Weekly Bible Reading – Week 34
We have reached one of the darkest stretches of our journey through the Old Testament. For weeks, Jeremiah has warned Judah that judgment was coming. He pleaded with kings, priests, prophets, and ordinary people to turn back to the Lord. He was mocked, beaten, imprisoned, thrown into a cistern, and accused of treason. Now everything he warned about has happened. Jerusalem has fallen, the temple has been burned, the walls have been torn down, and the people have been killed, scattered, or carried away into exile.
If last week showed us the catastrophe itself, this week teaches us how to live on the other side of it. We will finish Jeremiah, sit among the ashes with Lamentations, and then suddenly find ourselves hundreds of miles away in Babylon with a young priest named Ezekiel. There, beside a foreign river under the rule of a foreign king, Ezekiel will look up and see something astonishing: the glory of the God of Israel. Israel has lost its land, Jerusalem has fallen, and the temple is being abandoned. Everything they associated with the presence and blessing of God seems to have disappeared, but they have not lost God.
Daily Readings
Day 235 – Jeremiah 49-50: Jeremiah’s attention now widens beyond Judah to the nations surrounding her. Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Kedar, Hazor, Elam, and finally mighty Babylon all come beneath the word of the Lord. That is important because Judah could easily have misunderstood what had happened. Babylon had conquered Jerusalem, and in the ancient world military victory could be interpreted as the victory of one nation’s gods over another. Babylon’s armies had defeated Judah and would destroy Yahweh’s temple, so it might have appeared that Babylon and her gods had won.
Jeremiah says exactly the opposite. Babylon has not defeated God; Babylon has been used by God. The empire that crushed Judah remains accountable to the very God whose purposes it unknowingly served. Babylon may be the hammer, but the hammer is not the carpenter. When God has finished using Babylon as an instrument of judgment, Babylon herself will answer for her pride, cruelty, violence, and idolatry. That is an important reminder whenever evil looks powerful. God can use kingdoms without approving of them. He can accomplish His purposes through rulers and nations that neither know Him nor honor Him. No king, government, army, movement, or culture ever slips outside His rule. Babylon may look invincible for a season, but only the Lord reigns forever.
Day 236 – Jeremiah 51-52: Jeremiah 51 continues the announcement of Babylon’s eventual destruction, but chapter 52 brings us back to Jerusalem, and now there are no more warnings. The walls fall. The temple is burned. Its treasures are carried away. The leading citizens are executed. Zedekiah watches his sons die before his eyes before he is blinded and taken away to Babylon. It is a brutal ending to the story we have been following. There is something deeply important about Jeremiah ending this way. For decades Jeremiah spoke the word of the Lord while people dismissed him as pessimistic, disloyal, troublesome, or simply wrong. Chapter 52 quietly demonstrates that Jeremiah had been telling the truth all along. God had spoken, and everything happened just as He said it would.
Yet the book does not close in complete darkness. In its final verses, Jehoiachin, the imprisoned king of Judah, is released from prison and given a place at the table of the king of Babylon. It is only a tiny flicker of light, but after everything we have just witnessed, we should notice it. David’s family has not disappeared. The royal line has not been completely extinguished. Jerusalem may lie in rubble, but somewhere in Babylon a son of David is still alive. God is not finished.
Day 237 – Lamentations 1-2: Then we come to Lamentations, and before we go looking for a lesson or an encouraging takeaway, we need to allow this book to do what it was written to do: lament. Jerusalem is pictured as a widow sitting alone. The city that had once been crowded is empty. Her friends have abandoned her, her children have been carried away, and her streets mourn because worshipers no longer come through them for the festivals. There is no attempt to pretend that everything is fine, and that itself is an important lesson for us. Biblical faith does not require us to smile while our world collapses. There are moments when faithful people weep. There are losses that should hurt and consequences of sin that ought to horrify us. Lamentations does not rush past grief because grief makes us uncomfortable. It sits in the ashes for a while.
At the same time, the book refuses to accuse God of injustice. Jerusalem acknowledges that this disaster did not come from nowhere. Judah rebelled against God again and again. The prophets warned them, and the covenant itself had made the consequences of continued rebellion clear. Their grief is real, but their guilt is also real, and somehow they must bring both before God. That is one of the gifts of lament: it gives us a language for praying when there are no easy answers left.
Day 238 – Lamentations 3-5: In the middle of one of the darkest books of the Bible we suddenly encounter some of its most beloved words: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end.” Those words become much more powerful when we remember where they are spoken. This is not someone standing on a mountaintop after everything has worked out beautifully. Jerusalem is still destroyed. The exile is still real. The people are still suffering. Nothing visible has changed. What changes is where the writer looks. In the middle of the grief, he deliberately calls the character of God to mind. That is biblical hope. Hope looks directly at the ruins and remembers that the Lord is still good. God’s mercies are new every morning because every morning we awaken still dependent upon His mercy.
Lamentations finally ends with the prayer, “Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored!” That prayer reveals what the people finally need most. They need more than their city back. They need more than walls, land, prosperity, or even a rebuilt temple. They need God Himself.
Day 239 – Ezekiel 1-4: The scene changes dramatically as Ezekiel begins. We are no longer standing among Jerusalem’s ruins. We are in Babylon among the exiles beside the Chebar canal, and suddenly the heavens open. Ezekiel sees a storm, fire, strange living creatures, wheels within wheels, an expanse above them, and finally a throne. Seated above it is a figure surrounded by overwhelming brightness, and Ezekiel falls on his face.
