“1 The word came to Jeremiah from the Lord after Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard had released him at Ramah. He had found Jeremiah bound in chains among all the captives from Jerusalem and Judah who were being carried into exile to Babylon. 2 When the commander of the guard found Jeremiah, he said to him, “The Lord your God decreed this disaster for this place. 3 And now the Lord has brought it about; He has done just as he said he would. All this happened because you people sinned against the Lord and did not obey Him. 4 But today I am freeing you from the chains on your wrists. Come with me to Babylon, if you like, and I will look after you; but if you do not want to, then don’t come. Look, the whole country lies before you; go wherever you please.” 5 However, before Jeremiah turned to go, Nebuzaradan added, “Go back to Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, whom the king of Babylon has appointed over the towns of Judah, and live with him among the people, or go anywhere else you please.” Then the commander gave him provisions and a present and let him go. 6 So Jeremiah went to Gedaliah son of Ahikam at Mizpah and stayed with him among the people who were left behind in the land.
7 When all the army officers and their men who were still in the open country heard that the king of Babylon had appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam as governor over the land and had put him in charge of the men, women and children who were the poorest in the land and who had not been carried into exile to Babylon, 8 they came to Gedaliah at Mizpah—Ishmael son of Nethaniah, Johanan and Jonathan the sons of Kareah, Seraiah son of Tanhumeth, the sons of Ephai the Ne- tophathite, and Jaazaniah a the son of the Maacathite, and their men. 9 Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, took an oath to reassure them and their men. “Do not be afraid to serve the Babylonians,” he said. “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you. 10 I myself will stay at Mizpah to represent you before the Babylonians who come to us, but you are to harvest the wine, summer fruit and oil, and put them in your storage jars, and live in the towns you have taken over.”
11 When all the Jews in Moab, Ammon, Edom and all the other countries heard that the king of Babylon had left a remnant in Judah and had appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, as governor over them, 12 they all came back to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mizpah, from all the countries where they had been scattered. And they harvested an abundance of wine and summer fruit.
13 Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers still in the open country came to Gedaliah at Mizpah 14 and said to him, “Don’t you know that Baalis king of the Ammonites has sent Ishmael son of Nethaniah to take your life?” But Gedaliah son of Ahikam did not believe them.
15 Then Johanan son of Kareah said privately to Gedaliah in Mizpah, “Let me go and kill Ishmael son of Nethaniah, and no one will know it. Why should he take your life and cause all the Jews who are gathered around you to be scattered and the remnant of Judah to perish?”
16 But Gedaliah son of Ahikam said to Johanan son of Kareah, “Don’t do such a thing! What you are saying about Ishmael is not true.”
1 In the seventh month Ishmael son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, who was of royal blood and had been one of the king’s officers, came with ten men to Gedaliah son of Ahikam at Mizpah. While they were eating together there, 2 Ishmael son of Nethaniah and the ten men who were with him got up and struck down Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, with the sword, killing the one whom the king of Babylon had appointed as governor over the land. 3 Ishmael also killed all the Jews who were with Gedaliah at Mizpah, as well as the Babylonian soldiers who were there.
4 The day after Gedaliah’s assassination, before anyone knew about it, 5 eighty men who had shaved off their beards, torn their clothes and cut themselves came from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria, bringing grain offerings and incense with them to the house of the Lord. 6 Ishmael son of Nethaniah went out from Mizpah to meet them, weeping as he went. When he met them, he said, “Come to Gedaliah son of Ahikam.” 7 When they went into the city, Ishmael son of Nethaniah and the men who were with him slaughtered them and threw them into a cistern. 8 But ten of them said to Ishmael, “Don’t kill us! We have wheat and barley, oil and honey, hidden in a field.” So he let them alone and did not kill them with the others. 9 Now the cistern where he threw all the bodies of the men he had killed along with Gedaliah was the one King Asa had made as part of his defense against Baasha king of Israel. Ishmael son of Nethaniah filled it with the dead.
10 Ishmael made captives of all the rest of the people who were in Mizpah—the king’s daughters along with all the others who were left there, over whom Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard had appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam. Ishmael son of Nethaniah took them captive and set out to cross over to the Ammonites.
11 When Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers who were with him heard about all the crimes Ishmael son of Nethaniah had committed, 12 they took all their men and went to fight Ishmael son of Nethaniah. They caught up with him near the great pool in Gibeon. 13 When all the people Ishmael had with him saw Johanan son of Kareah and the army officers who were with him, they were glad. 14 All the people Ishmael had taken captive at Mizpah turned and went over to Johanan son of Kareah. 15 But Ishmael son of Nethaniah and eight of his men escaped from Johanan and fled to the Ammonites.”
