Jeremiah 43:7 So they came into the land of Egypt: for they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: thus came they even to Tahpanhes.
Perhaps you have some object you consider to be lucky, like a rabbit’s foot, or sometimes guys in the NFL will wear the same pair of socks all season because they are lucky socks. Intelligent people do such things. Sometimes we have lucky objects because we misattribute our success to some inanimate object. When I say misattribute, I mean an attribute like kindness, generosity, or honesty. We give those attributes to things or people that don’t merit them.
On the other hand, sometimes we lay blame to people who are not completely to blame or not to blame at all. It is easy to say, “It’s her fault! I didn’t do anything.” In both cases, the case of luck and the case of blame, it is a case of misattribution. We look for answers where they really do not exist. Oftentimes I can do this; think the fault lies with someone else when I am blind to the fact that some fault lies with me. I can look at something as the reason for my success when it is not. The truth is you can’t make things better until you know what does.
In Jeremiah 43-44 we have a graphic picture of this with a group of God’s people who had rejected God’s Word and who lived in the dark because they were continually misattributing the dynamics of their life. They attributed virtue to those things that did not have it, and they attributed fault to those that did not deserve it.
They had asked for prayer to know what to do, but they never intended to listen to God and His Word. God had said, “Stay here and don’t fear Nebuchadnezzar or the Babylonians. I will take care of you.” They were duplicitous and rebelled against God’s Word. Jeremiah 43:7 says, “So they came into the land of Egypt.” They did what they wanted to do in the first place. They tried to be pious, to pray, and be spiritual, but they rejected what God had said through Jeremiah. The verse continues, “For they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: thus they came they even to Tahpanhes.”
Yesterday, my wife and I were talking about this and she asked, “If they had such a clear word from God, why would they rebel in the face of what God had said?” We do the same thing if we are talking about something clearly said in God’s Word, but we equivocate and say we will pray about it when God has already made it clear. I think the answer to how they could do this is that they misattributed the dynamics of their lives. For example, they misattributed authority. Jeremiah 43:3 says, “But Baruch the son of Neriah setteth thee [Jeremiah] on against us, for to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans, that they might put us to death, and carry us away captives into Babylon.” Basically, they said, “Jeremiah, God didn’t send you.” Verse 2 says they were proud. They did not obey the voice of the Lord.
How could they say that and think that? Well, if a prophet came to you and said, “This is what God said,” what would cause you to believe him? God did show His truth through prophets by miraculous signs, but there were a lot of false prophets in Jeremiah’s day. Why did they say, “Jeremiah you are speaking falsely” and think that Baruch had put him up to this instead of just believing God had given him the message?
Baruch was Jeremiah’s penman. God gave Jeremiah the truth. Jeremiah then spoke that to Baruch who wrote it down. Jeremiah 36 talks about those who were skeptical about Jeremiah’s message that he had written by Baruch. They misattributed authority. They thought that the source of the message they did not want to hear came from Baruch or maybe from Jeremiah, but the message did not come from either of them. It came from God. If I don’t listen to the people God has put in my life when they are speaking from God’s Word, then I am really rebelling against God if the message is from God. If there is truth that is God’s Word, I make things worse when I don’t attribute that message to the source Himself, God.
Think about the destruction that came. Where did that come from? Jeremiah 43:10 says, “Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will send and take Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will set his throne…he shall smite the land of Egypt…and I will kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt; and he shall he burn them.” Who was the cause of the destruction? The people thought it was Nebuchadnezzar, but they were misattributing. Nebuchadnezzar was not the source of the destruction; it was God. The authority was not Jeremiah; it was God. The destruction was not of Nebuchadnezzar; it was God.
What about the curse? Jeremiah 44 talks about the curse these people would be. God had said to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his seed, yet verse 7 says, “Therefore now thus saith the LORD…wherefore commit ye this great evil against your souls.” He is talking to the people who rejected the Word of God through Jeremiah written by Baruch. They did not stay in Judah, but sought help from Egypt instead of God. God says through Jeremiah, “You did this evil against your own souls.” Verse 9 says it was their own wickedness. Verse 10 says the source of this was their pride. It says, “They are not humbled even unto this day.” Pride was the problem. They thought Babylon was the problem, but they themselves were the problem.
In each of these cases they couldn’t make things better because they didn’t know what or who made things better or worse. Ultimately, they sought relief from false gods. They misattributed the answer to their problem. I can’t solve my problem if I won’t be honest about where it comes from. I can’t make things better if I don’t know who or what makes them better.
In verse 17 they had been worshipping an idol and said, “Then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil.” In other words, they thought the safety, security, and plenty they had were from a false god, and the men blamed their women and the women blamed the men for their problems.
Authority, destruction, a curse, and blessing and relief. In every case God’s own people had misattributed. They couldn’t make things better because they didn’t acknowledge who could do that. At the end of the day, faith and obedience are the answer to limited knowledge. There are things these people could not have known, but God had revealed some of those things to them. So, faith and obedience were the only way to do what they needed to do. Jeremiah took some rocks at the command of God and buried them in the courtyard of a palace used by Pharoah. God essentially said, “I will set Nebuchadnezzar’s throne upon these stones that I have hid and he shall spread his royal pavilion over thee.” This was looking to the future. What God was saying was, “Unless you trust God and obey, your answers are limited to the knowledge you have and the knowledge you have is not as great as you think it is.
I don’t know what your issues are today or what you think the answers are, but you can’t make things better until you know what it is that does that. It is not ourselves or Egypt. It is not someone else’s fault, nor are the blessings a result of our money or things we can do. No, there is a God in Heaven, and faith and obedience are the answers to the limited knowledge we possess.