Truth and Consequences:
A study in the prophecy of Jeremiah
Chapter 24
By Bob Mendelsohn
Given 10 June 2022
Lesson Twenty-four: Baskets of fruit: Good or bad?
INTRODUCTION
Thank you, friends, for joining us today here in the Zoom room, as we unpack chapter 24 of Jeremiah. Let’s dig into it and find out what God has to say to us as 21st Century people wherever you live and for those on YouTube, from wherever and whenever you are watching.
I title today’s talk, “Fruit: Good or bad?” because that seems to be the question God is asking and Jeremiah is sharing as a good prophet.
Let me ask you. See if you recognize this scene. You are on the train headed home after a long day at work. You skipped lunch because, well, you had to in order to accomplish something your boss required. Then you couldn’t get the machine to produce the needed candy bar at the smoko break and now you are late to the train, rushing onto the platform just in time to catch the door before it closes. Exhausted you look for a seat, and you find one. Amazing. It’s there. And in fact, it’s a double seat. Just you and no one and you put down your briefcase on the floor between your feet and take a deep breath. Ah, good to settle.
Then you look to the side, and you see why there is no one in the seat next to you. There is an apple. A rich, red, juicy-looking apple, plump, as if God had put that there, just for you. Wow, fantastic. Someone must have had it in his backpack and it must have fallen out, or maybe even God had an angel drop that off, just now, just for you. Wow, awesome. You even smile and say a quick, albeit quiet, ‘thank you, Lord.’
You reach over pick it up. Fantastic, you think. This will tide me over until dinner. Your hand settles on the sides and almost caresses the red fruit, but to your surprise, the fruit is …well, something is wrong. The back of the apple is brown, the bottom is slightly dripping, and the “is it juice?” drips onto your new suit trousers. The smell is slightly off and all of a sudden you realize this was left by someone who rejected his own snack. The apple looked good, but was not good. It was not good for eating; it was not good for smelling, it was simply not good.
Your disappointment in fact is amplified. The day was bad enough; the disappointment in finding a fake apple, a rotten apple, a not-as-advertised apple makes the day that much worse. Better not to have advertised itself as a fruit at all. It would have been better if it simply went into a bin moments or hours before. The lie was worse than the pretense. Yuck.
OK< the story is exaggerated and may not speak to you, but it does to me. I’ve been in such a moment; I was thirsty in a public park, the water fountain bubbler was right there, but it didn’t work. Then I walked a bit further and found a coca-cola left on a picnic table and I got excited until I approached and found someone had used the coke as an ashtray and drowned a cigarette inside the bottle. What a waste! Again, the failure was amplified.
So we read in today’s story of some rotten figs and some good figs. And if we have been paying attention to the readings over the last 6 months, yes, the last 23 chapters of Jeremiah, we would know that the bad figs would represent the leadership and the good figs would represent the good people who are under the rubric of the leaders’ authority. That’s a simple reading and usually the right way to read the text. But not today. Not this chapter. In fact, the setting is clearer than many settings, so let’s unpack this and get to the heart of the matter and the good fruit can be ours.
The Good figs (v. 1-7)
Verse 1, Jeremiah tells us the time of this prophecy. Nebuchadnezzar arrives in 597 BCE into Jerusalem and sets up an attack. He takes captive some of the folks, in fact, the leadership of the Jewish people, and takes them to Babylon where he is the king. The king he lists is Jeconiah, whom we studied a couple of weeks ago. (chapter 22) OK, that seems right, after all, we have learned, that Coniah should be judged and taken away.
Jeremiah tells us after Coniah and the artisans were taken away, that God showed him two baskets and spoke to him through that scene. Like in chapter 1, God asked Jeremiah what he saw and the prophet answered simply.
Verse 4 and following,
Jer. 24:4 Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 5 “Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the captives of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans. 6 ‘For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them again to this land; and I will build them up and not overthrow them, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. 7 ‘I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the LORD; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart.”
