Good and Bad Figs

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Let us pray:

Grant, Almighty God, that as You have such patience with us that You do not deal with us as our sins deserve, may we not indulge ourselves but carefully consider how often, and in how many ways, we have provoked Your anger against us, that we may learn humbly to present ourselves to You for pardon, and with true repentance implore Your mercy upon us, so that we may from the heart desire wholly to serve You and submit ourselves before You. Whether Your providence is difficult or easy to bear, Lord, may we not flatter ourselves in our indolence and spiritual laziness, but instead find You to be our kind and bountiful Father, reconciled to You in and through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen1

In this morning’s reading from the book of Jeremiah we are transported back to the year 597 BC, to see a vision given to the prophet from the Lord Himself. The vision related to an invasion which had occurred between 598 and 597 BC, when the Babylonians (led by King Nebuchadnezzar) sacked Judah and took many of her people away into exile. In one of the most specific dates I think I’ve ever found in a Bible commentary, Biblical scholars believe that ““The city surrendered to the Babylonians on the fifteenth or sixteenth of March 597 BC”.2

We can read of this in 2 Kings:

At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up to the city while his servants were besieging it, and Jehoiachin the king of Judah gave himself up to the king of Babylon, himself and his mother and his servants and his officials and his palace officials. The king of Babylon took him prisoner in the eighth year of his reign and carried off all the treasures of the house of the LORD and the treasures of the king’s house, and cut in pieces all the vessels of gold in the temple of the LORD, which Solomon king of Israel had made, as the LORD had foretold. (2 Kgs. 24. 10-13)

After this surrender, a large number of people were taken away into captivity in Babylon. These people were:

Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, together with the officials of Judah, the craftsmen, and the metal workers. (Jer. 24. 1)

With these people in captivity, King Nebuchadnezzar installed a puppet monarch in the form of Mattaniah, and changed his name to Zedekiah. (2 Kgs. 24. 17) The invasion and captivity, we can read in Jeremiah 25, took place because of the sins of the people of Judah, so the Lord used Nebuchadnezzar (whom He describes as “my servant” - 25. 9) to sack the city and deport its key people, leaving only the poor. Even the king’s son was taken, he being descended from the line of King David. The exile, Jeremiah revealed in a later prophetic vision, would last for seventy years. (25. 12)

However, in the vision in chapter 24, which we heard read, the Lord showed Jeremiah two baskets of figs, standing before the Temple of the Lord. It was believed that the Temple was where God manifested Himself,3 so we can understand this to mean that the two baskets of figs were being well looked over and judged by the Lord in what He was about to say and do. The two baskets each contained figs, but one basket contained good figs, and the other rancid or bad ones. The good figs, said the Lord, represented “the exiles from Judah” (24. 5), whereas the bad figs (which were “so bad they cannot be eaten” 24. 8) represented “Zedekiah… his officials, the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt.” (24. 8)

The Good and Sweet Figs

The Lord then goes on to explain how the good figs, the exiles taken from the land of Judah into captivity in Babylon, had only been taken into captivity because He had willed it: He had sent them there. (24. 5)

Everything that had happened. The fighting, the destruction, the ransacking, the exile, had all happened as part of the Lord’s plan to bring about the people’s repentance. Nebuchadnezzar did not win the battle because of his strength, but because the Lord was using him. However, the exiles should be encouraged because, said the Lord, one day they would return to their native land. One day even the Temple of the Lord would be rebuilt. This would eventually come to pass, and we can read of this in Ezra 2, when King Cyrus decided to release the captives and send them back to their homeland. This change in fortunes, however, would not come about because of the exiles’ power or because of their might, but because they would experience a change of heart. God says, “I will give them a heart to know that I am the LORD…”. (24. 7)

This shows us two things:

Firstly we can recognise that their restoration could only come about through repentance. The exiled people of Judah could only return to their homeland once they realised the gravity of their sin and truly repented. The word repent means to turn around, to change course, and until the exiles did this, there was no hope for them in the eyes of God.

We can see something of this in the words of the Prophet Hosea, who pleaded:

Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the LORD; (Hos 14. 1-2)

It was the people’s iniquity, their sin, that had caused their destruction and their stumbling. For too long they had been walking away from God, and now their sins had caught up with them. If they ever hoped to return from their enforced exile, they would have to repent and come to the Lord seeking mercy.

