The Two Fold Plan of God – Jeremiah 50

Jeremiah 50 - The Wrath of God

This chapter has so many different aspects of God in it. God's love, mercy, patience, and steadfastness are seen towards His chosen people. He said that He would leave a remnant. But the overwhelming characteristic that I was able to pick up in this chapter is the wrath of God. Babylon, while used by God to discipline God's children, is now at the receiving end of God's wrath. God has decided and planned to utterly destroy the Babylonians. He will not let the evil that they have done go unpunished. Verse 45 says, "Therefore hear the plan of the Lord which He has planned against Babylon, and His purposes which He has purposed against the land of the Chaldeans." There is a plan and a purpose to what Jeremiah and the other Israelites are going through. It is a two-fold plan.

1. God is the Faithful Father - He must discipline/train those who are His. If He did not then He would not be a good father and nor would we be His legitimate children. He would not love us and we would go off and do all that we wanted to do (Hebrews 12:7-11). The Israelites (God's Chosen) had decided that they were going to go and worship who they wanted when they wanted. From the beginning of this book they had decided not only to go and do whatever they felt like doing, but they were going to put people in charge of them who would purposely point them in that direction (Jeremiah 5:31). That sounds an awful lot like what Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:3 when he says, "For the time will come when they not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." For myself today, I need to be reminded and live in such a way as to please my heavenly Father and not further put Him in a position where He must discipline me.
   


2. God is the just Judge: He must sentence and condemn those who are not His, even if He has used them for His purposes. There is evil in this world and if God is who He has said He is, then He must not only judge those whom have done evil, but He must sentence and condemn those who have committed sins against Him. My first instinct is to look at the world around me and say, "Yep, your time is coming." But that sounds almost like the Pharisee who stood above the tax gather and pointed down at him saying, "Thank you Lord for not making me like that person." My job isn't to look around and figure out who God is going to condemn and who belongs to Him. My job is to look at the world through His eyes and weep for everyone realizing as I go that if were it not by the grace of God, I would be under the same condemnation as the rest of the world. I would not have found God if He had not first found me, I would have not have responded to God if He had not first done a redemptive work in me, I would not have loved God if He had not first loved me. I can take zero credit for anything that I have done in the way of coming to know the Lord Jesus Christ...that is all the work of God for His glory alone. God is the just Judge and when all of time is complete, He will commit one final act of Judging...I have no choice but to weep and plead with men today about what is to come.
   

There was a lot to this chapter and I am sure that as I go through and read Calvin's thoughts on this chapter more things will be stirred up in me. But for now, for today, I need to rejoice in the fact that I am His child saved by His Son all for His glory. I also need to be praying for those who I will pass by on my way in to work, those who will serve me any food that I order today, those who I pay to any kind of work...the wrath of God is building and in His final act of Judging, He will release that wrath out on anyone who is not found in Christ. Soli Deo Gloria