August 19 – Day 232 – Jeremiah 20-22; Matthew 1

Jeremiah 20 records one of the lowest times in Jeremiah’s life.  First, one of the priests, Pashhur, had Jeremiah beaten and put in stocks for his prophecies.  Passhur and the false prophets didn’t want to hear what Jeremiah had to say, but after he was released, Jeremiah prophesied directly against Passhur and told him he and his descendants would go down as exiles into Babylon.  There Passhur and all his descendants would die.  Then Jeremiah turned on the LORD.  He cried out telling the LORD He had deceived him.  The course of Jeremiah’s life was too much for him.  He didn’t want to prophesy against his own people, yet he could not stop for it was like a fire in his bones.  After telling the LORD he would have been better off if he had never been born, if his father had killed him while he was still in his mother’s womb, Jeremiah eventually comes around and praises the LORD and asks Him for vindication.

In Jeremiah 21 Jeremiah prophesies against the people of Judah and Jerusalem.  He tells them the LORD is going to stand against them, that the siege of the Babylonians will not be their worst concern: The LORD Himself stands against them.  The LORD tells the people they will die by pestilence, famine, and sword.  The only ones who will survive will be those who turn themselves over to the Babylonians.  They will be carried off into exile.  The end of the chapter reminds the people once again the LORD is doing this, because they have turned against Him.  It is not He who has turned against them.

In Jeremiah 22 the LORD tells the kings to practice justice as Josiah did, but then goes on to say that not one of Josiah’s “sons” (his descendants) will do as Josiah did.  They will not act justly.  They will not remember that it was well with him, because he acted justly.  Each of them will come either to an untimely end or to exile, because they continue to practice godlessness.  While all this took place, and while the message is utterly negative, it reminds us we are called to live in righteousness.  We have the power to do that through the Holy Spirit, so we must not follow the pattern of our culture and do whatever we please.  We must follow the LORD, and carry out His will in Jesus’ name.

As we return to the Gospel of Matthew for the third time, let’s continue to “hide” this word in our hearts (as we read in Psalm 119) that we might not sin against the LORD, and that we might live in victory over sin in Jesus’ name.  As you will recall, Matthew starts with the genealogy of Jesus.  Both Matthew and Luke start with genealogies.  Matthew’s begins with Abraham, who was the father of the Jews or Israelites.  That’s because Matthew wrote from a Jewish background.  Luke, being a Gentile, traced Jesus’ lineage all the way back to Adam, the first human being.  After the genealogy, Matthew tells us how the birth of Jesus came about.  He tells us after Mary and Joseph were betrothed, but before they “came together,” Mary was found to be “with child,” or pregnant.  That was cause for Mary to be stoned to death, because the reasonable assumption would have been that Mary had been sexually unfaithful.  Joseph considered divorcing her privately, rather than making it a public matter, but as he considered it, an angel of the LORD appeared to him in a dream and told Joseph the Holy Spirit was the “father.”  Joseph accepted the dream as the truth, and took Mary as his wife, but they didn’t consummate the marriage until after Jesus’ was born.  When we read this account, it might not hit us how incredible it is, because we have read it so many times before.  But this was a once in history occurrence: the Son of the living God was coming to earth, and He was doing it through the vehicle of being born as a human being!  As we let that sink in, we see how great God’s love was and is for us, that He would become one of us to satisfy His justice (through Jesus’ death on the cross), and offer us the opportunity to become His children!

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