Inevitable Consequences

“Who is the wise man who would understand this, what the mouth of the LORD spoke to him, that he might tell it?  Why is the land destroyed, laid waste like the wilderness with none passing through?  And the LORD said, “Because they forsook My teachings that I set before them and did not heed My voice and did not go according to it.  And they went after the stubbornness of their heart . . .”  Jeremiah 9:11-14a  Robert Alter translation

Destroyed – Jeremiah has a message for Israel.  It’s recorded in the historical-theological record.  It describes the situation before the Babylonian captivity.  Terrific!  Now we have some explanation why God allowed the nation of Israel to be carried into captivity.  But does that have anything to do with us?  How can something specific to an ancient culture more than three thousand years ago tell us anything about our world today?

Without being too homiletically inclined, let’s see if we can mine any contemporary applications here.  “Why is the land destroyed?”  Well, obviously, the land wasn’t destroyed.  After the Babylonians took control, they didn’t destroy the land (at least not most of it).  What they destroyed was the production of the land, the people who occupied the land, the system of government that ruled the land, and the purpose of the land.  The mountains, the river, the plains, the hills—they were all still there, but now the civilization that once lived in this place was gone.  What was destroyed was a way of life identified by the land.  Remember that.

Why did this happen?  According to Jeremiah, it wasn’t because of the presence of an evil, invading army.  It wasn’t because of a lack of leadership or an unprepared army.  It was because of moral failure, specifically, sinful moral failure, that is, the failure of the people who occupied this land to adhere to and obey the directions given by the Lord of the land, the One Who granted them the property lease in the first place.  But as we know from archeological and historical records, the people in general were only following the leadership of their civilization.  When the leaders abandoned the teachings of God, the populace followed—and that led to excommunication and punishment.  As the leaders go, so goes the country, we might say.

What specifically was the failure of leadership?  “They went after the stubbornness of their heart.”  Jeremiah seems particularly fond of the word, šĕrirût.  “This noun is used ten times, eight times in Jeremiah. The root šĕrar is found in Aramaic with the meaning ‘be hard,’ ‘firm.’  šĕrirût is always found with lēb ‘heart,’ ‘mind’ and refers to a people who stubbornly refuse to respond to God’s admonitions.”^[1]  Ah, so it wasn’t just any kind of failure.  It was quite specifically a failure in Torah obedience.  Once the leadership gave up the moral compass of Torah, the end of the civilization was inevitable for everyone.  Rashi uses the term andralamousia.  We’ve looked at it before.[2]  It’s not pretty.  It seems to me that we’re getting very close.  Jeremiah warned about the coming Babylonian destruction of Israel.  Unfortunately, the scope of coming devastation is much bigger now.

Topical Index: destruction, stubbornness, šĕrirût, andralamousia, Jeremiah 9:11-14a

^[1] Austel, H. J. (1999). 2469 שׁרר. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 957). Chicago: Moody Press.

[2] Today’s Word, 4 October 2018, 21 October 2018, 6 October 2020