You would be wise to submit to God’s decisions. Imagine that we have a fierce winter, and it continues right through spring. Come Memorial Day we haven’t had a day above freezing for six months and then we get a nasty ice storm. So, the ground is frozen solid; it’s almost June, the forecast shows no sign of letting up, and there’s an ice storm.
There is a farmer in town, and he’s had enough. He’s never planted after Memorial Day and he’s not going to start now. He’s out there planting in that ice storm not because it’s wise but simply as a protest—he doesn’t think it should still be winter and so he acts like it isn’t. That’s not wise. An ice storm was God’s decision, and he would be wise to submit to God’s decision.
Refusing to submit to God’s decisions doesn’t break the hold of God’s decision. It just breaks you. It breaks your machinery in that frozen field. The same goes for God’s decisions of judgment. Refusing to submit to that judgment doesn’t break the hold of the judgment; it just breaks you. These next four chapters we are studying are all about refusing to submit to God’s judgments. This will be the equivalent of a farmer planting in an ice storm, and it will go just about as well as you would expect.
About these first two chapters we will study, J. Andrew Dearman wrote that, “in some ways, these two chapters are the saddest in the whole book of Jeremiah.” Considering how very sad this whole book is, that’s quite a statement. Don’t live out these chapters. Take this as a warning. Don’t plant in an ice storm. Submit to God’s decisions. Submit to God’s judgments. That’s the claim of this sermon: we must submit to God’s judgments.
We will study this in three points. First: the second release of Jeremiah. Second: Gedaliah the governor. Third: Ishmael the assassin. In verses 1-6 of chapter 40, we will consider the second release of Jeremiah. In verses 7-12 of chapter 40, we will consider Gedaliah the governor. From 40:13-41:15, we will consider Ishamel the assassin.
First: the second release of Jeremiah. This is the beginning of a rather long story that will take this week and next week to cover; verse 1 stands over it all, “The word came to Jeremiah from the Lord after Nebuzaradan commander of the imperial guard had released him at Ramah.” We won’t hear the content of this word from the Lord until next week.
This long story begins with Jeremiah en route to Babylon. He was in chains. It seems that he was picked up sometime after being released by the command of Nebuchadnezzar himself. It’s easy to see how such a thing could happen to one stray Jew in a sea of Babylonian soldiers.
Nebuzaradan, who we met last week, saw Jeremiah among the exiles and released him. He did so at Ramah, which was five miles north of the now smoldering remains of Jerusalem. The exiles passed through Ramah on their way to Babylon. That’s what the famous prophecy of Jeremiah 31 is about, “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” Rachel—Israel’s wife—is weeping for her children because they are leaving the land. The gospels use this same prophecy to capture the grief of mothers weeping for their murdered babies in Bethlehem after the birth of Christ. This is a heartbreaking world.
Nebuzaradan released Jeremiah from his chains. Then he gave the prophet a theologically astute explanation as to why all these people were going into exile; “The Lord your God decreed this disaster for this place. And now the Lord has brought it about; He has done just as He said He would. All this happened because you people sinned against the Lord and did not obey Him.” This doesn’t mean that Nebuzaradan was a follower of the Lord, but, as Jack Lundbom put it, “In a world of multiple religions, national gods, and universal beliefs that the actions of peoples and nations could passionately anger the gods, the statement of Nebuzaradan is eminently reasonable.”
Although he had no faith in the Lord, Nebuzaradan understood Him better than most of the Jews. He knew that this disaster had occurred because of the Lord’s anger for sin. Now Nebuzaradan assumed that the Lord’s wrath remained on these people. He offered Jeremiah safe haven away from the land; verse 4, “today I am freeing you from the chains on your wrists. Come with me to Babylon, if you like, and I will look after you; but if you do not want to, then don’t come. Look, the whole country lies before you; go wherever you please.”
Here you see that Jeremiah had become a man without a country. His prophetic work had made him an enemy of his own people and the Babylonians didn’t understand him either. As JA Thompson put it, “He [Jeremiah] would not have found it any easier to explain his theological position to the Babylonians than to the people of Jerusalem and Judah.” The Babylonians didn’t understand that the Lord hadn’t turned His back on His people.
