Jeremiah 43: 1 – 13
They want to ‘Bake’ their lives better
1 Now it happened, when Jeremiah had stopped speaking to all the people all the words of the LORD their God, for which the LORD their God had sent him to them, all these words, 2 that Azariah the son of Hoshaiah, Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the proud men spoke, saying to Jeremiah, “You speak falsely! The LORD our God has not sent you to say, ‘Do not go to Egypt to dwell 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 put us to death or carry us away captive to Babylon.” 4 So Johanan the son of Kareah, all the captains of the forces, and all the people would not obey the voice of the LORD, to remain in the land of Judah. 5 But Johanan the son of Kareah and all the captains of the forces took all the remnant of Judah who had returned to dwell in the land of Judah, from all nations where they had been driven— 6 men, women, children, the king’s daughters, and every person whom Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had left with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, and Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch the son of Neriah. 7 So they went to the land of Egypt, for they did not obey the voice of the LORD. And they went as far as Tahpanhes. 8 Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah in Tahpanhes, saying, 9 “Take large stones in your hand, and hide them in the sight of the men of Judah, in the clay in the brick courtyard which is at the entrance to Pharaoh’s house in Tahpanhes; 10 and say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will send and bring Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will set his throne above these stones that I have hidden. And he will spread his royal pavilion over them. 11 When he comes, he shall strike the land of Egypt and deliver to death those appointed for death, and to captivity those appointed for captivity, and to the sword those appointed for the sword. 12 I will kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt, and he shall burn them and carry them away captive. And he shall array himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd puts on his garment, and he shall go out from there in peace. 13 He shall also break the sacred pillars of Beth Shemesh that are in the land of Egypt; and the houses of the gods of the Egyptians he shall burn with fire.”?
You are at your wits end in the way the path of life has led you. You want your life to change.
There are three ways to take into consideration on making this happen.
You might;
1. Take time a think out all the possibilities and steps you need to do before taking the leap of change.
2. You can take some time and consult with our Holy God on what you should do.
3. You can just at the spur of the moment just go and make it happen.
Ready for a change? You are the one who wants to make a list and check it twice. Here's how you can make it happen.
If you're not where you want to be in your career--or, for that matter, in your life--never let yourself believe change is impossible. Don't allow your future to be limited by your age or your situation; stop being afraid of what might go wrong and start getting excited about what could go right.
Here are 10 ways you can begin right now to steer yourself toward a more fulfilled and happy life:
1. Address the choices you've made in the past and change the choices you'll make in the future.
Life is made up of choices--some we regret, some we're proud of, some that will hurt us. Everything in your career and your life reflects a choice you have made. If you want different results, start making different choices.
2. Speak up with honesty and stop holding back what you think.
People may believe that honesty won't win you many friends--but even if that were true, the friends you make with honesty will be the right ones. Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and the ability to perform cannot exist.
3. Forgo being a perfectionist. Perfect doesn't exist.
Once you realize perfect doesn't exist, you can ease up on yourself. There's no harm in being wrong or making mistakes, if you're willing to make corrections. Just be yourself, flaws and all, and let people see the real you. Each of us is an imperfect human being, aware that we can't push away our failures and our flaws.
4. Acknowledge your losses and move on to your success.
Remember, winners aren't people who never fail but people who never quit. It's important to never let success get to your head or failure to your heart. The secret to getting ahead is to acknowledge your failures and have the wisdom to apply them to new opportunities.
5. Remember that it's not how many mistakes you've made but what you learn from them that defines you.
Accept that you won't always make the right decisions. You'll mess up, sometimes badly. But your mistakes don’t mean you've failed, only that you're trying and learning in life. If you are not making mistakes it means you are not trying hard enough. When you learn from them, mistakes have the power to turn you into something better than you were before.
6. Forgive those who have hurt you but change who you surround yourself with.
You can improve your life just by changing the people you surround yourself with. If there are some who have brought negativity or hurt into your life, accept that those actions cannot be changed or undone or forgotten--only forgiven. Take it as a lesson learned and surround yourself with people who support you, guide you and make you better than you already are.
7. Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go higher than you think.
What you think is what you become. And the sad truth is that that most of us are our own worst enemy, allowing our negative thoughts to hold us back. If you load up on positivity and great thoughts, you can create positive and great things for yourself. If you want to change and change fast, start by changing how you think.
