“Remnant of Judah, the LORD has told you, ‘Do not go to Egypt.’ Be sure of this: I warn you today … – Jeremiah 42:19

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 29, 2014): Jeremiah 42

Italian author Laurentius Abstemius wrote his most famous work, Hecatomythium, in 1495. The book is a collection of a hundred fables written in Latin. Some of the fables were translated from Greek for the book. The book of fables were passed over by the critics of the day. The stories that they told were considered to be ridiculous, and many took exception to the negative view that some of the fables took on the clergy.

One of the fables told is a story about a group of fish. The fish had been caught and were being placed in a pan of boiling oil. And the fish began to have a conversation. One of them suggested that they needed to do whatever they could to get out of the pan. So a plan was made – and the fish jumped out of the oil, but they landed in the fire. There, lying on the burning coals, the fish curse the bad advice that they had followed. The fabulist concludes that “this fable warns us that when we are avoiding present dangers, we should not fall into even worse peril.” Aesop paraphrased the fable for his collection of fables. He entitled the fable “Worse and Worse” and rephrased the moral as “jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

The fable of the fish fits the message that God gives to Jeremiah. It would seem that the immediate reaction of those left in Judah, after the close of the Babylonian-Judean war, was to run to the other superpower in the world. The idea was that maybe in Egypt they could be safe. It is sometimes amazing as we tell the story of the Bible how often Israel seems to believe that safety is found in Egypt – that place where they once existed as slaves.

But God’s message was that the only place where they could be all that they were created to be was with God. What had happened in Judah may have been uncomfortable, but if God had not been with the people of Judah during their conflict with Babylon, it would have been so much worse. God had never left them. And now God was inviting them to stay – not to run to Egypt. God was still with them – and had no plans on leaving them. And they needed to leave behind them any plans to leave God if they wanted to be successful in the future.

According to Jeremiah, to run to Egypt would be like “jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Life might have been uncomfortable, but they could trust God to be with them where they were, and walk with them into the future. Here is the reality that I know. People will let you down. That was the danger that Egypt represented. It was trust in a group of people that could not save them. Only God was worthy of their trust – and if they were looking for someone to move them through to the end of the story, that someone was not going to be found in Egypt. That someone was the one that had held them every step of the way so far – and the one that was never going to give up on them. That someone was their God – the one who deserved their trust.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 43