There are hints of the Lord’s steadfast love for His people in this passage. The Hebrew recollection of Nebuzaradan’s words, “the whole country lies before you; go wherever you please,” is purposefully reminiscent of Moses and Israel looking at the Promised Land and of Abram and Lot looking at the Promised Land. The message was that this land was still the Promised Land. There was still a future here for the people of God.
Jeremiah decided to stay in the land and to go to Gedaliah as Nebuzaradan advised. It’s to him that we now turn our attention in our second point: Gedaliah the governor. We’ve met Gedaliah’s family before. His grandfather Shaphan found the law in the temple and brought it King Josiah. That’s what began the reform movement we studied earlier in this book. Gedaliah’s father, Ahikam, stood up for Jeremiah when he was on trial for his life in that chapter that I wish we would have studied. “The posture of [this] family seems regularly to be a sane, moderate position that is rooted in covenantal tradition and that is not attracted to the more urgent ideologies of its contemporaries,” as one scholar put it. This is as good as a leader as the people could have hoped for. As we will see, he and Jeremiah saw eye to eye.
Gedaliah didn’t govern Judea from Jerusalem because, of course, that was destroyed. He governed from Mizpah, which is where Samuel judged from. It’s almost as if we are back before David now, and, of course, there was no Davidic king on the throne. There was no city of David standing.
There were, however, Jewish military men left and military men often rush to fill power vacuums. That’s what’s going on with these men discussed in verses 7-8, particularly the first two listed—Ishmael and Johanan.
Ishmael, Johanan, and the rest listened as Gedaliah told them how he planned on governing; verse 9, ‘Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, took an oath to reassure them and their men. “Do not be afraid to serve the Babylonians,” he said. “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you.”’
Now who does that sound like to you, “Do not be afraid to serve the Babylonians. Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you”’? That’s right. It sounds like Jeremiah. The counterintuitive message of the prophet was also the politically wisest way forward. Gedaliah had the political capital to make this vision happen, but that would require the people recognizing the rule of Babylon. Theologically, it would require the people submitting to the judgment of God on their sin through Babylon. We will see how repugnant that was to some Jews, particularly Ishmael. Submitting to God’s judgment is always contrary to the flesh.
Gedaliah was anticipating a bumpy ride between these officials and Babylon; he saw himself as something of a mediator; verse 10, “I myself will stay at Mizpah to represent you before the Babylonians who come to us.” Gedaliah planned on cooperating with the Babylonians without selling out the Jews. That’s a hard line to walk, but he was willing to do it.
Gedaliah was the best the people could hope for. You see that in verse 11, “When all the Jews in Moab, Ammon, Edom and all the other countries heard that the king of Babylon had left a remnant in Judah and had appointed Gedaliah son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, as governor over them, they all came back to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah at Mizpah, from all the countries where they had been scattered. And they harvested an abundance of wine and summer fruit.”
This is a picture of peace and prosperity. The Jews who had fled from Babylon returned home. They had a great harvest. This is just a small but real picture of what we read about during the day of Solomon, “During Solomon’s lifetime Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, everyone under their own vine and under their own fig tree.”
The message here is that God’s word was the same as Gedaliah’s, “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you.” That was the route to blessing. Before the fall of Jerusalem, the people would be wise to surrender to Babylon. They could still be wise and submit to Babylon. However, just as they obey before the fall of Jerusalem, so they didn’t obey now; that’s our third point: Ishmael the assassin.
Everything would go well for the people as long as they accepted God’s judgment upon them in the form of Babylon. Ishmael wasn’t on board with that plan. The Ammonites to the east saw an opportunity. They didn’t want a strong Israel and they certainly didn’t want Israel to be a Babylonian satellite, and so they encouraged Ishmael to assassinate Gedaliah.
Johanan, the other military man we met earlier, caught wind of this plot. He gathered the rest of the officers and met with Gedaliah to tell him; verse 14, “Don’t you know that Baalis king of the Ammonites has sent Ishmael son of Nethaniah to take your life?”
Now we know that this was a credible threat. We know from our reading that Ishmael did, in fact, assassinate Gedaliah, but Gedaliah didn’t know that. What he did know was that Johanan, as we will see next week, was not a righteous man. He also knew that Johanan planned to kill Ishmael with no evidence, only suspicion. Although he turned out to be wrong, Gedaliah had good reasons for refusing to go along with Johanan’s plan. When reading history we must always remember that it’s much easier to play arm-chair quarterback than it is to make decisions in real time.