Now wait a minute, you shout. That’s not on. God is saying that the good figs are the rotten king and the fallen leadership? They are good? They will turn out ok? This ALWAYS happens to us, doesn’t it? The nobles seem to get lucky. The lords always seem to dominate and we little guys get stuck cleaning up after them. The winners always win; what’s that about? Where is there justice?
That’s a reasonable conversation starter to have with the Almighty. But don’t miss this; God is saying something about himself, not about them.
Christopher Wright says this about the phrase in verse 5, “Most English translations of verse 5 could lead to a misunderstanding. Most of them read that God intends to regard as good the exiles from Judah. This may sound as though God has changed his earlier condemnation into moral approval; as though God now regards them as good and so deserving of a better future. But the Hebrew is more subtle than that and leaves no room for imagining that the exiles had passed from condemnation to commendation. Literally, it says, “Like these good figs, thus will I regard the exiles of Judah, whom I sent away from this place to the land of Babylon, for good.” In other words, it is not the exiles who have suddenly become good, but God’s intentions for them that are surprisingly for good.”
The language is very similar to Ezekiel in his famous 36th chapter, although the Holy Spirit is not mentioned here. Listen to the emphasis I give to verse 5 and the following:
Jer. 24:5 ‘Like these good figs, I WILL regard … 6 ‘For I WILL set My eyes on them for good, and I WILL bring them again to this land; and I WILL build them up…, and I WILL plant them and not pluck them up. 7 ‘I WILL give them a heart …they will be My people, and I WILL be their God”
Hard to miss those promises of the Lord, you know? He will cause himself to perform. He is setting a calendar reminder on his iPad to certain actions that will testify to his own grace and mercy. No one of the exiles, exposed as the losers to the people still living in Jerusalem (at least for another 10 years), will be good in and of themselves. They will be reckoned as good (sounds like Abraham’s right standing with God (Gen. 15.6)) and God will honour his own name. Those sinners saved by grace will be brought back to Jerusalem. Those exiles will be returned and replanted and they will know the Lord personally. And God will see to it himself.
Listen, you might think that Jeremiah had been bought off by one of the nobles into saying nice things about the nobility, but that’s not anything close to true. We’ll see that in next week’s lesson. What we are hearing and learning is that God is a caring and loving and merciful Father who wants us all to know him and he will continue to be both Sovereign (that’s where all those “I will” came in) and expectant of good responses from us.
Wright uses a word that is well known in theology but may be new to you. It’s the word ‘antinomy.’ Anti-nomos. This is a statement that is really two statements lodged together which seem oxymoronic. These two statements here are related to God’s power to accomplish and man’s responsibility to perform. God will; we must. We must know him. We must return with a whole heart. He will bring this to pass. They sound like opposites; they sound like someone needs to make up his divine mind about who is responsible to do what. If God will give us a new heart and cause us to love him, ok, fine. Or is he saying we are required to return and love him? Which is it?
The answer is ‘yes.’ That’s an antinomy. What looks like conflicting statements that are equally valid and true. No wonder some people who are more demanding than us of God’s simplifying it for us have turned away. They cannot seem to hold truths in tension.
Dear friends, I don’t have to understand the workings of the Lord. I don’t have to know everything before I believe in the goodness of the Living God. He does everything for good, and even titling the failed king and the elite in his court (who were previously destined for the rubbish heap) as good...that rebranding shouts loudly to me of the Amazing Grace of God.
But of course, I know him personally too. And my life was in a rubbish heap in 1971. I was living for myself and although I was a chosen one, a Jew, my life was going nowhere fast. Then some people witnessed to me their life in Messiah and shared with me that if I accepted Jesus as Lord of my life, he would let me know him and that’s just what happened. May 1971, I was called ‘good fig’ by the God who made me thus. Anything good in me now, I owe it all to Him who made me new by his love, grace, and by the blood of Yeshua.
