Today, I am reading and commenting on Jeremiah 51-52.

The first thing I want to write about is the end of chapter 51.  There it tells us that Jeremiah had written his prophecies against Babylon on a scroll which he sent to Babylon with Seriah, who went to Babylon with Zedekiah after the fall of Jerusalem.  There Seriah was to read the scroll aloud then tie a stone around it and throw it into the Euphrates River.  This makes this seem as a follow-on prophecy to the one which Jeremiah had sent to those who had been taken into exile earlier.  In that prophecy he told them to make themselves at home and seek the prosperity of the land in which they found themselves because they would be there for a long time.  Now, he tells them that they should not allow themselves to be completely assimilated, they should remain God’s people because in due time God was going to destroy Babylon.  We should keep this in mind today.  We should seek the prosperity of the society in which we live, which means seeking to draw them to the Lord.  However, we should not allow ourselves to lose our identity as the people of God, separate from the world around us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Jeremiah 49-50.

When I think of the area ruled by the ancient Israelites, I think of the area of modern Israel plus Gaza and the West Bank territories.  Yet this passage makes clear that even in the time of Jeremiah, when the Kingdom of Judah was at its weakest, they still considered the land settled by Gad. Reuben, and half of the tribe of Manasseh to be part of the land of Israel.  That is basically the land east of the Jordan River which makes up the Jordan River valley and is now part of the nation of Jordan.  I’m not sure that has any significance today, but it reminds me that the land of Israel in the Old Testament was larger than I tend to think of it.  The last couple of days I have written about Jeremiah looking like an agent of Babylon because of the way he prophesied the downfall of Jerusalem.  However, today we see that Jeremiah also prophesied the downfall of other nations, including Babylon itself.  The reason that most of his prophesies were directed at Judah was because the people of Judah thought of themselves as the people of God.  In the same way, a prophet today will have more to say to those who consider themselves the people of God than to the society around us, but that does not mean that he will not have a message for society as well.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.