Jeremiah 46
by Pastor Lawrence Bowlin

The first forty-five chapters of the book of Jeremiah have been dedicated exclusively to God’s judgment upon the Jews, but the remaining chapters are devoted to God’s judgment upon all the surrounding gentile nations. The prophet had briefly shared with us earlier on in Jeremiah 25:15ff that the Lord was going to bring judgment on these other nations in addition to Judah by also making them to drink from the cup of the wine of God’s wrath, and he mentioned a number of specific countries that are now the subject of prophecy for the remainder of the book, beginning with the nation of Egypt and ending with the fearsome Babylonians.
Notice, however, that these prophecies were not all given at the same time, for many of them were pronounced earlier on during the reign of King Jehoiakim. Thus, what we have here is a compilation of Jeremiah’s prophecies against gentile nations that are once again arranged thematically instead of chronologically. The fact that Jeremiah is now turning his attention to other nations outside Judah should not be surprising to us at all, for we were told at the very beginning of the book in Jer. 1:5 that God had set him apart at birth to be “a prophet to the nations.” Of course, Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet who addressed foreign entities, for in Jer. 28:8 he shared that the prophets who had preceded him even from ancient times also had prophesied “against many countries and great kingdoms.”
We see this same calling clearly in two of the other Major Prophets, for Isaiah devotes eleven chapters of his work to judgment against the nations (13-23), and Ezekiel devotes eight chapters to this same theme (25-32). Hosea is the only prophetical book that doesn’t give any direct prophecy against the nations, and three books (Obadiah, Jonah, and Nahum) are devoted almost entirely to prophecies against particular gentile nations.
The belief in ancient times was that the kings were emissaries of the gods if not gods themselves, thus the prophets at times brought judgment against these so-called gods to show them and Israel that the Lord is the one true God over all the world and that he is the only one who decides the fate of each nation.
Egypt was often one of the primary countries mentioned in judgment (see Isa.19-20 and Ezek. 29-32) for it was one of the great power houses in ancient times that rivaled the Babylonian empire prior to the rise of the Persians and the Greeks, and it was one country that Israel often turned to for help. In this particular instance, it seems that the prophecy against Egypt is given first since Egypt was the last false hope of the Jews before their demise.
There are two prophecies against Egypt in this passage. The first predicts the defeat of Pharaoh Neco II in his attempt to overthrow the Babylonians in the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BC. After killing Josiah, the godly king of Judah who had formed an alliance with the Babylonians in the battle at Megiddo four years earlier, Neco, now in an alliance with the Assyrians, believed he could overthrow the rising powers in Babylon and conquer all of Asia, but the Babylonians decisively proved him wrong on their own turf. After that pivotal battle, Assyria never recovered as a nation, and Egypt no longer pursued hegemony in the Near East.
The second prophecy deals with the waning power of the Egyptians as they sought to prop up their crumbling empire and how the Babylonians would eventually show up at their doorstep and force them into submission, destroying their palaces and their temples and forcing many of the nobles into exile just as they did with the nation of Judah.
The final two paragraphs are then addressed to the Jews themselves, exhorting them not to be afraid, to remember that the Lord will be with them, even in the midst of all this turmoil, and that He will save them even from far away, from the land of their captivity. One day they will return from exile and once again enjoy their rest in the Promised Land. Nevertheless, this act of discipline is very important for Judah, for they must learn to trust in the Lord and repent of their sins and stop looking to Egypt for salvation. God will bring a full end to Egypt, but he will not bring a full end to Israel, for God’s covenant will not be broken. He will keep his word and show forth his love to his people until the end.
Let us, then, who have been grafted into the vine of Israel, give thanks to the Lord that He will not bring a full end to us either because of our sin but will discipline us as sons and daughters of God. And let us not turn our faces toward Egypt anymore but put our hope in God alone.