See that in verse 7? In chapter 17, Jeremiah had already made it abundantly clear that our heart is deceitful and we cannot make good decisions. Who can know it? Yet, here we will return with a whole heart. That’s where life is. Not in the 50% or 80% giving to God. A ship’s captain doesn’t take half a wheel; or 80% of the steering of a vessel. The captain has to take the whole wheel or he’s not actually driving the ship. Otherwise, the ship will crash and the voyage will fail. There’s only one captain on your ship; let it be the Lord and your life will be way better.
The Bad Figs (v. 8-10)
The conclusion of the chapter is three verses. The bad figs are named. Zedekiah about whom we spoke a few weeks ago. He’s the ultimate king of Judah and his failures are aggravated and exaggerated like my apple story earlier. No escaping. Even though they think they will escape because they are still in the land for another decade, that is not their final chapter. The language here is reminiscent of all judgment chapters in the Bible, whether the Tochacha we read in the synagogue a couple of weeks ago in Bechukotai or in the penultimate Parsha in Deuteronomy 28 which we read just before the Holidays. The future looks bleak; Jeremiah is not changing his tune. Will the people who stay in the Land repent? Will they listen? Will they be called ‘good’ by God, the God of mercy? Time will tell. And we will return to this book next week to learn more.
CONCLUSION
God is calling each of us to know him and to walk with him, today and throughout our days. Have you received Yeshua as your messiah and Lord? He has risen from the dead! Have you renounced your sin, your idolatry, your forsaking God and given him First Place in your life? If not, please, do so now, just now, as we pray together. Use your own words, if you want, but yield, surrender, to the Lord of life.
PRAYER
Then please write us (admin@jewsforjesus.org.au) to tell us what you have just done, and we will send you literature and encourage you. You are part of our family; we love and appreciate you. And we want you to enjoy the presence of the Lord who calls, who knows, who blesses and builds us up.
We hope to see you again next week as we study chapter 18. Until then, Shabbat shalom!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barnes, Albert, Albert Barnes’ Commentary on the Old Testament,
Craigie, Peter; Kelley, Page; Drinkard, Joel. Word Biblical Commentary. Book of Jeremiah. 1991.
Henry, Matthew, Commentary.
McConnville, Gordon, Jeremiah, New Bible Commentary.
Wright, Christopher, The Message of Jeremiah, The Bible Speaks Today, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 2014.
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ACTUAL TEXT
Baskets of Figs and the Returnees
Jer. 24:1 After aNebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the officials of Judah with the craftsmen and smiths from Jerusalem and had brought them to Babylon, the LORD showed me: behold, two bbaskets of figs set before the temple of the LORD! 2 One basket had very good figs, like afirst-ripe figs, and the other basket had bvery bad figs which could not be eaten due to rottenness. 3 Then the LORD said to me, “aWhat do you see, Jeremiah?” And I said, “Figs, the good figs, very good; and the bad figs, very bad, which cannot be eaten due to rottenness.”
Jer. 24:4 Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 5 “Thus says the LORD God of Israel, ‘Like these good figs, so I will regard aas good the captives of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans. 6 ‘For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will abring them again to this land; and I will bbuild them up and not overthrow them, and I will cplant them and not pluck them up. 7 ‘I will give them a aheart to know Me, for I am the LORD; and they will be bMy people, and I will be their God, for they will creturn to Me with their whole heart.
Jer. 24:8 ‘But like the abad figs which cannot be eaten due to rottenness — indeed, thus says the LORD — so I will 1abandon bZedekiah king of Judah and his officials, and the cremnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land and the ones who dwell in the land of dEgypt. 9 ‘I will amake them a terror and an evil for all the kingdoms of the earth, as a breproach and a proverb, a taunt and a ccurse in all places where I will scatter them. 10 ‘I will send the asword, the famine and the pestilence upon them until they are destroyed from the land which I gave to them and their forefathers.’”
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