Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague, but whoever goes over to the Babylonians will live. (Jer. 38:2)
Jeremiah had good reason for being a weeping, balky prophet. Four kings succeeded Josiah, and each of them gave the prophet a hard time. One king scheduled a private reading of Jeremiah's prophecies in his winter apartment. As each scroll was read, the king casually hacked it to pieces with a knife and tossed it into the fireplace (36:23). On other occasions the prophet himself was beaten and put in stocks, or locked in a dungeon, or, as this chapter relates, thrown in a well. The best state Jeremiah could hope for was house arrest or confinement in the king's courtyard.
The mistreatment only served to harden Jeremiah's resolve. He would curse his tormentors even as they released him from the stocks. Evidently, he reserved his fears and doubts for God's ears alone.
The events in this chapter took place in Jerusalem, in the midst of a terrible two-year siege by the Babylonians. The city's starving residents, barely clinging to survival, had resorted to cannibalism. City officials were frantically trying to improve morale and whip up courage. Little wonder they objected to Jeremiah's dour advice: "We're going to lose anyway - might as well defect over the walls, or open the gates and let the Babylonians in."
The following chapter (39) tells of Jeremiah's prophecies coming true. Babylon's army did breach the walls, and then captured and tortured the weak King Zedekiah. The conquerors treated Jeremiah with respect, however, having heard of his counsel to surrender.
Not long after the fall of Jerusalem, a gang of Israelites rebelled against their captors and ran to Egypt, with the angry prophet in tow. They thought they had reached safety. But in his last recorded words, Jeremiah, a browbeaten seventy-year-old, announced that those refugees would meet a tragic end. They ignored him - just like everyone else in Jeremiah's hapless career.
Life Question: What do you think Jeremiah would have said about the "prosperity theology" some Christians preach today?
