Reflections on Jeremiah 38

Jeremiah 38 (Contemporary English Version)
1. One day, Shephatiah, Gedaliah, Jehucal, and Pashhur heard me tell the people of Judah
   
2. that the LORD had said, "If you stay here in Jerusalem, you will die in battle or from disease or hunger, and the Babylonian army will capture the city anyway. But if you surrender to the Babylonians, they will let you live."
   
3. (SEE 38:2)
   
4. So the four of them went to the king and said, "You should put Jeremiah to death, because he is making the soldiers and everyone else lose hope. He isn't trying to help our people; he's trying to harm them."
   
5. Zedekiah replied, "Do what you want with him. I can't stop you."
   
6. Then they took me back to the courtyard of the palace guards and let me down with ropes into the well that belonged to Malchiah, the king's son. There was no water in the well, and I sank down in the mud.
   
7. Ebedmelech from Ethiopia was an official at the palace, and he heard what they had done to me. So he went to speak with King Zedekiah, who was holding court at Benjamin Gate.
   
8. (SEE 38:7)
   
9. Ebedmelech said, "Your Majesty, Jeremiah is a prophet, and those men were wrong to throw him into a well. And when Jerusalem runs out of food, Jeremiah will starve to death down there."
   
10. Zedekiah answered, "Take thirty of my soldiers and pull Jeremiah out before he dies."
    
11. Ebedmelech and the soldiers went to the palace and got some rags from the room under the treasury. He used ropes to lower them into the well.
    
12. Then he said, "Put these rags under your arms so the ropes won't hurt you." After I did,
    
13. the men pulled me out. And from then on, I was kept in the courtyard of the palace guards.
    
14. King Zedekiah had me brought to his private entrance to the temple, and he said, "I'm going to ask you something, and I want to know the truth."
    
15. "Why?" I replied. "You won't listen, and you might even have me killed!"
    
16. He said, "I swear in the name of the living LORD our Creator that I won't have you killed. No one else can hear what we say, and I won't let anyone kill you."
    
17. Then I told him that the LORD had said: "Zedekiah, I am the LORD God All-Powerful, the God of Israel. I promise that if you surrender to King Nebuchadnezzar's officers, you and your family won't be killed, and Jerusalem won't be burned down.
    
18. But if you don't surrender, I will let the Babylonian army capture Jerusalem and burn it down, and you will be taken prisoner."
    
19. Zedekiah answered, "I can't surrender to the Babylonians. I'm too afraid of the Jews that have already joined them. The Babylonians might hand me over to those Jews, and they would torture me."
    
20. I said, "If you will just obey the LORD, the Babylonians won't hand you over to those Jews. You will be allowed to live, and all will go well for you.
    
21. But the LORD has shown me that if you refuse to obey,
    
22. then the women of your palace will be taken prisoner by Nebuchadnezzar's officials. And those women will say to you: Friends you trusted led you astray. Now you're trapped in mud, and those friends you trusted have all turned away.
    
23. The Babylonian army will take your wives and children captive, you will be taken as a prisoner to the King of Babylonia, and Jerusalem will be burned down."
    
24. Zedekiah said, "Jeremiah, if you tell anyone what we have talked about, you might lose your life.
    
25. And I'm sure that if my officials hear about our meeting, they will ask you what we said to each other. They might even threaten to kill you if you don't tell them.
    
26. So if they question you, tell them you were begging me not to send you back to the prison at Jonathan's house, because going back there would kill you."
    
27. The officials did come and question me about my meeting with the king, and I told them exactly what he had ordered me to say. They never spoke to me about the meeting again, since no one had heard us talking.
    
28. I was held in the courtyard of the palace guards until the day Jerusalem was captured.
    
    

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    Zedekiah, king of Judah, is considered to have been a puppet king, merely following the counsel of his advisors who did not give wise counsel. It was his advisors who kept advising him to rebel against Babylon, thus going against Jeremiah's prophecies. It was they, also, who wanted to kill Jeremiah. Though Zedekiah did not want to kill him, neither did he oppose his advisors to stop them from taking action against Jeremiah.
    
    It was in this environment of a weak king and his advisors who were hostile to Jeremiah's messages of surrender that led to the account in chapter 38 of Jeremiah being dropped into a cistern to die. As he had repeatedly done before, Jeremiah told the people that "whoever surrenders to the Chaldeans (Babylonians) will live." And that "This city will most certainly be handed over to the king of Babylon's army, and he will capture it."  (38:2-3) Because of this, the king's advisors told the king, "This man ought to die, because he is weakening the morale of the warriors who remain in this city and of all the people by speaking to them in this way." (38:4) The king, too weak to go against his advisors, told them Jeremiah was in their hands to do what they would with him. And what they did was to drop Jeremiah in a cistern where they left him to die. A concerned Cushite court official reported to the king what had been done with Jeremiah and received orders from the king to take some men and rescue Jeremiah.
    
    Following Jeremiah's rescue from the cistern, he remained under arrest in the guard's courtyard. Soon after, king Zedekiah sent for Jeremiah and met with him secretly wanting Jeremiah to tell him honestly what the Lord had to say to him. Jeremiah's word from the Lord was consistently the same, "If indeed you surrender to the officials of the king of Babylon, then you will live, this city will not be burned down, and you and your household will survive." But if the king did not surrender to the Chaldeans, "They will burn it down, and you yourself will not escape from them." (38:17-18) As consistently as Jeremiah delivered this message, the king ignored it. He remained in the city until the Babylonians captured the city.
    
    Zedekiah apparently had some respect for Jeremiah and his messages from the Lord. Indeed he should since everything Jeremiah had said was happening by this time. It is baffling, though, why the king would meet secretly with Jeremiah to hear what the Lord had to say and then ignore it. Though a number of possible reasons might be given for this, I suspect that at the core of it is the effects of sin on one's reasoning. In short, the further one goes away from God and the longer they stay away from Him, the more one loses the ability to reason logically.  It is similar to addictive thinking. One who is addicted to a substance, such as alcohol, becomes so enmeshed in justifying their addictive habits that they can no longer reason logically. They become unable to recognize even contradictory ideas in their reasoning. So it is when we are far from God. We are made to relate to our Creator, but when we go against that our reasoning for doing so becomes less and less logical.
    
    King Zedekiah's request to meet secretly with Jeremiah to hear a word from the Lord and then ignoring it was not logical, though the king undoubtedly reasoned that there was justification for what he did. What did he tell himself after ignoring Jeremiah's message from the Lord when the Babylonians captured the city as predicted and he was taken away in shame?