Jeremiah 28 And it happened in the same year, at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year and in the fifth month,
So just to set the stage a little, this Zedekiah is the son of Josiah, who was the last "good" king of Judah. Zedekiah was put on the throne after one of his brothers was king and carried off captive to Egypt. The second brother to be king, gave away a lot of the people as slaves to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and looted the Lord's Temple to buy Babylonian protection, which didn't help much since Babylon invaded and he died in the siege of Jerusalem. His son was king for a few months until the Babylonians took the city and the temple, plundered them both again for slaves and treasure and then installed the last king of the line of David, Zedekiah, as their puppet. At this point Jeremiah has been prophesying a long, miserable Babylonian slavery for the last 30 years or so. And into this, a guy named Hananiah decides to interject a message of hope.
[it happened] that Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet, who was from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord in the presence of the priests and of all the people, saying, 2 “Thus speaks the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying: ‘I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. 3 Within two full years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. 4 And I will bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, with all the captives of Judah who went to Babylon,’ says the Lord, ‘for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’”
God is going to fix this for his people, in fact their prayers have already been answered. It is a nice message. There may be a lot of clouds today but the Lord will bring us a better day soon.
5 Then the prophet Jeremiah spoke to the prophet Hananiah in the presence of the priests and in the presence of all the people who stood in the house of the Lord, 6 and the prophet Jeremiah said, “Amen! The Lord do so; the Lord perform your words which you have prophesied, to bring back the vessels of the Lord’s house and all who were carried away captive, from Babylon to this place.
I would very much like to leave off here, and Jeremiah wanted to too. We have all seen the guys on the street corner saying that God is gonna punish America for her sins. They scream at us to repent but we can't help but realise that deep down they want us to suffer. With so many of those guys I can't help but feel like the issue is more about our sins against the self-appointed prophets than against the Lord. Jeremiah wasn't like that. He really would have been happy to believe that this prophesy of Hananiah was true. Jeremiah prophesied death and destruction to Jerusalem in the hope that somehow it wouldn't happen. He endured the people's mocking and persecution so that maybe he wouldn't wind up sitting on a hill watching Jerusalem burn and his neighbors killed. But the story doesn't end that way and we need to keep going.
7 Nevertheless hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people: 8 The prophets who have been before me and before you of old prophesied against many countries and great kingdoms—of war and disaster and pestilence. 9 As for the prophet who prophesies of peace, when the word of THAT prophet comes to pass, the prophet will be known as one whom the Lord has truly sent.”
Jeremiah mocks the message of hope. A few chapters ago he said, "Let the prophet who dreams a dream(the false prophets) tell the dream. And let the prophet who has a word from the Lord tell the word. What is the chaff to the wheat? The word of the Lord will stand." Anyway, Jeremiah doesn't believe Hananiah. The story goes on, Hananiah can't convince Jeremiah, Jeremiah tells him that he will die before the year is up. Hananiah dies two months later and eventually Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem, Jeremiah cries out his lamentations and lives out his days as an exile in Egypt. But it is his words here to Hananiah that I want to look at.
Jeremiah says that the prophets always bring bad news. When the Lord sends a prophet, they prophesy war, disaster, pestilence, and death, that is the formula straight through to John's Apocalypse. Now he is unquestionably right, but he does leave something out. Sometimes the prophets do talk about a better day. There are plenty of prophecies about a beautiful time of millenial peace to come. My favorite historian, Philip Schaff says that all of the heathen believed in a Golden Age in the past, that one of the great differences of Judaism was the hope of a Messianic Age in the future, the idea that there is hope for us. One day the lion WILL lie down with the lamb, but we generally find that that day is not today. There IS pie in the sky but we aren't in the sky. We are here. And there isn't that much pie in sight. I want some pie now. Hananiah wanted some pie now, all of the people did. Jeremiah did too. But there wasn't any pie coming.
So, what affect does the Gospel have on this bleak picture, this bleak world that we live in? What does the Prince of Peace have to say to all of this. "Do not think that I came to bring peace. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." As far as prophets of destruction Our Lord set the bar rather high, in the Lord's words sure there is more peace and hope but there is a lot more suffering and darkness and death, and He is the first one to clearly teach on eternal suffering in the next life. I don't think anyone of the prophets had the heart to bring that message until He said it Himself first.
Matthew 24:6 And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. 8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.
9 “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake. 10 And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. 11 Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. 12 And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. 13 But he who endures to the end shall be saved. 14 And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.