There is much about this vision that is strange to us, and Ezekiel himself struggles to describe it. He repeatedly uses words such as “appearance,” “likeness,” and “something like” because ordinary human language is failing him. Yet the central message of the vision is wonderfully clear. The throne of God has wheels. God is not trapped in Jerusalem. The Babylonians may have carried His people hundreds of miles away, but Israel has not crossed some invisible border beyond which Yahweh cannot reach them. God shows up in Babylon.
That would have been especially powerful for Ezekiel. He was a priest, but now he lived hundreds of miles from the temple where priests were supposed to serve. The future he may have expected for himself had disappeared. Yet God found him in exile and gave him a new calling. Ezekiel’s plans had been shattered, but God’s purposes for him had not.
Day 240 – Ezekiel 5-8: Ezekiel’s visions also begin to explain why Jerusalem’s judgment had to come. The Lord shows Ezekiel what is happening inside the city and even within the temple itself. Idolatry has infected the very place that was supposed to display the holiness of God. Ezekiel sees elders secretly offering incense to false gods, and men turning their backs toward the temple of the Lord to worship the sun. Perhaps the most sobering part is that they behave as though God cannot see them. They have hidden their idols behind walls and closed doors, but nothing is hidden from the Lord.
That is one of the frightening themes of these chapters. We are often much more concerned with what other people can see than with what God sees. It is possible to preserve the outward appearance of religion while our hearts quietly construct their own collection of idols. We can say the right words, attend the right gatherings, and look perfectly respectable while our deepest loves, fears, ambitions, and dependencies have moved somewhere else. The temple still looked impressive from outside, but God saw what was happening within. He always does.
Day 241 – Ezekiel 9-12: Then we come to one of the most heartbreaking moments of the week. The glory of the Lord departs from the temple. It does not simply disappear all at once. Ezekiel watches as the glory moves from the inner sanctuary to the threshold, then toward the eastern gate, and eventually away from the city. There is something almost reluctant about the movement. The God who had chosen to dwell among His people is departing from the house they have filled with idols. The temple itself continues to exist physically for a short time. Its rooms are still there. The priests can still walk through its courts. The altar still stands. The building still carries the name of the Lord, but the glory is leaving.
As a pastor, it is a particularly dark thought for me as I imagine the people continuing all the motions of religion even after the presence of God has departed. Yet even here, Ezekiel gives us hope. God promises that although He has scattered His people among the nations, He Himself will be a sanctuary to them in the places where they have gone. He promises to gather them again and to give them one heart and a new spirit. He will remove their heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. The answer to Israel’s problem cannot simply be rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls or constructing another temple. Their deepest problem is inside them. They need new hearts, and so do we.
Deep Dive: God is not Trapped in the Temple
One of the most important theological developments in this week’s reading happens when Ezekiel sees the glory of God in Babylon. Think about how deeply Jerusalem shaped Israel’s understanding of God’s presence. God had chosen Jerusalem. Solomon had built the temple there, and the glory of the Lord had filled it. Sacrifices were offered there, priests served there, and the great festivals brought Israel there year after year. The temple was the visible center of Israel’s relationship with God. So what happens when the temple falls? Has God lost His home? Has Babylon conquered His territory? Can the people of Israel still encounter the Lord hundreds of miles away from the place where He had chosen to put His name?
Ezekiel’s vision gives a dramatic answer. The throne of God is mobile. The strange wheels beneath the living creatures can move in every direction, and wherever the Spirit goes, the throne goes. God is not a local deity confined to a city or a building. He is the King of heaven and earth. When His people are carried into exile, He is already there.
That does not make the destruction of Jerusalem unimportant. Ezekiel is devastated by what he sees, and sin really has driven the people from the land and the glory from the temple. Yet exile does not put them beyond the reach of God. In Ezekiel 11, the Lord says that although He has scattered the people among the countries, He has been “a sanctuary” to them there. They have lost the temple, but they have not lost His presence.
That theme becomes even more beautiful as the Bible continues. John tells us that the eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Himself becomes the meeting place between God and humanity. When His opponents speak about the temple, Jesus points toward His own body. After His resurrection and ascension, He pours out the Holy Spirit so that God now dwells within His people. Paul can therefore speak to ordinary Christians scattered across the Roman world and tell them that they are God’s temple.
That means Ezekiel’s vision has something to say to us whenever the structures we depended upon disappear. A church can change. A career can end. A relationship can be lost. A family can go through upheaval. Sometimes we become so accustomed to meeting God in a particular place, season, routine, or circumstance that when it disappears we begin to wonder whether God has disappeared with it. But Ezekiel reminds us that the heavens can open beside a river in Babylon. God can meet His people in exile. His throne has wheels. There is nowhere His people can be carried where He cannot find them, and ultimately our hope is even greater than Ezekiel could see.
In Christ, God did not merely send a vision of His glory into our exile; He came Himself. The Son of God entered our broken world, bore our judgment, died outside the city, rose from the grave, and poured out His Spirit so that everyone who belongs to Him can know the presence of God wherever they are. So as we finish a difficult week of reading, that may be the encouragement to carry with us. Jerusalem can fall, walls can crumble, temples can burn, the world we expected can disappear beneath our feet, but none of those things can unseat God from His throne, and none of them can place His people outside His reach. When we find ourselves far from where we expected to be, we may discover what Ezekiel learned beside the Chebar canal: God was already there.