Jeremiah 24:9-10 – The Following of Ferment
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.’ ”Jeremiah 24: 8-10, New King James Version
Spurgeon takes the believer back to a palpable, oppressive sense of lostness in his sermon, "A Time for Finding the Lost Sheep." "Sometimes there was a glimmer of hope," he holds out, "but that only made your darkness more visible. As John Bunyan has it, the hell drum was beating in your ears—you heard it from morning till night and from night till morning—'Lost, lost, lost! You will soon be in hell!'”
This is the drum that beats the sickly, condemned march of Jeremiah 24:9-10. When the king and the princes were in their realm, they were revered by habit, respected for their position if not for their character. Jeremiah foretells, though, that they will be uprooted. Even then, by the Word of the Lord, they will serve His purposes. They will be scattered among the nations as a reminder of the fermenting effect of soaking in His blessings without submitting to Him.
Their own countrymen may have grown acclimated to Hell's work within their breast, and its outworking in the rotting culture. Except for stalwart souls like Jeremiah fresh from hearing God's perspective, others of Judah may have ceased to notice the degradation of her leadership. If they caught a whiff of ferment, perhaps they excused it with general and jovial cynicism. That's the way government goes. Perhaps deep flaws in leadership even excused and distracted from individual unrighteousness that could have been repented of.
So it is, then, that God enacts Jeremiah 24:9-10. He drives these fallen leaders among those who have not seen the gradual hardening of their hearts and coarsening of their behaviors. As Pilate played the irony of declaring that here is the king of the Jews upon the cross, so God leads men to see the disparity between the God-given bounty of grace to which this leadership class was born, and now the dregs for which they have settled.
The difference, the fall, by His ongoing work, will prick hearts. For, without such jarring dissonance, we in the nations would go on about our business, ruling our own hearts by our own passions just as fecklessly as the dispossessed leadership class to which Jeremiah points. So intervenes, Charles Spurgeon says in "The Evil and Its Remedy," the work of God. "No man," he warns, "can know the greatness of sin till he has felt it, for there is no measuring-rod for sin except its condemnation in our own conscience, when the law of God speaks to us with a terror that may be felt."
Feel it, fellow man. Learn from the example of others, exposed in pride, ripped from their own pretentious kingdom, before you yourself stand defenseless on that day of judgment, or before you yourself are someone else's watchword, someone else's prompt to wonder, "Didn't he, in all his blessings, perceive the glory and goodness of God?"
Spurgeon takes the believer back to a palpable, oppressive sense of lostness in his sermon, "A Time for Finding the Lost Sheep." "Sometimes there was a glimmer of hope," he holds out, "but that only made your darkness more visible. As John Bunyan has it, the hell drum was beating in your ears—you heard it from morning till night and from night till morning—'Lost, lost, lost! You will soon be in hell!'”
This is the drum that beats the sickly, condemned march of Jeremiah 24:9-10. When the king and the princes were in their realm, they were revered by habit, respected for their position if not for their character. Jeremiah foretells, though, that they will be uprooted. Even then, by the Word of the Lord, they will serve His purposes. They will be scattered among the nations as a reminder of the fermenting effect of soaking in His blessings without submitting to Him.
Their own countrymen may have grown acclimated to Hell's work within their breast, and its outworking in the rotting culture. Except for stalwart souls like Jeremiah fresh from hearing God's perspective, others of Judah may have ceased to notice the degradation of her leadership. If they caught a whiff of ferment, perhaps they excused it with general and jovial cynicism. That's the way government goes. Perhaps deep flaws in leadership even excused and distracted from individual unrighteousness that could have been repented of.
So it is, then, that God enacts Jeremiah 24:9-10. He drives these fallen leaders among those who have not seen the gradual hardening of their hearts and coarsening of their behaviors. As Pilate played the irony of declaring that here is the king of the Jews upon the cross, so God leads men to see the disparity between the God-given bounty of grace to which this leadership class was born, and now the dregs for which they have settled.
The difference, the fall, by His ongoing work, will prick hearts. For, without such jarring dissonance, we in the nations would go on about our business, ruling our own hearts by our own passions just as fecklessly as the dispossessed leadership class to which Jeremiah points. So intervenes, Charles Spurgeon says in "The Evil and Its Remedy," the work of God. "No man," he warns, "can know the greatness of sin till he has felt it, for there is no measuring-rod for sin except its condemnation in our own conscience, when the law of God speaks to us with a terror that may be felt."
Feel it, fellow man. Learn from the example of others, exposed in pride, ripped from their own pretentious kingdom, before you yourself stand defenseless on that day of judgment, or before you yourself are someone else's watchword, someone else's prompt to wonder, "Didn't he, in all his blessings, perceive the glory and goodness of God?"
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