Jeremiah 22:16 He judged the cause of the poor and needy: then it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith the LORD
I don’t know if you have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island, but I have watched the 1950 version of that book on numerous occasions. The hero of the story is a boy named Jim Hawkins, and he is on a ship with pirates. They end up on a desert island where the crew of the ship, the good guys, and Jim Hawkins are holed up in a stockade on the island and the pirates take control of the ship. In the middle of the night Jim slips away from the safety of the stockade, swims out to the ship, performs a daring deed, is injured by a pirate, swims back to the island, stumbles back into the stockade in the middle of the night, and falls at the feet of Dr. Livesey asking him for help. The doctor rouses, sits up, looks at him and says, “Matey!” It turns out to be the pirate, John Silver. The pirates have taken the stockade in the middle of the night. It is a shocking moment in the story. Little Jim Hawkins faints away because he thought he was getting help from the doctor and he was actually awakening a sleeping pirate.
Sometimes that happens to us in life. We seek God’s help and we don’t know with whom we are dealing. That is exactly what happened in Jeremiah’s day. Jeremiah 21:1 says, “The word which came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, when king Zedekiah sent unto him Pashur…, and Zephaniah…saying, Enquire I pray thee, of the LORD for us, for Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon maketh war against us; if so be that the LORD will deal with us according to all his wondrous works, that he may go up from us.” He is saying, “Send a messenger to find out whether God will deliver us from Nebuchadnezzar.”
The message he gets back from God is this: “I will deliver the king of Judah to Nebuchadnezzar. I have set my face against this city. I have given to the king of Babylon all that is here. I am against you. I will punish you. I will kindle a fire.” In other words, this king thought his problem was Nebuchadnezzar, but his problem was God. He wasn’t rebelling and resisting Nebuchadnezzar. For a long time before this he had been resisting God. Nebuchadnezzar was nothing but God’s servant. He was pagan, Babylonian, and not a Jew, but God owns this world and He was using this wicked king to correct the people that He loved.
In contrast to this, in chapter 22 the Bible is referring to a good king whom Judah had years before, and it says of him, “He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith the LORD.” In other words, when they were doing right to the poor and needy, they were actually doing right by God. So many times we are dealing with God when we think we are dealing with other people.
For instance, the Bible tells us not to despise the chastening of the Lord. Don’t be discouraged when you are corrected by Him because the Lord chastens those He loves. On the other hand, the Bible says when you give a cup of cold water to a little child, you have done it to Him. What we are saying is never ignore God in the world you experience. It is very easy to view God as distant and far away, and people around you as good or bad, a threat or in need of you. We see these things as totally distinct and distant from our relationship to God, but our relationship to God is evidenced by our relationship to people.
We are asking the wrong person for help when we ask God for help but are rebelling against Him. We are wrong to be discouraged when we are helping other people who need us and think that God will not supply those of us who are helping others.
Today, who is it that is in need? Realize that when you are doing right by others, you are doing right by God. Who is it that may be oppressing you in some way? It is not to say that every time some calamity happens it is of God, but it is to say that good is definitely involved in this world and He is involved in the lives of those who love Him. Sometimes we are dealing with God when we think we are dealing with other people.