Jeremiah 41-44: Who You Gonna Trust?

Sometimes it difficult to hear the Lord's voice and know which way to go, but that was never the problem for Israel.  God spoke to them, over and over again through the prophets.  The only problem was, even when they sought the prophets like Jeremiah out, they really didn't want to hear what the Lord said.  The bottom line was they didn't trust in God.  They believed they fared much better under the heathen gods than under the one who had promised them abundant prosperity if they would obey him.  The heathen gods never asked for obedience:  a little incense, a few altars erected in high places, a few of their children as sacrifices perhaps, but obedience was optional.  As the men of Judah told Jeremiah when they had fled to Egypt to escape the wrath of the Babylonians:
"We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our fathers, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time we had plenty of food and were well off and suffered no harm." - Jer. 44:17 NIV

Ah, but it wasn't the Babylonians they had to fear.  Their own God, the one that they ignored so easily, was waiting in the wings.  He was the one controlling the fates of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians.  He was the one that would crush the Egyptians at the hands of the Babylonians and the one who would have saved Judah had they listened to him. 

Roosevelt was wrong when he said 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself."  We have nothing to fear but God.  All our other fears pale in comparison to what he is able to do and anything or anyone we trust in suffers the same fate.  There is nothing that can stand in God's way when he is determined to bring circumstances about and there is nothing that can protect us like the mighty hand of God.  Why trust in anything else.

2010 Post - Jeremiah 41-44:  A Fatal Mistake