Welcome to the Fallout
August 4, 2024
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
Jeremiah 42:1-43:7
42:1 Then all the commanders of the forces, and Johanan the son of Kareah and Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah, and all the people from the least to the greatest, came near 2 and said to Jeremiah the prophet, “Let our plea for mercy come before you, and pray to the Lord your God for us, for all this remnant—because we are left with but a few, as your eyes see us— 3 that the Lord your God may show us the way we should go, and the thing that we should do.” 4 Jeremiah the prophet said to them, “I have heard you. Behold, I will pray to the Lord your God according to your request, and whatever the Lord answers you I will tell you. I will keep nothing back from you.” 5 Then they said to Jeremiah, “May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act according to all the word with which the Lord your God sends you to us. 6 Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we are sending you, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God.”
7 At the end of ten days the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. 8 Then he summoned Johanan the son of Kareah and all the commanders of the forces who were with him, and all the people from the least to the greatest, 9 and said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to whom you sent me to present your plea for mercy before him: 10 If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you, and not pluck you up; for I relent of the disaster that I did to you. 11 Do not fear the king of Babylon, of whom you are afraid. Do not fear him, declares the Lord, for I am with you, to save you and to deliver you from his hand. 12 I will grant you mercy, that he may have mercy on you and let you remain in your own land. 13 But if you say, ‘We will not remain in this land,’ disobeying the voice of the Lord your God 14 and saying, ‘No, we will go to the land of Egypt, where we shall not see war or hear the sound of the trumpet or be hungry for bread, and we will dwell there,’ 15 then hear the word of the Lord, O remnant of Judah. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: If you set your faces to enter Egypt and go to live there, 16 then the sword that you fear shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt, and the famine of which you are afraid shall follow close after you to Egypt, and there you shall die. 17 All the men who set their faces to go to Egypt to live there shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. They shall have no remnant or survivor from the disaster that I will bring upon them.
18 “For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: As my anger and my wrath were poured out on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so my wrath will be poured out on you when you go to Egypt. You shall become an execration, a horror, a curse, and a taunt. You shall see this place no more. 19 The Lordhas said to you, O remnant of Judah, ‘Do not go to Egypt.’ Know for a certainty that I have warned you this day 20 that you have gone astray at the cost of your lives. For you sent me to the Lord your God, saying, ‘Pray for us to the Lord our God, and whatever the Lord our God says, declare to us and we will do it.’ 21 And I have this day declared it to you, but you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God in anything that he sent me to tell you. 22 Now therefore know for a certainty that you shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence in the place where you desire to go to live.”
43:1 When Jeremiah finished speaking to all the people all these words of the Lord their God, with which the Lord their God had sent him to them, 2 Azariah the son of Hoshaiah and Johanan the son of Kareah and all the insolent men said to Jeremiah, “You are telling a lie. The Lord our God did not send you to say, ‘Do not go to Egypt to live there,’ 3 but Baruch the son of Neriah has set you against us, to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans, that they may kill us or take us into exile in Babylon.” 4 So Johanan the son of Kareah and all the commanders of the forces and all the people did not obey the voice of the Lord, to remain in the land of Judah. 5 But Johanan the son of Kareah and all the commanders of the forces took all the remnant of Judah who had returned to live in the land of Judah from all the nations to which they had been driven— 6 the men, the women, the children, the princesses, and every person whom Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had left with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, son of Shaphan; also Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch the son of Neriah. 7 And they came into the land of Egypt, for they did not obey the voice of the Lord. And they arrived at Tahpanhes.
Good morning, everyone! This summer, we have been in a sermon series through the book of Jeremiah learning how there is hope for those who surrender to God and his plan. And today, we get to see that put to the test. So, before we dive into the text today, let me ask you – in your life when things go really, really wrong, what has been your gut instinct? Like when things get as bad as you think they could possibly get, what do you do? Do you tend to try to fix things immediately? Do you step back and assess the situation? Do you find yourself getting angry or confused? This morning, we will get a window into how the people in Jeremiah’s day would answer that question and then we’ll see how surrendering to God’s plan is far better than anything that we could come up with on our own. Before we do that, though, let’s pray.
