Don't ask if you don't want to know

 This week's verses are almost two chapters' worth: Jeremiah 42:1-43:7:

Then all the army officers, including Johanan son of Kareah and Jezaniah son of Hoshaiah and all the people of every class, went to the prophet Jeremiah. They said to him, “Please grant our request and pray to the Lord your God for all those of us who are still left alive here. For, as you yourself can see, there are only a few of us left out of the many there were before. Pray that the Lord your God will tell us where we should go and what we should do.” The prophet Jeremiah answered them, “Agreed! I will indeed pray to the Lord your God as you have asked. I will tell you everything the Lord replies in response to you. I will not keep anything back from you.” They answered Jeremiah, “May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not do just as the Lord your God sends you to tell us to do. We will obey what the Lord our God to whom we are sending you tells us to do. It does not matter whether we like what he tells us or not. We will obey what he tells us to do so that things will go well for us.”

Ten days later the Lord’s message came to Jeremiah. So Jeremiah summoned Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers who were with him and all the people of every class. Then Jeremiah said to them, “You sent me to the Lord God of Israel to make your request known to him. Here is what he says to you: ‘If you will only stay in this land, I will build you up. I will not tear you down. I will firmly plant you. I will not uproot you. For I am filled with sorrow because of the disaster that I have brought on you. Do not be afraid of the king of Babylon whom you now fear. Do not be afraid of him because I will be with you to save you and to rescue you from his power. I, the Lord, affirm it! I will have compassion on you so that he in turn will have mercy on you and allow you to return to your land.’

“You must not disobey the Lord your God by saying, ‘We will not stay in this land.’ You must not say, ‘No, we will not stay. Instead we will go and live in the land of Egypt where we will not face war, or hear the enemy’s trumpet calls, or starve for lack of food.’ If you people who remain in Judah do that, then listen to the Lord’s message. This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, has said, ‘If you are so determined to go to Egypt that you go and settle there, the wars you fear will catch up with you there in the land of Egypt. The starvation you are worried about will follow you there to Egypt. You will die there. All the people who are determined to go and settle in Egypt will die from war, starvation, or disease. No one will survive or escape the disaster I will bring on them.’ For the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘If you go to Egypt, I will pour out my wrath on you just as I poured out my anger and wrath on the citizens of Jerusalem. You will become an object of horror and ridicule, an example of those who have been cursed and that people use in pronouncing a curse. You will never see this place again.’

“The Lord has told you people who remain in Judah, ‘Do not go to Egypt.’ Be very sure of this: I warn you here and now. You are making a fatal mistake. For you sent me to the Lord your God and asked me, ‘Pray to the Lord our God for us. Tell us what the Lord our God says, and we will do it.’ This day I have told you what he said. But you do not want to obey the Lord your God by doing what he sent me to tell you. So now be very sure of this: You will die from war, starvation, or disease in the place where you want to go and live.”

Jeremiah finished telling all the people all these things the Lord their God had sent him to tell them. Then Azariah son of Hoshaiah, Johanan son of Kareah, and other arrogant men said to Jeremiah, “You are telling a lie! The Lord our God did not send you to tell us, ‘You must not go to Egypt and settle there.’ But Baruch son of Neriah is stirring you up against us. He wants to hand us over to the Babylonians so that they will kill us or carry us off into exile in Babylon.” So Johanan son of Kareah, all the army officers, and all the rest of the people did not obey the Lord’s command to stay in the land of Judah. Instead Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers led off all the Judean remnant who had come back to live in the land of Judah from all the nations where they had been scattered. They also led off all the men, women, children, and royal princesses that Nebuzaradan, the captain of the royal guard, had left with Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam and grandson of Shaphan; this included the prophet Jeremiah and Baruch son of Neriah. They went on to Egypt because they refused to obey the Lord, and came to Tahpanhes.

 Has anyone ever asked you for advice and then ignored it? I used to have a colleague who would ask me questions and if she didn't like my answer she would go and ask someone else the same question, despite the fact that I had about as much experience in my field as she'd had years on this earth. It was infuriating! I never could figure out why she would ask questions she didn't want the answer to, but it's not as uncommon as you would think.

Here the leading people in Jeremiah's time were living in occupied territories, under the military rule of the empire of Babylon. Babylon was an oppressive superpower and was in the process of conquering the known world. The other, more luxurious, superpower was Egypt. Life under occupation was rough, and the people with money and power enough to move were hoping to move to Egypt in order to be protected from Babylon.

Imagine you were a minority who was suffering under Turkish oppression in the Ottoman empire a bit over a hundred years ago, and thought maybe if you could move to France that you could start a better life for yourself. Little would you have known that in a decade or two the Germans would sweep through and you would have been carted off to a prison camp and killed. Staying where you were would have been a much better choice, but nothing in the politics of the day would have let you believe it.

So this is the situation that Jeremiah and these wealthy would-be emigrants find themselves in. Times are rough. The country isn't what it used to be. Corruption is rampant. And there are jobs and wealth and safety to be found overseas. They want to go, but they want God's seal of approval on their move. So they ask the prophet with the best batting average they can find: Jeremiah.

They assure him, probably genuinely, that they will obey anything he tells them, no matter if they like it or not. In their minds, there's no way he's going to tell them to stay in Judeah, getting robbed and abused while the people who have already left are telling them about all of the money they're making. Surely God wants them to be rich and successful and beautiful and popular, right? Isn't the faith life about happiness?

But God doesn't tell them what they want to hear. He says their best plan is to stay. He tells them why. He assures them he has the situation under control, if they will only be patient and stick it out a bit longer. But they don't want to hear it. They lash out and slander Jeremiah and then drag him by force with them into the very place God told them not to go.

It's easy to start from the end of the book and work backwards and look down on these people who were with Jeremiah. "Well duh, God told them not to go and they got what they deserved. They're so stupid!" But they didn't know what would happen, and they were so used to being tricked that they just assumed that Jeremiah's warning was more fake news. But for the grace of God we could have been in their same situation, or still could be.

I personally have ignored what I felt God was telling me to do a couple times in my life, and the results were never good. Out of all of us, he is the one who knows what happens later in the story, and can warn us off of the desolate or dangerous path.

But ever since the very beginning, Satan has always been there right behind him, asking "Did God really say?" "Does God really want you to stay in this dangerous, dead-end place while your friends go make money in the big city?" "Would God really say that you should rethink your plans to marry the love of your life?" "Did God really say, does God still say, even knowing all we do about science, would God really say, knowing what we know now?"

And so we get trapped in the place God warned us not to be. Like we're living the horror movie and he's there on his throne, our lives reflected onto the sea of glass, yelling "Don't go in there! Don't open that door! No! What are you doing??"

The expats of Israel found themselves in a really bad place when war finally made its way to Egypt. The battle-hardened troops had become more brutal, more inhumane, more cynical, and the expats were no longer surrounded by their own people, in a land whose contours they knew. It was a bloodbath, followed by the famine and disease that usually appear in the aftermath of carnage. And it all could have been avoided if they'd listened to God when they asked his advice.

Luckily we don't have to be like those arrogant, doomed men. If you've made the wrong choice, repent and see if you can get out before it's too late. And if you haven't made the wrong choice yet, pay close attention so that your pride or your doubt or your emotion doesn't get the best of you.