After Gedaliah son of Ahikam had been appointed governor by the king of Babylon (Jeremiah 40:7), some of the leaders of the remnant of the army of Judah, who had been hiding in the wilderness, came to him, and he urged them to stay in the land and serve the king of Babylon (40:9).

Johanan son of Kereah, the leader of these soldiers, told Gedaliah about the plot against his life by the assassin Ishmael son of Nethaniah, hired by the Ammonites; but Gedaliah did not believe it (40:13-16). Ishmael did indeed murder Gedaliah, along with the Judeans and the Babylonians who were there at the time; and then killed and kidnapped others and made his escape (41:1-10).

Then Johanan and his men pursued Ishmael, and freed the prisoners whom Ishmael had kidnapped (41:11-16). Yet they were afraid to stay in the land, because they feared that the Babylonians would blame them for the death of Gedaliah the governor (41:17-18). They asked Jeremiah to pray for them to discover God’s will, promising to obey it (42:1-6). Jeremiah told them: stay here, and God will bless you; or go to Egypt, where you will all die from hunger, disease, and war (42:7-22).

They decided they did not believe Jeremiah, and would go to Egypt anyway, taking Jeremiah along with them (43:1-7). As it turned out, once they got to Egypt the people gloated in their idolatry (44:15-19). And Jeremiah could only report to them the word of the Lord concerning the disaster they were bringing upon themselves: “I am going to watch over them for harm and not for good; all the people of Judah who are in the land of Egypt shall perish by the sword and by famine, until not one is left” (44:27).

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We often ask to know your will, O Lord, and we promise to obey you, yet it seems what we really want is for you to affirm what we have already decided. Then when you point us in a different direction, we decide that answer must be wrong. Grant us grace and courage, O God, to follow you: especially when you call us to do something other than what we picked for ourselves.

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