Weekly Bible Reading – Week 33
Last week we spent some extra time getting our bearings in Jeremiah. Because the book is arranged more thematically than chronologically, it can sometimes feel like we are jumping backward and forward through Judah’s final years. This week, however, everything begins to converge. The siege tightens. Jeremiah is imprisoned. King Zedekiah refuses to listen. Jerusalem falls. The temple burns. The people are carried away. Even those left behind in the land continue making disastrous choices.
This is one of the darkest weeks in our entire reading plan. We have watched this coming for hundreds of years. God warned His people through Moses. He sent judges, prophets, faithful kings, and reformers. Again and again He called them to return, and again and again they wandered away. Now the judgment that seemed so distant finally arrives.
And yet this is not a week without hope. In fact, some of the brightest statements of faith in the Old Testament appear against this incredibly dark background. Jeremiah buys a field while Babylon surrounds the city. Habakkuk rejoices while imagining the crops failing and the stalls standing empty. The temple may fall, but God has not lost control of history.
Sometimes faith looks like praising God after the victory. This week, faith looks like trusting Him while the walls are falling down.
Daily Readings
Day 228 – Jeremiah 32-34: Jerusalem is under siege, Jeremiah is imprisoned, and God tells him to buy a field. From a purely financial standpoint, this may be the worst real-estate transaction in the Bible. Babylon is about to take possession of the land. Jeremiah may never personally enjoy the property he purchases. But that is exactly what makes the purchase so powerful. Jeremiah puts his money behind God’s promise that judgment will not be the end of Israel’s story. Houses, fields, and vineyards will one day be bought in this land again.
Jeremiah 33 continues that hope. The God who tears down is also able to rebuild. But chapter 34 reminds us why judgment is necessary. The people briefly obey God’s command by releasing their Hebrew servants, only to change their minds and enslave them again. Their repentance lasts only as long as the crisis frightens them. God is not looking merely for frightened promises. He desires hearts that genuinely turn toward Him.
Day 229 – Jeremiah 35-37: Jeremiah 35 gives us a powerful contrast. The Rechabites faithfully obey the instructions handed down by their ancestor, while Judah refuses to obey the repeated words of God. Their obedience becomes an indictment against a nation that has heard the Lord speak again and again but will not listen.
Then King Jehoiakim takes Jeremiah’s written prophecy, cuts it apart piece by piece, and throws it into the fire. It is almost a picture of Judah’s entire rebellion: if we destroy the message, perhaps we can avoid the judgment. But burning God’s Word does not silence God. Jeremiah simply dictates the message again. By chapter 37, Jeremiah is imprisoned while Jerusalem continues moving toward destruction. The prophet who faithfully speaks God’s Word looks like the loser, while the rulers who reject him still sit in positions of power. However, that will not last long.
Day 230 – Jeremiah 38-40, Psalms 74, 79: Jeremiah is lowered into a muddy cistern and left to die until Ebed-Melech courageously intervenes. Zedekiah continues secretly asking Jeremiah for God’s counsel while remaining unwilling to publicly obey it. He wants a word from God, but he does not want the consequences of actually following that word.
Then the city falls. Jerusalem is breached. Zedekiah attempts to escape, but he is captured. His sons are killed before his eyes, his eyes are put out, and he is carried in chains to Babylon. Jeremiah, meanwhile, is released. Psalms 74 and 79 give us words for the devastation. The sanctuary has been ruined. Jerusalem has been reduced to rubble. These psalms do not pretend that everything is fine. Biblical faith gives us permission to grieve, lament, ask questions, and cry out, “How long?” Lament is not the absence of faith, lament is just what faith sounds like when everything hurts.
Day 231 – 2 Kings 24-25, 2 Chronicles 36: The fall of Jerusalem is the end of an era. The city is captured. The temple Solomon built is burned. The treasures are carried away. The walls are demolished. Judah goes into exile. Think about how much history is contained in those ruins. This is the city of David. This is the temple where Solomon prayed and the glory of God filled the house. This is the kingdom that received God’s covenant promises. Yet neither possession of the temple nor descent from Abraham could substitute for faithfulness to the God who gave those blessings. But 2 Chronicles refuses to end the Old Testament story with Babylon. Its final words look ahead to Cyrus and the return from exile. Even when God’s people are removed from the land, God’s promises have not been removed from history.