Gedaliah invited Ishmael over for a meal. This was most likely an attempt to bring Ishmael around to his point of view. Meals were bonding events in the Ancient Near East, but notice how the author introduces Ishmael in verse 1 of chapter 41, “Ishmael son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, who was of royal blood and had been one of the king’s officers.” Ishmael thought he had the right to rule. He was of royal blood. He considered Gedaliah a collaborator installed by the occupying force. He wanted Israel for the Israelites. You can understand the logic, but it, in this case, it was anti-God logic. Ishmael was rebelling against the judgment of God because God’s word was Jeremiah’s word which was Gedaliah’s word, “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you.”
Ishmael rejected that and so he made it all the harder for anything to go well for anyone. You see the gall of his sin in the fact that he and his men killed Gedaliah as the governor offered him hospitality—a treacherous act that would have simply shocked any ancient reader. This man was not the patriot that he made himself ought to be. He was a rebel against God’s will—murdering his dinner host just makes that clearer. Life is not as simple as the enemy of your enemy being your friend. Anyone who, like Ishmael, longed for independence from Babylon was about to learn that.
Notice that this language is Babylon-heavy; verse 2, “killing the one whom the king of Babylon had appointed as governor over the land. Ishmael also killed all the Jews who were with Gedaliah at Mizpah, as well as the Babylonian soldiers who were there.” The one whom the king of Babylon had appointed was killed and soldiers of the king of Babylon were killed. “Settle down in the land and serve the king of Babylon, and it will go well with you,” now looked unworkable. What seemed likely, as we will see next week, was retribution from Babylon. Ishmael had seemingly brought an end to the wine and summer fruit enjoyed under Gedaliah. Refusing to submit to God’s decisions and judgments can only lead to trouble. Only grace can offer way out of what Ishmael had done and next week we will see even this grace rejected.
Before anyone knew what Ishmael had done, mourners came to Mizpah. These Jews had come to mourn what had happened to their country. They had come to meet with the governor, very possibly to see what they could do to help. Ishmael senselessly slaughtered these people. He only spared the ones who offered him food, and if he was so interested in food, he could have had all the wine and summer fruits he wanted under Gedaliah. This slaughter of his own countrymen was senseless. It was of no advantage to Ishmael, and I think that’s part of the point. Now that Gedaliah was dead, chaos reigned.
It had gotten much worse. The Jews thought the fall of Jerusalem was as bad as it could get. Some Jews thought that having Babylon in charge was as bad is it could get. It got worse. It can always get worse like a farmer out there in an ice storm. Refusing to submit to the judgment of God will always make it worse. That’s these two chapters in a nutshell and that might be highly relevant for us if what we are seeing is the judgment of God upon our nation.
It continued to get worse in Israel. The bodies of the mourners Ishmael slaughtered were thrown into a cistern which was part of the defenses that Asa king of Judah had constructed against Baasha king of Israel. That description isn’t included because the particular cistern was important. It was included to harken back to civil war. We now have Jews against Jews. Johanan chased Ishmael; verse 12, “They caught up with him near the great pool in Gibeon.” Again, that location wasn’t simply a location. It as the place where Joab, David’s general, and Abner, Saul’s general, engaged in a bit of sport. Near the beginning of that civil war, they each chose twelve men to fight the other’s twelve. All twenty-four died in senseless violence. Any number of parents of children who died serving in Afghanistan are now wondering, “what was all it about?” The parents of those twenty-four men who died because of Abner and Joab’s decision at that great pool of Gibeon were left wondering, “what was it all about?” That’s what’s going on here with Ishmael. “How did it come to this? What was any of this about?”
Ishmael of the line of David refused to submit to God’s judgment. He showed his true colors in the killing of his own people. He brought chaos and death to those mourning over the wrath of God. He didn’t submit to the judgment that he deserved in the form of Babylon.
Jesus of the line of David submitted to the judgment of God. He showed his true colors in being killed for his own people. He has brought and still brings the opposite of chaos and death to those who mourn over the wrath of God. He submitted to the judgment he didn’t deserve in the form of the cross.
Both men produced results. Ishmael produced two of the saddest chapters of possibly the saddest book in the Bible. Jesus has produced life that’s far better than the wine and summer fruit under Gedaliah. Those who are willing to submit to the judgment of God follow Jesus where he leads. Those who are not, whether they see it or not, follow Ishmael into the sort of chaos and death to which he leades. That’s the wisdom of submitting to the judgment of God. Amen.