Sowing & Reaping
8/5/26 Bible Thought (Jeremiah 43-44)
Main Idea: Accepting responsibility and heeding God’s Word are the first steps towards change.
A Look at the Text:
The people of Judah were hardhearted and hardheaded.
The prophet Jeremiah had warned them about going to Egypt, and in today’s text we see that they didn’t listen to him at all. In fact, two of the leaders accused Jeremiah of lying, thinking they were going to be delivered into the hands of the Babylonians if they listened to him (Jer. 43:2-3). As such, the whole remnant escaped to Egypt, and they even took Jeremiah with them (Jer. 43:5-7).
There, Jeremiah received another message from the Lord that the remnant of Judah couldn’t hide from Nebuchadnezzar even in Egypt (Jer. 43:11). Just as God delivered His people in Jerusalem into Nebuchadnezzar’s hands, so He could do the same in Egypt (Jer. 44:30). He is God of all, and they could not escape His purposes.
The problem, once again, was simply that the people didn’t obey God and follow in His ways. Even in Egypt, the people fell once again into syncretistic practices and served the idols of Egypt! (Jer. 44:8-9). They didn’t fear the Lord or walk in His ways (Jer. 44:10). They hadn’t learned anything from the destruction of Jerusalem.
Even more, the people blatantly shared that they wouldn’t listen to God, concluding that their lives were better when they were idolaters! (Jer. 44:16-19). To this, Jeremiah pointed out that it was for those same sins that they were made a desolation (Jer. 44:23). Sadly, a day was coming when they would find out whose word would come true: theirs, or God’s (Jer. 44:28).
Bringing it Home:
The greatest tragedy in Judah was not the Babylonian devastation of the land, but the perpetual disobedience of the Judean hearts. The remnant in Egypt attributed the glory days to idols and believed that if they returned to idolatry, their problems would go away. Tragically, they hadn’t learned anything.
As human beings, we can prolong problems in our own lives by our unwillingness to accept that we are the problem. People have, from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, a horrible practice of shifting blame onto others and ignoring the plain truth that sometimes our problems are actually our problem.
God has set up the world with principles of sowing and reaping (see Gal. 6:7-9). If we don’t like what we are reaping, we can blame others again and again and keep getting the same harvest. Or, alternatively, we could learn from our mistakes and sow different seed.
God isn’t going to change His position, but He invites us to change ours. Ultimately, we will see that His Word will stand and ours will not. Will we learn along the way?
Challenge:
Is my first response to conviction to shift blame or to accept responsibility?