Jeremiah 42:7-12 - Do not be afraid of him

42:7-12

The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah ten days later, and Jeremiah gathered the people so he could pass the word of the Lord on to them. God told them to stay in the land. Now remember that God had earlier said they should surrender to the Babylonians. We need to be careful that we do not make an everlasting word out of what is a temporal word. Of course, there are dangers in this as well, as we can easily treat eternal commands as temporal. Many do this with sexual morality. So how do we tell which is which? Well, there are no easy answers, but a key part of the answer is to look at the whole of scripture. On sexual morality the Bible is very clear from beginning to end, and those who are LGBT affirming should be clear that they are sin-affirming. So in that case the situation is very clear. In matters like women preachers the situation is far less clear. However, in the present case the key element was trusting in the Lord. There is a great difference between obeying the Lord because He has spoken, and using the Bible to find some “justification” for what we want to do anyway. God’s commands may have seemed very dangerous and risky, but God reminds them that He is Lord of all, and the only reason Babylon was able to conquer them in the first place was because the Lord decreed it. We are to put our trust in the Lord!