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
On January 15, 2009, a US Airways flight left New York City’s LaGuardia Airport headed to Charlotte, North Carolina. However, within just a few minutes of taking off, the plane struck a flock of geese in the air, some of which flew into the engines, causing the engines to catch fire and shut down. After repeated failed attempts to restart the engines, the pilot in command, Chesley Sullenberger, or “Sully,” and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles, determined that they would need to land immediately. Sully issued a mayday call to the airport, telling them that their engines had failed and that they were turning back to LaGuardia. The air traffic controller told the airport to halt all departing flights and told Sully to land on Runway 13. Sully responded with one word: “unable.” Within seconds, Sully and Skiles determined that because of the lack of thrust from the engines and their rapidly dropping altitude, there was no chance that they could land at any of the nearby airports. Their one option: to land in the Hudson River. Just three minutes later, Sully had successfully landed the plane in the middle of the Hudson River and had begun what would be a safe evacuation of the plane. Not sure if you were doing the math on that timeline, but from takeoff to landing in the river was just about 5 minutes. Some of you may be familiar with that story from the Tom Hanks movie called “Sully” that came out in 2016 telling this very story.
But what many people don’t know is that later that spring, Sully was being interviewed by a national news anchor and was asked the question of how he was able to execute a near perfect water landing. He answered, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”[1] Another way of saying this is that in the nearly 20,000 hours of flight experience he had logged to that point, he had been preparing for the moment if and when the worst were to happen. So that in a split second, he would be able to react in the proper way.
And in many ways, the prophet Jeremiah has been attempting to do this for the people in Jerusalem. For 38 chapters, Jeremiah has been preparing his people for the worst-case scenario. For 38 chapters, he has been telling them, “Hey, Jerusalem is going to fall, and when it does, the way we can safely land this plane is by surrendering to God by surrendering to Babylon. Even when it doesn’t make sense, we follow God’s plans for us because his plans are to prosper us and not to harm us, to give us a hope and a future. Even in spite of being taken over and exiled.”
And here we are, in our passage today, at the tipping point. After 38 chapters, the city falls. How will the people respond? Well, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover today so in terms of where we’re going, I’m first going to summarize all the events surrounding the fall of the city, then we’ll see how the people respond. So, in short, we’ll look at the fall of the city and the foolishness of the people. Then we’ll end the sermon by talking about the faithfulness of God.
THE FALL OF THE CITY
First, let’s look at the fall of the city. The passage that was read for us, although it was a lot of verses, was just a small portion of the story. There are a few chapters right before this that have crucial information. So let me bring us up to speed. This is going to feel like a lot of information coming at us quickly, but we won’t be able to understand the weight of our passage or why the gospel is such good news for us without understanding the context, so let me ask you for extra attention for just a few minutes. I think it’ll pay off for us.
Last week, Pastor Ron preached a sermon about the way that King Jehoiakim totally rejected the Word of God. This king was not a good dude. He ended up dying, and when he died, his son Jehoiachin, who was also a bad dude, took the throne, but he only had the throne for a few months, until he was captured and taken to Babylon by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. King Jehoiachin ends up staying in a Babylonian prison for about 37 years. In the meantime, in his place, King Nebuchadnezzar put Jehoiachin’s uncle on the throne in Jerusalem, a man named Zedekiah. King Zedekiah, you probably guessed, was also a bad dude. He was not only rebellious against God, but also against Nebuchadnezzar. And after 11 years of putting up with King Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar decided to bring his army to Jerusalem to lay siege to it.
Now, here is the interesting thing. For years, Jeremiah had been warning King Zedekiah that this was coming. He told him multiple times that the king of Babylon would come and attack. And he also told him in Jeremiah 38,
“thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, the God of Israel: If you will surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then your life will be spared, and this city shall not be burned with fire, and you and your house shall live. But if you do not surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then this city shall be given into the hand of the Chaldeans, and they shall burn it with fire, and you shall not escape from their hand” (Jer. 38:17-18).
So, Zedekiah has been warned. Yet, when Nebuchadnezzar does come, Zedekiah seems totally caught off guard! He and his soldiers and his family scramble to escape from the city in the middle of the night and make a run for it. But Nebuchadnezzar’s army catches up to Zedekiah and his posse, lines up all his sons in front of him, and Nebuchadnezzar himself slaughters each of Zedekiah’s sons in front of him, and then gouges out Zedekiah’s eyes so the last thing he ever sees is his sons being slaughtered. Then Zedekiah and all of the people living in Jerusalem get captured and taken to Babylon, and the city of Jerusalem is left in shambles, the army leaving little but smoking rubble behind them. The only people that remain in what is left of the city are “some of the poor people who owned nothing” (Jer. 39:10) and the governor that Nebuchadnezzar left to rule over them. Cheery story, right?
