Our Agenda or God's Will?

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Opening Prayer

Heavenly Father, I ask for wisdom and courage. May any fear and doubts I harbor be banished by Your invading presence.

Read JEREMIAH 43:1-13

^[1] When Jeremiah had finished telling the people all the words of the LORD their God-everything the LORD had sent him to tell them- ^[2] Azariah son of Hoshaiah and Johanan son of Kareah and all the arrogant men said to Jeremiah, “You are lying! The LORD our God has not sent you to say, ‘You must not go to Egypt to settle there.’ ^[3] But Baruch son of Neriah is inciting you against us to hand us over to the Babylonians, so they may kill us or carry us into exile to Babylon.” ^[4] So Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers and all the people disobeyed the LORD’s command to stay in the land of Judah. ^[5] Instead, Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers led away all the remnant of Judah who had come back to live in the land of Judah from all the nations where they had been scattered. ^[6] They also led away all those whom Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard had left with Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan-the men, the women, the children and the king’s daughters. And they took Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah along with them. ^[7] So they entered Egypt in disobedience to the LORD and went as far as Tahpanhes. ^[8] In Tahpanhes the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: ^[9] “While the Jews are watching, take some large stones with you and bury them in clay in the brick pavement at the entrance to Pharaoh’s palace in Tahpanhes. ^[10] Then say to them, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: I will send for my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and I will set his throne over these stones I have buried here; he will spread his royal canopy above them. ^[11] He will come and attack Egypt, bringing death to those destined for death, captivity to those destined for captivity, and the sword to those destined for the sword. ^[12] He will set fire to the temples of the gods of Egypt; he will burn their temples and take their gods captive. As a shepherd picks his garment clean of lice, so he will pick Egypt clean and depart. ^[13] There in the temple of the sun in Egypt he will demolish the sacred pillars and will burn down the temples of the gods of Egypt.'”

Meditate

We must be prayerful and careful about the choices we make. Seemingly small decisions can have huge consequences.

Think Further

Believers can err in their attitude to prayer. Johanan certainly believed in God and that Jeremiah was God’s prophet. Johanan was not essentially a bad man but his request for prayer (42:3) sounds like calculated self-interest. He believed that his own plan for his refugee people was right before he sought prayer. What he wanted was not God’s will but affirmation of himself, bringing God onto his side and thus, no doubt reinforcing his strategy and his reputation with the people.

Few of us may ever have the fate of so many people in our hands, but we can all stubbornly insist on our preconceived ideas. Church history shows, time and again, powerful church leaders obstinately maintaining their own agendas, even convincing themselves that their preferred course of action is God’s will.

So the refugees go on their way to Egypt, Jeremiah with them. They reach Tahpanhes, not far across the border in the north-east of the Nile Delta. There, Jeremiah was called yet again to pantomime, as he had already done with the belt, the clay pot and the yoke. Symbolic action was a common prophetic technique (Ezek. 4:9-15; Zech. 6:9-11; Hos. 1:2). Jeremiah creates a symbolic site for the throne of the future Babylonian conqueror. His prophecy of doom is not against the Jews but Egypt, which will also fall in time to Babylon. Yet, the meaning for the Jews was clear. They have not chosen the safe haven they so willfully imagined, fulfilling Amos’s parable long ago about the man who escaped a lion and then a bear only to be bitten by a snake (Amos 5:19). Johanan had blindly led the Jews to a place they assumed would be secure, but in the end it would become the place of their death. Our own choices for our futures may likewise be blind. Many churches lost their smart investments in the global financial crisis. Their ultimate security lies only with God.

Apply

“Don’t bother me with the facts, I have already made up my mind!” Does this describe your intercessory prayers? How can you change your prayers for the better?

Closing prayer

Lord, help me to discern Your answers to my prayers and to respond rightly, even when the response seems hard to me.

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