Day 521: Rebellion and pride- Jeremiah 28 vs 12 - 17

12-14 Sometime after the prophet Hananiah had broken the yoke-bars from off the neck of Jeremiah the prophet, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “Go, tell Hananiah, ‘Thus says the Lord: You have broken wooden bars, but you have made in their place bars of iron. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put upon the neck of all these nations an iron yoke to serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and they shall serve him,  for I have given to him even the beasts of the field.’” 

15-16 And Jeremiah the prophet said to the prophet Hananiah, “Listen, Hananiah,  the  Lord has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie. Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will remove you from the face of the earth. This year you shall die,  because you have uttered rebellion against the Lord.’” 17 In that same year, in the seventh month, the prophet Hananiah died. Jeremiah 28:12-17 (English Standard Version)

The prophet named Hananiah had dramatically taken off Jeremiah’s yoke that God had told him to wear (like a visual aid to illustrate the yoke Babylon would be) and had broken it in the presence of the king and the people. He prophesied that their troubles would be over in a couple of years. What happened to Hananiah as a result of his false prophesying? (vs 17)

To understand this more fully we must remember what God spoke through Moses hundreds of years earlier. In Deuteronomy 13:1-5 Moses said: “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and  the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods’, which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them’ - you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. For the Lord  your God is testing you, to know whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him and keep his commandments and obey his voice, and you shall serve him and hold fast to him.  But  that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the  Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt and redeemed you out of the house of slavery, to make you leave the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil  from your midst.”

Now while Hananiah was not calling Israel to worship other gods, he was lying to them and urging them to disobey what God had spoken through Jeremiah. A man named Saul, the first King of Israel, had also disobeyed words God spoke through the prophet Samuel. Samuel told the King that, in God's sight, “rebellion is like the sin of divination, and defiance is like wickedness and idolatry.” (1 Samuel 15:22-23) This is surely why God dealt with Hananiah so strongly. Hananiah was preaching rebellion against God, and disobedience to God's word. Let us learn from such an incident.

There's another thing worth noting in this section. What else did God say He had placed under the iron yoke of Nebuchadnezzar, besides many nations? (vs 12-14)

The beasts of the field. Many years after Jeremiah said this, King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream in which he saw a huge tree where even “the beasts of the field found shade under it - and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.” (Daniel 4:12) But the dream turned out to be a warning from God that, because Nebuchadnezzar boasted it was his own mighty power that had given him such lordship in the world, God would send a sickness upon him that would make him “be driven from among men, and his dwelling would be with the beasts of the field. He would be made to eat grass like an ox, until he knew that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He will.” (Daniel 4:32)

Oh let us be careful of rebellion and pride and obey God's words always, and acknowledge that He is Lord.