Day 232 – Habakkuk 1-3: Habakkuk asks the questions many of us would have been asking, like “How long will God allow evil to continue?” And when God answers that Babylon is coming, Habakkuk has another question: “How can God use a nation even more wicked than Judah to judge Judah?” God does not give Habakkuk a simple explanation for everything he sees. Instead, He calls him to trust.
That leads to one of the most beautiful endings in all the prophets. Habakkuk imagines the worst-case scenario: no figs, no grapes, no olives, no crops, no sheep, no cattle. The entire economy collapses. Everything he can see says disaster. Yet he will rejoice in the Lord. That is not optimism. Habakkuk is not saying, “I’m sure everything will work out somehow.” His confidence is much stronger than that. Even if everything around him falls apart, God Himself remains his salvation. We will come back to that in our Deep Dive.
Day 233 – Jeremiah 41-45: You might think that after they watched Jeremiah’s prophecies come true in horrifying detail, the survivors would finally listen to him. Instead, the tragedy continues.
Gedaliah, the governor appointed over those who remain in Judah, is assassinated. The survivors become terrified of Babylonian retaliation and decide that Egypt looks safer. They ask Jeremiah to seek God’s direction and solemnly promise that they will obey whatever the Lord says. God tells them not to go to Egypt, so where do they go… Egypt. That may be one of the saddest summaries of the human heart in Jeremiah. We sometimes ask God for guidance when what we really want is His approval of a decision we have already made.
However, tucked into these chapters is a personal word to Baruch, Jeremiah’s faithful scribe. God tells him not to seek great things for himself. The kingdom around him is collapsing, and this is not the moment for dreams of personal greatness. God promises him something simpler and more precious: his life. Sometimes God’s faithfulness does not look like giving us the life we imagined. Sometimes it looks like carrying us faithfully through the life we were given.
Day 234 – Jeremiah 46-48: After all this focus on Judah’s judgment, Jeremiah turns his attention toward the surrounding nations. Egypt will be judged. Philistia will be judged. Moab will be judged. Babylon may appear unstoppable, but Babylon is not sovereign. Nebuchadnezzar is not writing the story. God is.
That is important after everything we have just read. Jerusalem did not fall because Babylon’s gods defeated the God of Israel. Judah fell because the Lord had announced judgment against His rebellious people, and He used Babylon as His instrument. And the nations themselves will answer to Him as well. Kings rise. Empires expand. Cities fall. Borders move. But the Lord remains King over all the earth.
Deep Dive: Faith That Says “Yet”
The little prophet Habakkuk gives us one of the clearest pictures in Scripture of what mature faith looks like when circumstances give us no reason to celebrate. It’s easy to say that God is good when the fig tree is blossoming. It is easy to praise Him when the vines are heavy with grapes, the fields are producing food, the sheep fill the pens, the cattle fill the stalls, the family is healthy, the bills are paid, the church is growing, and tomorrow looks promising. But what happens when those things disappear?
Habakkuk deliberately strips them away one by one. The figs fail. The grapes fail. The olives fail. The fields fail. The sheep disappear. The cattle are gone. And then comes that little word: yet. That may be one of the most important words we learn in the life of faith.
- The diagnosis is frightening, yet God is faithful.
- The relationship is broken, yet God is faithful.
- The job disappears, yet God is faithful.
- The prayer has not been answered the way we hoped, yet God is faithful.
- The future looks nothing like the future we had planned, yet God is faithful.
Habakkuk’s joy is not naive pretending that the losses are unimportant. The losses are real. Jerusalem really will fall. People really will suffer. The temple really will burn. However, his joy is rooted in something that Babylon cannot burn down. God Himself.
Habakkuk does not merely say, “God gives me salvation.” He rejoices in the God of his salvation. God is not simply the One who provides the good things Habakkuk wants. God is the treasure. That is where this entire week has been leading us. Jeremiah can purchase a field while an enemy army occupies the land because God has promised a future. The psalmists can lament the destruction of the sanctuary because they know there is still a God in heaven who hears them. The exiles can be carried hundreds of miles from Jerusalem without being carried outside the reach of God’s covenant faithfulness. And Habakkuk can stand among the ruins and rejoice.
There will be seasons when our confidence in God is strengthened because we can clearly see what He is doing. Thank Him for those seasons. But there will also be seasons when almost everything visible seems to argue against hope. In those moments, faith says yet.
The fig tree may not blossom, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. Not because the loss is small, but because our God is greater.