Well, Jeremiah is among the people who get taken to Babylon, and on their way to Babylon, Jeremiah is given in custody to the captain of the guard, who gives Jeremiah a choice: come with the people to Babylon or stay with the poor in Jerusalem. Jeremiah decides to do the harder thing and return to Jerusalem. So, Jeremiah gets back to Jerusalem, and when he does, he finds the people revolting against the governor who Nebuchadnezzar put over them. Things get so bad that this guy named Ishmael murders the governor. The people then freak out and get scared that Nebuchadnezzar is going to come back in revenge since they just killed the guy that he just put in charge. So, they get to a point where they think they’ve got to get out of dodge. They don’t want to go to Babylon, they don’t think they can stay in Jerusalem, so they decide to go to Egypt. And that is basically my summary of Jeremiah 39-41. It’s a wild few chapters. And all of that leads us to the passage that was just read for us.
To put it in terms of the story we started with, the people have left LaGuardia, and they just got hit by the flock of geese. Now, the question is whether or not they have been listening as Jeremiah has been preparing them for when the worst-case scenario would happen. Will they safely land the plane?
THE FOOLISHNESS OF THE PEOPLE
So, that’s the fall of the city. Now, as we press on we’ll see the foolishness of the people. So, spoiler alert: they don’t land the plane. Look with me at Jeremiah 42:1-6.
Then all the commanders of the forces, and Johanan the son of Kareah and Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah, and all the people from the least to the greatest, came near 2 and said to Jeremiah the prophet, “Let our plea for mercy come before you, and pray to the Lord your God for us, for all this remnant—because we are left with but a few, as your eyes see us— 3 that the Lord your God may show us the way we should go, and the thing that we should do.” 4 Jeremiah the prophet said to them, “I have heard you. Behold, I will pray to the Lord your God according to your request, and whatever the Lord answers you I will tell you. I will keep nothing back from you.” 5 Then they said to Jeremiah, “May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act according to all the word with which the Lord your God sends you to us. 6 Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we are sending you, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God.”
My wife Hannah and I have been married for three years now, as of last month. I couldn’t be more thankful. I’ve learned so much in such a short period of time. And one of the things that I have learned from marriage is this: sometimes, when people ask your opinion on something, they don’t actually want your opinion. Let me give an example. Imagine, hypothetically, Hannah and I are getting ready on a Sunday morning before church. And, hypothetically, she looks at me and says, “do you think I should wear the brown sandals with the white straps or the brown sandals with the cream-colored straps?” Now, many of you have learned from experience, whether through friendship or marriage, that the correct answer to that question is probably something along the lines of, “well, which ones were you leaning toward?” Why? Because 9 times out of 10, she’s not looking for my opinion on what shoes to wear, she’s looking for me to affirm the opinion she’s already made.
Something very similar is happening here in this passage, except the stakes are far higher than sandals. At first glance, we see the people ask Jeremiah to pray about whether or not they should go to Egypt, and we think, “yes! Finally! They’re turning to the Lord!” And yet it becomes painfully obvious that they aren’t actually looking for direction from the Lord, but instead they’re looking for the Lord to bless the decision they’ve already made.
How often do we do this? Where in our hearts, we have already decided on our course of action, and only pray about it as an afterthought? How often do we pray for God’s guidance, but only in order to baptize our own plans and call them God’s? And just to press on this a little bit harder, if my heart is anything like yours, I know that I far too often make decisions without praying at all. So, hear this from someone who needs to take this to heart as much as anyone: we have got to do a better job of inviting the Lord into our decisions. And one of the best ways to do this is to involve trusted Christian community in our decision-making process, whether that is our community group, or pastors, or other close brothers or sisters in Christ.