8. Find success at the edge of your comfort zone.
Regardless of our hesitation or fear, humans need change to be happy. Try to do something you've never done every single day. Don't be afraid to try new things and stand in your discomfort zone. If you want something you've never had, you must do something you've never done.
9. Don't compare your own life with anyone else's.
A big source of unhappiness is the idea that other people's lives are better or easier than yours. But when you compare your situation to that of others, you're comparing your complete reality to their surface. No matter how fantastic, how happy, how brilliant everything may seem on the outside, you never know what's going on the inside If you find yourself being jealous of someone, remember that person has struggled with hardships and insecurities just as you have
10. Eliminate the unnecessary and cultivate the essentials.
Think of all the things in your life that are important to you--the essentials--then eliminate everything else. This system helps you simplify your life and see what you should focus on. It can work for anything you have in your life, professional or personal. And just the act of letting things go will help you to simplify, to focus on what's important, and to build the life you want.
As you can see there is a lot in trying to do all that you can to make a right decision in making your life better. In the book of James chapter 4 we read, “13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” 16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.”
Our Holy Master has said to you and me as recorded in the book of Philippians chapter 1, “being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ”
Take it to Him and ask if a change is according to His will. If it is then things will go smoothly.
However, if you just want to go ahead and do what you want you will not make but ‘bake’ your life better.
In our last study the leaders of the remnant of survivors wanted Jeremiah to seek our Holy Father God Yahweh whether to go to Egypt. Jeremiah sought the Lord’s advice and He told them not to leave the land but to trust Him to protect them. They refused to listen to the Lord’s advice and went to Egypt anyway.
They settle in Tahpanhes, Egypt. Our Holy Scripture today will highlight that this area was home to a brick kiln. We will learn that the refusal to listen to our Holy Master will not make their live better but in fact cause their lives to go through intense heat and pain.
Even as Jeremiah had been giving to the people ‘the word of YHWH’ he had recognized from their reaction that they were going to reject it. And so, it proved true. A group of ‘proud men’, which included the leaders of the people, came to Jeremiah and accused him of prophesying at the behest of Baruch, the son of Neriah, who had been Jeremiah’s assistant and was a man of high standing. And they then subsequently sought refuge in Egypt, in the border town of Tahpanhes. This had clearly always been their intention, whatever word from YHWH Jeremiah brought them. So once again Judah proved itself unwilling to obey the voice of YHWH.
We must not underestimate the significance of this event. YHWH had made a clear offer to Judah to re-establish it in accordance with His promises in chapter 31.28, by ‘building it and planting it’. This was thus an open and direct rejection of the new covenant. It will be noted that they did not attack Jeremiah directly. They did so through Baruch, suggesting that Jeremiah’s influence over many of the people was still large. By this means they justified to themselves their disobedience to the word of YHWH.
How easily we can find ourselves doing the same thing that these leaders did. We do not directly refuse to obey God. Instead we find some way of arguing our way round what He demands to justify our own position.
1 Now it happened, when Jeremiah had stopped speaking to all the people all the words of the LORD their God, for which the LORD their God had sent him to them, all these words,
Jeremiah had brought to them the word of ‘YHWH their God’ (repeated twice), and that they had listened while he pronounced the whole. It was a momentous situation. Judah were once more being faced up to the question as to whether they were truly willing to respond to YHWH as ‘their’ God by obeying His word through Jeremiah, as they had solemnly promised to do (42.2-5).
2 that Azariah the son of Hoshaiah, Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the proud men spoke, saying to Jeremiah, “You speak falsely! The LORD our God has not sent you to say, ‘Do not go to Egypt to dwell 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 put us to death or carry us away captive to Babylon.”
Up to this point Johanan had been the prominent one but now the leadership is taken by Azariah the son of Hoshaiah. The ‘arrogant/proud men’ were those whose self-pride made them exalt themselves against YHWH, they were the ‘discontents’. It may simply be a way of describing the whole attitude of the group of leading men.
They came as a group to Jeremiah and informed him that in their view he was speaking falsely, and not bringing them the word of YHWH at all. They refused to believe that YHWH had commanded them not to go to Egypt. It may be significant that they altered what Jeremiah had said, replacing ‘not at this time’ with ‘not at all’. This has ever been the method of the deceiver of men, right from the time of his activity in the Plain of Eden.
