“Please ask the LORD to come and help us, because King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon is attacking us. Maybe the LORD will perform one of his miracles as in times past and make him stop attacking us and leave.”
Jeremiah 21:2 NET
Does God answer prayer? I believe he does, although not always in the way we might have hoped for. In Jeremiah 21:1-10, we find one of those occasions when God’s answer to prayer was not at all what was hoped for.
Judah, as a nation, felt that they were special. And, in a sense, they were. God had made a covenant with their ancestors. His temple was in Jerusalem. And an ancestor of King David sat on the throne. They were his chosen people.
But all was not well. The people of Judah gave lip service to worshipping God, at least most of the time. But they also worshipped many other gods. And they were not very faithful to the terms of the covenant God had made with them.
Through the prophets God sent to them, he repeatedly warned them that disaster awaited if they did not turn away from their idolatry and follow him alone. But they refused. And now Babylon had laid siege to Jerusalem. The outlook for the nation was bleak.
So Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, sent messengers to Jeremiah, asking him to pray for deliverance from the Babylonians. He hoped that maybe God would perform a miracle like he had done in the past, likely thinking of God’s deliverance from the Assyrians during the reign of Hezekiah.
An Unwelcomed Answer
But the answer he received back from God through Jeremiah was not what he had hoped for. It was an unwelcome answer to their prayer. Instead of God performing a miracle to deliver them, God would be aiding the Babylonians in destroying them. By rejecting God for so long, Judah now found itself rejected by God.
There is a lesson in this for those of us who call ourselves Christians. We should not think that just because we identify as Christian, God will perform a miracle for us when we face trouble. We have no reason to expect him to respond to our prayer if we are not fully committed to him. And if he does respond, that his response would be what we had hoped for. It could even be something quite different and unpleasant.
