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 Jeremiah. 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 Babylon began to exert more of its own influence. In other words, Judah, and their long reigning, popular, and good King Josiah 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 Israel, 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 Jerusalem 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 Hezekiah 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 Shaphan was decisive in protecting Jeremiah from death. This is interesting because in 2 Kings 22, Josiah sends Shaphan to the Temple, where the priest Hilkiah informs him that he has found the scroll of the torah. 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 Ahikam 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 2 Kings 25, we read the story of Nebuchadnezzar destroying Jerusalem and the Temple, taking the people into exile, and setting up a man named Gedaliah, 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.