At least with the prophets we had the comfort of knowing that our suffering was caused by our sin, but with Christ we are hated and persecuted innocently. And yes He has great hope for us, explicitly placed at THE END, at least Jeremiah offered hope in 70 years not at the End of the World.
Whatever the Good News is, I don't think that it changes these facts. There is Pie in the Sky and there is misery and suffering before then. Those facts were clear before the Lord died and rose again and they are clear now, but none of those facts are the Gospel. What then is News that can be unconditionally good without changing any of these rather depressing facts?
Jeremiah 24 The Lord showed me, and there were two baskets of figs set before the temple of the Lord, after Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes of Judah with the craftsmen and smiths, from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon. 2 One basket had very good figs, like the figs that are first ripe; and the other basket had very bad figs which could not be eaten, they were so bad. 3 Then the Lord said to me, “What do you see, Jeremiah?”
And I said, “Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad, very bad, which cannot be eaten, they are so bad.”
4 Again the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 5 “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge those who are carried away captive from Judah, whom I have sent out of this place for their own good, into the land of the Chaldeans. 6 For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land; I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. 7 Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart.
8 ‘And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad’—surely thus says the Lord—‘so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt. 9 I will deliver them to trouble into all the kingdoms of the earth, for their harm, to be a reproach and a byword, a taunt and a curse, in all places where I shall drive them. 10 And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence among them, till they are consumed from the land that I gave to them and their fathers.’”
The Kingdom does not come with observation, and the Good News doesn't change the circumstances of life. Those in Jerusalem that the Lord had set His favor on, were not in the least exempted from suffering, in fact they were preeminent in misery. They were made exiles and slaves, while the rest, the targets of the Lord's wrath, were left in relative peace and freedom. But we want to be the good figs. Why? The difference is that the Good Figs have a piece of Good News that the Bad Figs don't. The Good News is not in their future but now. But no one can see it. It doesn't make any earthly difference to their lives, it only changes everything. It is the difference between a suicide and a martyr. It is only the difference between being Judas hanging and Peter hanging upside down. The only difference is that one is living in the regular old world and the other's whole world has been turned upside down.
There is a lot of "good news" in the world. A prisoner being set free would be good news. A debt forgiven would be good news. A sickness healed would be good news. We all agree that these are all just "little g little n" good news, and I contend that eternity in Heaven rather than Hell is still just "little g little n" sure it is good news but it isn't the Gospel. How can I say that? Because it is conditionally good. It is good IF some condition is met. It is good under certain conditions. It is good generally, more or less. It is only good IF. But The Good News that deserves the big G and the big N and the definite article must be absolutely good news, must be good no matter what, no matter where, whether any conditions are met or left unmet. In other words it must be good news whether the prisoner is set free or not, whether the debt is forgiven or not, whether we are sick or well, it must be so good that it makes all of the circumstances of life good. It must be able to make the prisoner sing songs in the night like Paul, without any thought of being set free. It must be able to do more than remove poverty and sickness, it must be able to sanctify them to make poverty the apostolic poverty of St. Francis. It must go further than that. It must be Good News even to the damned, or what is it that Our Lord preached to them? What would be good news to a soul in Hell? We may think that the only thing that could be good news to them is to be set free, but that is conditional good news. Is there News that can make the soul in Hell sing like Paul in jail, without any consideration of release?
Well, Paul in the first chapter of Romans and John in the first chapter of his first letter try to summarize the Gospel for us, I think that accounting for the differences between the two men that they say very much the same thing. And I think that their News meets this standard that it turns the whole world upside down and makes even Hell not merely acceptable but good.
Romans 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”
What does Paul say? He says that in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed. He says that that is what is saving about the Gospel.
1 John 1:5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.
Paul's Gospel is that God is righteous. John's Gospel is that God is light and in Him is no darkness. John is very unambiguous. THIS is the message that He was given by God, it was this that was the core of his preaching to all the churches. It is not a message about us. It says nothing about our present or about our future. But it tells us everything about everything. It tells us that everything that happens is the best that is conceivable. It tells us that even the One who creates the worlds out of His imagination cannot imagine a better world than this one or a better life or afterlife for any of His creatures than the One He has given them. I think an understanding of Paul's use of the term righteous and John's light makes it clear all that happens is not simply the best possible but the best that can even be imagined. This life doesn't look that way to us, and I will go out on a limb and say that the next one won't either, whatever name you call it by. But that is why the righteousness of God is revealed only to faith.