The second thing that we can learn is that this heart of repentance could only come about thanks to the Lord’s actions in their lives. Note how God did not say “And they will have a heart to know that I am the LORD”, but rather “I will give them a heart to know that I am the LORD…”. (24. 7) It was only through God’s gracious working in the exiles’ lives that they would find it in their hearts to turn away from their wickedness and seek forgiveness. Without Him making the first move, they would have remained in their defiant ways, ever lost to darkness.

In Deuteronomy, we can find these words:

And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (Deut. 30. 6)

It was only through loving the Lord their God that the people could live, and it was only through the Lord circumcising their hearts (and the hearts of their offspring) – literally cutting away all that was sinful and cankerous – that they would ever love the Lord at all. In Christian theology this concept of God moving first is known as prevenient grace: it is the teaching that, before we were ever able to know or love God, He had first to reveal Himself to us and plant that love in our hearts. This is why some people, try as you might to evangelise them or encourage them in the Lord, will never respond. It is not down solely to your bad evangelism, but because the Lord, for reasons best known only to Him, has not placed the spark of faith in their hearts. The people of Judah who had been taken away into exile could not return until they repented, and they could not repent until the Lord had changed their hearts.

Once the Lord had done this - once the people’s hearts had been turned and they were truly seeking forgiveness – then they could follow the pattern laid down and promised in Joel 2:

Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in stedfast love; and He relents over disaster. (Joel 2. 12-13)

Reading this promise in the here and now, and indeed perhaps hearing it shared at the time, the exiles may well have jumped up and down with joy at the prospect of being returned to their native land. After all, we all know the sorrow the Psalmist felt when he was in exile:

By Babel’s streams we sat and wept,

when Sion we thought on.

In midst thereof we hang’d our harps

the willow-trees upon.

For there a song required they,

who did us captive bring:

Our spoilers call’d for mirth, and said,

A song of Sion sing.

O how the Lord’s song shall we sing

within a foreign land?

If thee, Jerus’lem, I forget,

skill part from my right hand. (Ps. 137. 1-5 – Scottish Psalter)

But to focus only on their promised return to Judah would only be to understand half of the promise. Yes, the promise was certainly that one day they would again inhabit the land the Lord had given them, but there was something else. Let’s read the promise again:

I will set my eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. (Jer. 24. 6-7)

Not only did God promise to return them home, but He also promised to “change them inwardly.”4 In many ways this is the most exciting bit of the promise. Yes, returning to the land is good, but (says John Calvin) the “much more excellent favour”5 is that God would “inwardly change and reform their hearts, so that they would not only return to their own country, but would also become a true Church”.6

The exiles, through their enforced time away from the land of Judah, were being punished for their sinfulness, and were being transformed more into the likeness of God. On their return they would return with changed hearts and spirits.

The Bad and Sour Figs

Found within the other basket in Jeremiah’s vision were the bad or sour figs. These figs represented the people who remained and were not taken off into captivity. These people included the puppet king Mattaniah (who Nebuchadnezzar had renamed Zedekiah – 2 Kgs. 24. 17), the people left living in the destroyed city, and those who, on seeing the oncoming storm, had fled into neighbouring Egypt for safety. These people, said the Lord, were bad figs, good for nothing but throwing out.

Last Lord’s Day at Dowanvale, I went downstairs into the hall with the Church Officer and discovered that we had been infested with a plague of flies. They were flying all around our heads, big black buzzing things in every direction. We couldn’t work out where they had come from, but they were crawling up the pillars, settling on the tables and chairs, and generally causing a great nuisance. Upon further examination we found that somebody had left a piece of cabbage in the paper recycling bin, that the fruit flies had somehow got in and laid their eggs within. When I foolishly opened the bin lid, another swarm of big black flies buzzed past my head and out into the hall. I am reminded of this when reading of the bad figs. We don’t know especially why they were bad, but given that they were (in the vision) apparently standing in the open in the temple, we can perhaps imagine the flies buzzing around them, the stench as you went near them. Not the sort of thing that the Lord would want in His holy place.

