

So what we can see, a little blurrily, maybe, are the political machinations that are going on behind the scenes. Josiah, along with his trusted officials, Shaphan and his son Ahikam, institute religious reforms that just so happen to also amount to political rebellion against Assyrian rule, we are not going to worship your gods anymore. This, right around the time the Assyrian empire is crumbling. Jeremiah, we can assume, was a vocal supporter of these efforts, because they are exactly the types of reforms he has been advocating for, for religious and ethical, not political reasons.

Then, when Egyptian forces try to make their way through Judah to help the Assyrian armies against the upstart rebels from Babylon, Josiah opposes them, because he is anti-Assyria, thus aligning himself with the emerging Babylonian side in the fight. Josiah is killed, and his son is installed by the Egyptians as the new king, and he not-coincidentally, flips to the other side of this fight, supports Egypt, and opposes Babylon. Meanwhile Jeremiah is telling the people to submit themselves to Babylon, which is not the party line of the current King, he gets in trouble, and his old friend Ahikam has, apparently, managed to retain some influence under this new King and saves him. Then, after Judah rebels against Babylon twice, Babylon finally finishes the job and conquers Jerusalem. They appoint as Governor a man who, from their perspective, is now the third generation of “pro-Babylonian” voices in his family. But then the other side kills him and flees to their old allies, Egypt. There is an ongoing political battle going on sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes right out in the open in Jeremiah, running parallel to Jeremiah’s message. “Serve the King of Babylon” is not a neutral statement politically, it was Jeremiah taking sides on THE key political fights of his day.

And, in fact, this pops right out into the next chapter. One quick note here. Some early manuscripts begin chapter 27 the same way that chapter 26 begins “In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiaqim” This is almost certainly a mistake that a scribe made at some point along the way in copying the . Because two verses later, is king, not Jehoiaqim, and no time has passed. There are actually a few other ancient manuscripts that align with verse 3, and the rest of this chapter, saying that Zedekiah is the king in question here, not Jehoiaqim. And since Jehoiaqim doesn’t make any sense in this context, it’s pretty safe to say that some poor, tired scribe, after spending a few long hours copying chapter 26, just got his kings mixed up as he began chapter 27.

In any case, back to the political, in chapter 27 we get Jeremiah making some yokes. God tells him to go crash a meeting at the palace, one that seems to have happened around 594 or 593 BC. The kings of several of the small nations in the area around Judah are getting together to talk through, ok, what are we going to do here? Babylon wants us to pay tribute to them or be destroyed. If we stay separate, there’s no way we can win, so what if we band together, refuse to pay, and take our chances?

And in barges Jeremiah, with his yokes knocking lamps over and making a big scene. And his message is clear, you all are going down a path where you will be wearing Nebuchadnezzar’s yoke. The yoke was a common symbol of being forced to submit to the power of a King, we actually see this same image elsewhere in the Bible. What’s interesting here is, as I was hinting to before, this is a wholly political statement. Jeremiah is not telling the other kings, repent and turn back to Yahweh or else you’ll be wearing this yoke. He’s saying, serve the king of Babylon, and you’ll live. Accepting this yoke is the one way forward for you all. I think that’s kind of interesting. God sends Jeremiah to advise the political deliberations of foreign kings. We’ve seen a lot of Jeremiah’s message in terms that we would probably characterize as “religious” or “ethical” before we would term it “political”, although in the ancient world those are not easily separable realms. But this, this is purely political, God warning the surrounding nations about the inevitable political consequences of their decision. Part of me does wonder if Jeremiah’s political statements, like here, might have caused people to miss his main message. Oh, you’re just spreading pro-Babylonian propaganda, so of course you would speak out against the king and the Temple, who are anti-Babylonian. Why should we listen to you on matters of religion and ethics, when you’re just a shill for the pro-Babylonian political faction?

I think that for us there are kind of parallel warnings here. On the one hand, as we talked about a few weeks back, Jeremiah is clearly political. The message of God in this chapter is for Jeremiah to make a political statement, that’s his job as a prophet here. To miss the word of God because we have a preconceived notion that God only speaks to religious issues, or individual ethical issues, is a big mistake. A mistake the nations here make, when they decide to rebel against Babylon, and are destroyed about 6 years after this warning.

But the parallel warning, I think, for us to think about, is the danger that our message, our life as the people of God gets subsumed under a political agenda, and the religious and ethical aspects get lost. I wonder to what degree that happens for Jeremiah here, even despite his best efforts. It certainly has happened today as the conservative evangelical camp has been wholly subsumed under the banner of the Republican party, to the point of supporting nakedly anti-Christian policies in the name of Jesus. And the liberal, mainline congregations have been wholly subsumed under liberal justice causes with only the vaguest “hand-wavy” references to Jesus.

And so our culture, and this is born out in survey after survey, sees Evangelical Christians as standing for pro-gun, anti-immigrant, anti-women’s rights, anti-LGBTQ rights causes, while it sees issues of justice as purely secular. We need to see how we can effectively engage in the political realm as required by our allegiance to Jesus, while not being subsumed under the political and losing sight of Jesus. And that’s a challenge.

One final note from chapter 28. Part of Jeremiah’s rebuttal there to Hananiah, the false prophet, is, in effect, “all the true prophets from our past came with messages of warning and destruction. Any prophet saying ‘hey everything’s all good’ you should be suspicious of”. The burden of proof, for Jeremiah, is on the prophet bringing soothing words. This is an interesting point, because in Deuteronomy 13 and 18 the two tests for whether a prophet is true or false are 1) are they telling you to move towards Yahweh or away from Yahweh, and 2) do their predictions actually come true, because if they’re from Yahweh, they’ll be true. But, as we said last week, the answers to those questions aren’t always immediately obvious. Jeremiah is adding, sort of, a third criteria here. Be skeptical if they’re saying happy things. Now, I think this is, in some ways, a variation of the first criteria from Deuteronomy. Are they bringing you towards Yahweh or away? Because, while there are some prophets who bring words of hope, and are from Yahweh, that hope is always on the other side of repentance. You’re walking away from God, turn around, and you’ll find the hope you’re looking for. But you have to turn around first! Hope without the turning is a false message, and I think that’s what Jeremiah is getting at here. The road to hope is not easy, it’s not obvious, it’s not assured. Jesus said it slightly differently, that the way to life is hard, and narrow, and many miss it.

So yes, God has a message of hope for people, the Gospel is Good News, it’s life giving! And sometimes, both in Jeremiah’s day and our own, people claiming to bring a message from God will use that true thing, but miss the part that makes it true in the first place. Life and good news are available to all of us, *when we put our trust in God, when we follow Jesus and walk the path towards God. It’s a hard path, a narrow path, one that it’s so easy to stray off of. And we will. And that’s ok, provided we hear the message to turn around and come home. And so prophets bring words of warning and destruction, not because the hope isn’t true, but because the hope is only true if we’re walking the right way. One of the scholars I was reading put it this way: God’s eternal will is for blessing and life, always. But sometimes God’s temporary, circumstantial will can be for judgment. Why? Because the judgment is part of the turning around. God’s eternal will for us to experience blessing and life CAN ONLY COME TRUE if we turn around and walk towards life instead of away from it. Without the turning, it’s nothing but false hope, from a false prophet.

And that’s as good a place as any to stop for today. Thanks for listening to The Backdrop. We hope to see you this Sunday, 9am Pacific time on Zoom. There’s a link on our website, pomonavalleychurch dot org that will take you there, and you can also find a couple questions there to help with reflection or discussion after this podcast. That’s all for today, until next time, bye!