They claimed that he had simply been influenced by Baruch, the son of Neriah, his former clerk and assistant, who was also with the party (verse 6). Baruch was clearly a man from an influential family, and an aristocrat, who undoubtedly owed his freedom to the fact that he had been Jeremiah’s close supporter (his brother Seraiah had been transported to Babylon (51.59) and was designated as a ‘prince’ or ‘noble’). He is rebuked elsewhere for a certain tendency to seek greatness and influence (45.5), a danger for us all. This may suggest that unlike Jeremiah he had taken advantage of Nebuchadnezzar’s goodwill to further himself and his ambitions, something for which he had to be rebuked. In Jewish tradition he is depicted as the author of the apocryphal book of Baruch and is portrayed as having lived in Babylon for a period, and as having had influence there. However, that might be, Jeremiah is being accused of being influenced by Baruch with a view to Nebuchadnezzar being able to gain his revenge on them. The words bear all the marks of being an excuse, but they do indicate how sure they were that Nebuchadnezzar would seek to do just that.
Most of them had for a long period in the past been prejudiced against Jeremiah, considering him to be a false prophet. In spite of the fact that what he had prophesied came true, and that he had refused to go to Babylon and had remained among them, there was that within them that would always hold Jeremiah in suspicion of being a Babylonian collaborator
4 So Johanan the son of Kareah, all the captains of the forces, and all the people would not obey the voice of the LORD, to remain in the land of Judah.
The consequence was that the commanders of the Judean forces, headed by Johanan, together with ‘all the people’ did not obey YHWH’s voice. They refused to continue living in the land of Judah with the constant threat of Nebuchadnezzar’s vengeance hanging over them. There is a reminder here for all of us that before changing our whereabouts we should consider the will of God.
5 But Johanan the son of Kareah and all the captains of the forces took all the remnant of Judah who had returned to dwell in the land of Judah, from all nations where they had been driven— 6 men, women, children, the king’s daughters, and every person whom Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had left with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, and Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch the son of Neriah.
The whole group, ‘the remnant of Judah’, decamped and set off for Egypt. It is difficult to know how far the description of those who went with them takes in all the inhabitants of Judah. The description certainly covers the men who were in the various fighting groups who had been guerillas, no doubt along with their families, (they would see themselves as liable to retribution), together with former refugees who had returned to Judah and could be there ‘without permission’ (40.11). And it includes all who had been living in Mizpah under the protection of Gedaliah, who could be liable to suspicion, especially daughters of the royal house who could be made an example of. And it includes Jeremiah and Baruch who were probably forced to go with them (even though they may have been quite willing to go so as to cater to the spiritual needs of the people) . But there would be many elsewhere in Judah who had survived the invasion, and among them would be many of ‘the poor of the land’ to whom Nebuzaradan had given land who were no doubt scattered throughout Judah (39.10). None of them had much to fear from Nebuchadnezzar’s reprisals. The land may well have remained fairly well populated, as in fact is required by the fact that when Nebuchadnezzar did arrive he was able to take into exile 745 of the leading men in Judah (51.30), no doubt with their families.
7 So they went to the land of Egypt, for they did not obey the voice of the LORD. And they went as far as Tahpanhes.
So the refugees made for Egypt, and it is emphasized that this was because ‘they did not obey the voice of YHWH’. And when they came to the border town of Tahpanhes they settled there.
Jeremiah no doubt saw it as ironic that after over 600 years of ‘freedom’ from Egypt God’s nominal people had returned there. They had by their own free choice returned to the subjection from which they had been delivered. We can compare how Hosea, in fact, insisted that their heart had always been there (Hosea 11). That was why God’s initial step after the birth of His Son, was to bring Him out of Egypt (Matthew 2.15) finally fulfilling deliverance from Egypt and reversing what had happened here. Men’s hearts have to be ‘delivered from Egypt’.