Why, then, were these figs so bad? Why, then, were these people so bad? Was it because they had done anything more sinful than those who were taken into captivity? Well, the Word of God doesn’t say this anywhere. But what we can see is that whereas the exiled Judaeans would one day repent and return to the Lord, these people apparently had no sense of repentance or guilt for the sins that they had committed. Don’t forget, it was Judah’s collective, combined, sin which led to the invasion in the first place. These people shared collective responsibility with those who had been dragged away into exile. On seeing their friends and kindred being taken away, these people should have put on sackcloth and ashes and repented, imploring God to have mercy upon them for their sinfulness. They should have been shaken from their spiritual apathy and returned to the Lord, but they didn’t.

Those who were left assumed, because they weren’t taken into exile, that they had been spared. ‘Surely the favour of the Lord is upon us,’ they may well have said.

And yet, friends, spared they were not.

We can read what happened only a little later in 2 Kings. It is quite long, but let’s read it together:

And in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came with all his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it. And they built siegeworks all around it. So the city was besieged till the eleventh year of King Zedekiah. On the ninth day of the fourth month the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land. Then a breach was made in the city, and all the men of war fled by night by the way of the gate between the two walls, by the king’s garden, and the Chaldeans were around the city. And they went in the direction of the Arabah. But the army of the Chaldeans pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho, and all his army was scattered from him. Then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, and they passed sentence on him. They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon.

In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month—that was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon—Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD and the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down the walls around Jerusalem. And the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile. But the captain of the guard left some of the poorest of the land to be vinedressers and plowmen.

And the pillars of bronze that were in the house of the LORD, and the stands and the bronze sea that were in the house of the LORD, the Chaldeans broke in pieces and carried the bronze to Babylon. And they took away the pots and the shovels and the snuffers and the dishes for incense and all the vessels of bronze used in the temple service, the fire pans also and the bowls. What was of gold the captain of the guard took away as gold, and what was of silver, as silver. As for the two pillars, the one sea, and the stands that Solomon had made for the house of the LORD, the bronze of all these vessels was beyond weight. The height of the one pillar was eighteen cubits, and on it was a capital of bronze. The height of the capital was three cubits. A latticework and pomegranates, all of bronze, were all around the capital. And the second pillar had the same, with the latticework.

And the captain of the guard took Seraiah the chief priest and Zephaniah the second priest and the three keepers of the threshold; and from the city he took an officer who had been in command of the men of war, and five men of the king’s council who were found in the city; and the secretary of the commander of the army, who mustered the people of the land; and sixty men of the people of the land, who were found in the city. And Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard took them and brought them to the king of Babylon at Riblah. And the king of Babylon struck them down and put them to death at Riblah in the land of Hamath. So Judah was taken into exile out of its land.

(2 Kings 25. 1-21)

God was true to His word. Those who remained, who did not repent and change their ways, became “a reproach, a byword, a taunt, and a curse” (Jer. 24. 9). Incidentally each of these four words has has its own special significance. Each of them looked back to a time in the life of the people of Israel, and each of them should have served as a warning to those who remained. Calvin explains it by saying, “The meaning of this vision is, that there was no reason for the ungodly to flatter themselves if they continued in their wickedness, though God did bear with them for a time.”7

What kind of fig are you?

This leads me to ask myself, and indeed ask you, what kind of fig you and I are. I suspect that, had you and I been among those who remained in Judah after the Babylonians took some of our fellow countrymen away into exile, we would have turned to each other, wiped our brows, and breathed a sigh of relief that we had not been taken. I suspect we, like those who remained, would not have seen the signs, we would have remained ignorant to the warning that the Lord had given.

Even though the Lord had given warning after warning, culminating in the ultimate warning or sign of having the city sacked by a foreign power and allowing part of the nation to be taken into exile, those who remained were stubborn. They “had not ceased to add sins to sins”.8 The events which should have served as a great warning to those who remained were soon forgotten, as the people continued to get on with their own lives, with no interest in what the Lord had said. The Lord warned Jeremiah this would happen, and as we heard, only a few years later the ultimate destruction came to pass.

Dear friends, if you see bad things happening around you, I beseech you not to allow yourself to fall into a cool complacency, think “I’m alright, Jack” and get on as though nothing had happened.

