Week 25 Jeremiah
In chapter forty-four Jeremiah told Israel why their current disaster had happened… They had: burned incense and worshipped other gods.
I’ve been seeing different reactions to Jeremiah’s unhappy prophecies. Disdain disregard animosity hostility belligerence. Like that. But in this case the people challenged Jeremiah’s Reason Why.
They checked the record and figured their best days correlated with times when they were idolaters: in those days we had plenty to eat, and we were well off and had no troubles! But ever since we quit burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and stopped worshipping her, we have been in great trouble and have suffered the effects of war and famine.
Their equations were:
Worshipping the Queen of Heaven = good times.
Not worshipping the Queen of Heaven = bad times.
I don’t think there’s any reason to say there weren’t any good times when idolatry was popular. There must have been some evidence to back that up.
If the equation was worshipping the Queen of Heaven = immediate and disastrous bad times that would’ve been one thing. But it hadn’t worked that way. So Jeremiah had two problems. First was his glass-almost-empty message. And second was that based on observation his message could be disputed.
So no matter how iron-clad the message sounded it was a waste of Jeremiah’s breath if the audience believed they had good reason not to believe.
Note: quotes from Jeremiah 44:3, 17-18 (NLT).