I was recently listening to a podcast, and one of the guests was describing an experience that he had in a community group he was a part of, where one family that was also part of their community group came to one of their gatherings and announced that they had decided to move to another state and asked that the group pray for that transition to go smoothly. The group agreed to be praying, and over the next few days, separately, a few members of the group began feeling like something about the situation just wasn’t right. After a week, everyone in the group was contacting each other saying the exact same thing: something about this isn’t right. So, the next time the group got together, the group shared with the family that they were concerned about this move. The family then admitted that they really hadn’t prayed about it at all, and certainly hadn’t brought trusted Christian community into the decision-making process. The family began to pray and ended up agreeing that they didn’t think it was actually the right time to move. A few years later, they began considering a move again, but this time bathed the decision in prayer and involved their community in that prayer and decision-making process. And that time the whole group was in agreement that that was the right move.
I tell this story to just encourage us, whether that is our community group, or pastors, or other close brothers or sisters in Christ, when we buy a house or change jobs or move across the country, let’s bring others into the process. Or, if you are a member here and you think the Lord is leading you to another church, talk to one of our pastors about that. Not so they can convince you not to go, necessarily, but so they can help you discern what may be hard to see on your own. We should not be making big life decisions in a vacuum. If you were here last week, you may remember that Pastor Ron encouraged us to remember that one of the ways that God communicates to us is through other Christian brothers and sisters. So often, others are immune from the emotional baggage that we can carry into so many of our decisions, making our discernment foggy. Because of that, trusted Christian brothers and sisters have an ability to affirm or challenge plans we might be sensing the Lord leading us into. And as we do that, it’s important to recognize that both asking the Lord for his direction and accepting what he says are both moments of surrender for us, and as we’ve been seeing in the book of Jeremiah, there is hope for those who surrender.
So, to return to our passage, although the motives may be wrong, the people display at least a small amount of wisdom in involving Jeremiah, asking him to pray. He does pray, and after 10 days, it becomes very clear, the people should for sure not go to Egypt. God says this to the people (vv. 10-12):
10 If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you, and not pluck you up; for I relent of the disaster that I did to you. 11 Do not fear the king of Babylon, of whom you are afraid. Do not fear him, declares the Lord, for I am with you, to save you and to deliver you from his hand. 12 I will grant you mercy, that he may have mercy on you and let you remain in your own land
So it is clear from these verses that they are to stay in Jerusalem. And then in the next 10 verses, God warns them that if they go to Egypt, the army they fear will take them over, they will be plagued with famine, and all of them will die there. And in order to be totally clear, God repeats himself. He says all of that twice, even saying explicitly, “Do not go to Egypt. Know for a certainty that I have warned you this day that you have gone astray at the cost of your lives.”
So, in short, to stay in Jerusalem = blessings and life. To go to Egypt = curses and death.
This idea of going to Egypt as bringing about curses and death is not just limited to the book of Jeremiah. All throughout the Old Testament, we see this theme of going to Egypt as picturing a reversal of the exodus. So in the exodus, God’s people, who had been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years were miraculously led out of slavery by God into the land he had promised them. But throughout the Old Testament we see that although God had saved his people out of slavery to Egypt, they keep wanting to go back. In spite of God’s blessing and salvation, his people choose to return to the place of their slavery. It happens over and over and over again.
And that’s exactly what happens here. After Jeremiah tells the people that God was very clear that staying in Jerusalem means blessing and life for them and that going to Egypt means death and famine and destruction, do you remember how they respond? Look at the beginning of chapter 43.
“When Jeremiah finished speaking to all the people all these words of the Lord their God, with which the Lord their God had sent him to them, 2 Azariah the son of Hoshaiah and Johanan the son of Kareah and all the insolent men said to Jeremiah, ‘You are telling a lie’” (Jer. 43:1–2).
Do you see what’s going on here? They had already made up their mind to go, but they wanted God’s stamp of approval. Yet when he doesn’t give his stamp of approval, they’re at a crossroads. Either obey God or keep heading down the path they started on. Either turn around and head back to Jerusalem or keep going to Egypt.
The heartbreaking thing is the people go. They go to Egypt totally disregarding what God said. They go because regardless of what Jeremiah said that God said, in their minds Egypt is a safe, comfortable place where they can avoid hunger and war. What they are doing is building their lives on false hope and attempting to find earthly solutions to huge spiritual issues going on in their hearts.
To bring it into our own context, it is as if God is telling the people to remain faithful and trust him even when things seem like they are totally out of control, yet they hitch their hope to a political candidate to bring about a better reality. Or they completely jettison gospel-inspired generosity in order to hoard money for themselves when the economy starts to take a downturn, just to name two temptations for us. These things can be so easy to do because actually trusting God when things get uncomfortable is so hard.