If, however, you and I had been among those taken into exile in Babylon, we may well have thought that all was lost, that there was no hope for us and our descendents. We were rightly being punished for our sins and there was nothing more for it. And yet this was far from the case. Yes, the people were facing God’s punishment for their sins, but there was a great hope ahead of them. In fact, this time of affliction was all part of the Lord’s sovereign plan to lead them back into their land, and back into relationship with Him. God had His hand on all that was going on: He had used Nebuchadnezzar for His purposes and had a plan for the exiled community. By turning their hearts to repentance, the Lord was giving the exiles the prompt they needed to return to Him in repentance.

The phrase ‘providence’ which we often use to describe the Lord’s will often has very positive and almost cuddly connotations; and yet this passage of Scripture shows us that sometimes the Lord’s providence can at times be quite difficult to bear. And perhaps there are those among us this morning who can attest to this truth. Indeed, in my own life I have undergone some difficult points in my Christian walk, and yet it is only upon looking back that I realise how the Lord not only had His hand on me, but was actually using the difficult situation (and those who were causing me such distress) as His servants, just like He used Nebuchadnezzar the King. Perhaps, as we think on this, we can consider the lives of Daniel and Joseph, both men who were either forced or sold into exile and slavery, and yet in both cases the Lord used them mightily. Joseph, when the end of his life was drawing near, was even given the grace to say to his brothers that, while they meant their actions for evil, “God meant [them] for good.” (Gen. 50. 21) If you are in the midst of a difficult trial this morning, it is worth reminding yourself that all things are in God’s hands, and whether we understand it now, or not, when we come before Him face to face, all things will be revealed and His providential love in our lives will make all things clear.

Perhaps too we can remember the all too familiar words of Psalm 23, reminding ourselves how, in verse four, the Lord is with His sheep even in “the valley of the shadow of death”. (Ps. 23. 4) Note how He does not stop us going into the valley, nor does He swoop in and remove us, but instead walks through alongside us – the King of love alongside us as a friend and travelling-companion.

Another truth we can learn from this passage concerns those who, in this life, commit acts of great cruelty and sin, and yet who appear to get away with it. I am sure that we can all imagine such people, and that each of us has, at some point or other, asked God ‘How come You let so-and-so get away with this?’ Just because God does not immediately reward us according to our deeds, just because God does not immediately settle scores, we can see from this passage that those who continue in sin will not escape Divine justice.

Jeremiah’s vision of the good and bad, the sweet and sour, figs is a startling reminder for us that, with God, all is not as it may seem. The bad figs were the ones who, in earthly terms at least, seemed to have all the luck. They were not taken away in bondage into captivity, but instead survived the attack and were left in their homeland. As they waved goodbye to their countrymen, they may have felt very pleased with themselves, and yet their luck was up. Those good figs, however, were those who suffered in this life but were ultimately rewarded with both restoration to their home-land, but restoration with the Lord by the renewing of their hearts.

Many good Christian people will, in this life, suffer great adversity, but God has a purpose that will ultimately work to their good, for “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” (Rom. 8. 28) What may have appeared to be a catastrophe would ultimately be seen as a blessing. We should not, therefore, be overwhelmed when apparent calamity overtakes us, but instead remember how the Lord can and does use such situations for good.9 Let us always trust in His providential love, which He promises us in the person of Jesus Christ, to whom be glory now and forever.

Let us pray:

Grant, Almighty God, that as You have placed us in this world and daily pour upon us blessing upon blessing, that we may live lives hastening towards our ultimate goal. Grant that Your blessings may not become hindrances to us through our misusing or misunderstanding of them, but instead may teach us to love and praise You, and to appreciate Your mercy. May we ever know You as our God, and strive on our part to present ourselves to You as Your people, and consecrate ourselves to You, that Your name may be glorified in us, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.10

  1. Jean Calvin, Commentaries on the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1981), 223 (Modernised). ↩

  2. Lane T. Dennis, Wayne Grudem, and J. I. Packer, eds., ESV Study Bible, Personal Size, First Edition (Crossway, 2015), 693. ↩

  3. Calvin, Commentaries on the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, 2:221. ↩

  4. Ibid., 2:227. ↩

  5. Ibid. ↩

  6. Ibid. ↩

  7. Calvin, Commentaries on the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, 2:219–20. ↩

  8. Ibid., 2:221. ↩

  9. Joel R. Beeke, Family Worship Bible Guide, Gift ed. edition (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 538. ↩

  10. Calvin, Commentaries on the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, 2:233 (Modernised). ↩