8 Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah in Tahpanhes, saying, 9 “Take large stones in your hand, and hide them in the sight of the men of Judah, in the clay in the brick courtyard which is at the entrance to Pharaoh’s house in Tahpanhes; 10 and say to them, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: “Behold, I will send and bring Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will set his throne above these stones that I have hidden. And he will spread his royal pavilion over them. 11 When he comes, he shall strike the land of Egypt and deliver to death those appointed for death, and to captivity those appointed for captivity, and to the sword those appointed for the sword. 12 I will kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt, and he shall burn them and carry them away captive. And he shall array himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd puts on his garment, and he shall go out from there in peace. 13 He shall also break the sacred pillars of Beth Shemesh that are in the land of Egypt; and the houses of the gods of the Egyptians he shall burn with fire.”?
The word of YHWH was not limited to Palestine. And thus, it came to Jeremiah in Egypt. God was still concerned to speak to those who claimed to be His people, even though they were living in disobedience, and worse. God’s word knows no limitations.
Jeremiah was called on to involve himself in another acted out prophecy, this time by taking ‘large stones’ and hiding them in mortar in the ‘brickwork’ (or ‘brick-kiln’) in front of ‘Pharaoh’s house’ in Tahpanhes. The ‘king’s house’ in Tahpanhes was not one of Pharaoh’s regular palaces but would rather have been a government building, the administrative center for the area, although available for Pharaoh’s use when he paid a state visit.
If the house of Pharaoh was in process of being restored (which would explain the presence of the available mortar) there could well have been a brick-kiln in front of it, even if at some distance, and being a raised place it could later have been used by Nebuchadnezzar as a place on which to set up a throne, having covered it with a covering, so that he could be seen by the crowds of people who surrounded and acclaimed him. Reference to a brick-kiln would certainly fit in with the idea of YHWH’s burning anger against His disobedient people, who were perhaps beginning to think of themselves as ‘large stones’ because they were what remained of Judah, and with Nebuchadnezzar’s activities in ‘burning the houses of the gods of Egypt’ as described in verses 12-13. And it is significant that he would do this as ‘YHWH’s servant’ (verse 10).
Nebuchadnezzar will come and smite the land of Egypt bringing death, captivity and sword on its inhabitants, including the hapless Judeans. Rather than escaping death, captivity and sword by their flight the fugitives had plunged themselves right into them. They would each receive their inevitable end, along with those who had welcomed them.
Here we need to take note of the change of person to ‘I’. YHWH Himself was involved in this. Not only the people but also the gods in whom they trusted would be humiliated, for YHWH Himself would kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt (YHWH’s brick kiln?). So in the face of YHWH’s anger the gods of Egypt were no safer than the people. The Egyptian gods and their houses would be burned with fire, whilst the gods themselves would also be carried off as trophies into captivity. Thus, the very gods whom they had trusted to keep them from captivity would themselves be taken captive. Josephus later confirms that at this time the Jewish captives were carried off to Babylon.
Furthermore Nebuchadnezzar, as YHWH’s servant, would ‘array himself with the land of Egypt as a shepherd puts on his robe’. Egypt was no match for the one chosen by YHWH to carry out His purposes. It was simply rather an accessory, a cloak for YHWH’s shepherd, to be tossed casually around his shoulders.
While the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar was rather a punitive expedition in the face of different Egyptian activities against their possessions, than a full-scale invasion, it was totally successful and resulted in a peace treaty between himself and Ahmose II, which no doubt acknowledged Babylonian rights in Syria, Cyprus and Palestine, after which Nebuchadnezzar retired in peace, his aims accomplished.
The outstanding feature of Nebuchadnezzar’s activities as YHWH’s servant would be the breaking of the famous pillars in Beth-shemesh (house of the sun) in Egypt. Even the sun god was helpless before YHWH’s servant. This probably refers to the famous temple in Heliopolis, (twenty miles north-east of Memphis) one of the pillars of which is still standing while another can still be seen in Rome where it was taken by the later victorious Romans. There were also numerous other pillars, and these were accompanied by huge statues. It was an exceedingly prestigious Temple, and no doubt seen by many Egyptians as inviolable. But it would fall at the hands of YHWH’s servant. And the temple at Heliopolis would not suffer alone, for many houses of the gods of Egypt would be consumed by fire before the victorious advance of Nebuchadnezzar, YHWH’s servant. The gods of Egypt would be humiliated, as they had been in the time of Moses.