The people choose what is easy and tangible over what is right yet requires faith. To put it another way, they choose convenience over conviction. Again, how much are these people so like us? How often do we, in spite of our salvation and the blessing that is promised to us, choose convenience and comfort over the conviction of what God says is right? How often do we return to our place of slavery? Let me ask you, do you remember where you came from? Do you remember the sin that once held you captive? Do you remember Egypt? How often are we tempted to run right back to our chains? And not only that, but how often do we refuse to believe God when he tells us that our chains aren’t good for us? Whether it is porn or apathy or pleasure seeking or overvaluing financial security or drunkenness or idolizing family or even just following the Christian way of life with no regard for Jesus, whatever it is that grips your heart and pulls you away from gospel of grace, we come up with so many reasons to run right back to Egypt. We make so many excuses and think that either God is lying to us when he says our chains are not good for us, or he’s holding out on us, or we find ways to reinterpret what is perfectly clear in the Bible so that God approves of our lifestyle.
This is precisely what the apostle Paul is warning against in the book of Galatians when he writes, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1).
But in a total reversal of the exodus, the people choose Egypt. And when they go to Egypt, they take Jeremiah with them. And while we hear more of the words of Jeremiah through the rest of this book, this is really the end of what we know of his story. The last thing we know of him is that he is taken to Egypt and probably dies there. But while this is the end of the story for Jeremiah it isn’t the end of the story of the Bible.
CONCLUSION: THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD
Because while zooming in on this story shows us the fall of the city and the foolishness of the people, when we zoom out to the broader story of the Bible we see the faithfulness of God.
Jeremiah was a prophet who served God with his life, and who ultimately was taken to Egypt and died there. But the prophet Jeremiah points us forward to the true Prophet of God, Jesus Christ. You see, hundreds of years after Jeremiah lived, after the Babylonian empire, and after King Nebuchadnezzar, when Jesus was just a toddler, there was another king named Herod who saw this baby Jesus as a threat. So, he ordered that all boys 2 years old and younger to be killed in order to eliminate this threat. Yet an angel of the Lord appeared to Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph in a dream and told him to take Jesus and Mary to Egypt to keep Jesus safe. After King Herod died, the family returned to their hometown of Nazareth. The Gospel writer Matthew comments on this, saying that “this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (Matt. 2:15; cf. Hos. 11:1).
This passage in Jeremiah is incredibly sad. It is heartbreaking to see all of the bloodshed, disregard for God, and just total direct disobedience to what the Lord commands. But here is the good news of the gospel where we see the faithfulness of God. In spite of you and I constantly choosing to return to the sins that once bound us like dogs returning to our vomit – in spite of God’s people constantly choosing to return to Egypt, Jesus himself has gone into Egypt in order to bring us out of slavery once and for all. In Jesus going to Egypt, he is showing us that he has brought about the final exodus of God’s people out of our slavery to sin.
And we see this reality displayed most specifically on the cross. On the cross, Jesus Christ entered into the deepest depths of our brokenness, taking on himself the curse and death from the rebellion and waywardness of his people, putting it to death forever. In his resurrection, Christ has given those same people victory, breaking our chains and carrying us out of Egypt on his back, leading us to the promised land of freedom.
That journey from slavery to freedom is an exodus that anyone is invited to join in on. Apart from Christ, we are weak, wounded, and wayward slaves, trapped in patterns of sin and bondage in Egypt. But today we can turn to the living Jesus who offers us freedom and life and blessing. In Christ, there is hope for those who surrender.
Let’s pray . . .
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/capt-sully-worried-about-airline-industry/
Sermon Discussion Questions
Who are the core people in your life that make up your trusted Christian community?
Have you done a good job in bringing your Christian community into big decisions you’ve made in your life? How will you do this in the future?
What are ways that you are tempted to put your hope in earthly things (political leaders, financial security, relationships, etc.) rather than the good news of Jesus in order to bring comfort and peace?
Do you remember your “Egypt” (patterns of sin you’ve been enslaved to in the past)? As you feel comfortable, share your testimony with others and name specific ways you have seen the Lord break the chains of sin in your life. If you have not yet experienced victory in these sin patterns, take time to pray together that the Lord would deliver you from those things.
