Jeremiah 24

Today’s Passage: Jeremiah 24

The chapter opens on a strange and vivid sight. The first wave of exiles has already been carried off to Babylon, King Jeconiah among them, and the LORD sets before His prophet a plain everyday thing, two baskets of figs standing in front of the temple. One basket holds figs so good they make the mouth water, the kind that ripen first and best; the other holds figs so rotten no one could bring himself to eat them. Then God asks Jeremiah what he sees, and out of that ordinary picture He unfolds a truth that would have turned every settled assumption in Jerusalem upside down. The good figs, He says, are the exiles already dragged away to a foreign land, and on them He sets His eyes for good. The bad figs are the king and the people still sitting in the city, sure they are the safe ones, and for them He has nothing but disaster. It is a short chapter, only ten verses, but it quietly overturns the way we measure whose life God is blessing.

As you read, hold this: God’s grace can rest on those the world counts cast off, and His deepest gift is a heart to know Him.

Jeremiah 24:1–3 (BSB)

¹ After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had carried away Jeconiah son of Jehoiakim king of Judah, as well as the officials of Judah and the craftsmen and metalsmiths from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon, the LORD showed me two baskets of figs placed in front of the temple of the LORD. ² One basket had very good figs, like those that ripen early, but the other basket contained very poor figs, so bad they could not be eaten. ³ “Jeremiah,” the LORD asked, “what do you see?” “Figs!” I replied. “The good figs are very good, but the bad figs are very bad, so bad they cannot be eaten.”

Notice how gently God teaches. He does not begin with a thundering announcement; He begins with a question, drawing His prophet to look and to say plainly what is there. Two baskets, one full of the finest early fruit and one full of figs too spoiled to touch, and the difference between them is not subtle. Anyone could tell the good from the bad at a single glance. That is the whole point of the picture, that the LORD is about to sort His people into two baskets, and He wants Jeremiah, and us, to see the sorting clearly before the meaning lands. It matters, too, that the vision stands right in front of the temple, the place where the whole city rested its confidence. The lesson is coming that the fruit God is looking for is not where anyone would have guessed.

Jeremiah 24:4–5 (BSB)

⁴ Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, ⁵ “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Like these good figs, so I regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I have sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldeans.

Here comes the turn that would have stopped every listener cold. The good figs, the LORD says, are the exiles, the very people the city had written off as the accursed and the abandoned. They had been marched away in chains to the land of the Chaldeans, stripped of home and temple and throne, and by every outward sign they looked like the losers of the story. Yet God calls them good, and He says something tender in the same breath: it is He Himself who has sent them there. Their exile was not the enemy’s triumph running loose beyond God’s reach; it was the LORD’s own hand, and He had good in mind even in the sending. This is the great comfort hidden in the whole chapter, that when God’s people find themselves carried into hard and foreign places, they have not slipped out of His care. Sometimes the very ones the world counts as cast off are the ones on whom His eyes rest for good.

Jeremiah 24:6–7 (BSB)

⁶ I will keep My eyes on them for good and will return them to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. ⁷ I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD. They will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with all their heart.

Now the promise pours out, and it is worth reading slowly, for every verb belongs to God. I will keep My eyes on them, I will return them, I will build them up and not tear them down, I will plant them and not uproot them. These are the very words that were spoken at Jeremiah’s own calling but turned now toward mercy, no longer the language of judgment but of restoration, and all of it is the LORD’s own doing from first to last. Yet the crown of the whole passage is the seventh verse, and it rises above everything else God offers here. He does not merely promise to bring them home or to prosper their fields. He promises to give them a heart (לֵב) lev, pronounced LEV. Strong's H3820, heart; the inner person, mind, will, and self. In the Scriptures the lev, the heart, is far more than the seat of feeling. It is the whole inner person, the mind that thinks, the will that chooses, the center where a life is steered. And the knowing paired with it here, yada’at (from yada, H3045, to know), is not the cool knowing of facts filed away in the memory; it is the warm, personal knowing of one who is loved and trusts, the same word used for the deepest closeness between persons. So when God promises a lev lada’at, a heart to know Him, He is promising to remake the very core of a person so that it can hold Him rightly, to think of Him, to choose Him, to lean the whole weight of the life upon Him. This is grace of the most searching kind, for it does not wait for us to work up such a heart on our own. God says plainly, I will give it. The knowing of God begins not with our reaching up but with His reaching in. to know Him. That is the deepest gift a soul can receive, deeper than any change of circumstance, for a man may have his land restored and his house rebuilt and still not know his God. What God pledges here is an inward work He alone can do, to reach into the heart itself and make it able to know Him and love Him and turn to Him with everything it has. Land and safety are gifts; but a heart that knows God is the gift that makes a people truly His.

Jeremiah 24:8–10 (BSB)

⁸ But like the bad figs, so bad they cannot be eaten,’ says the LORD, ‘so will I deal with Zedekiah king of Judah, his officials, and the remnant of Jerusalem—those remaining in this land and those living in the land of Egypt. ⁹ I will make them a horror and an offense to all the kingdoms of the earth, a disgrace and an object of scorn, ridicule, and cursing wherever I have banished them. ¹⁰ And I will send against them sword and famine and plague, until they have perished from the land that I gave to them and their fathers.’”

And here is the hard other side of the picture, and we must not soften it. The bad figs are the ones who stayed, King Zedekiah and his officials and the remnant left in the city, along with those who would later run down to Egypt for safety. These were the people who looked spared, who congratulated themselves that the sword had passed them by, and God says they are the fruit too rotten to eat. Against them He speaks the sober words of judgment, sword and famine and plague, and a scattering into disgrace. This is not God delighting in ruin, for the whole book of Jeremiah is one long, weeping plea to turn back before it comes to this. It is the settled justice of a people who trusted the temple and the land instead of the God of the temple, and who would not be given the softened heart because they would not seek it. The contrast could not be plainer. Outward circumstance is no measure of whose God will do good. The exiles in chains had His eyes upon them for blessing; the free men in Jerusalem had presumed on a safety that was never theirs. The one thing that finally divides the good fruit from the bad is not where a person sits but whether the LORD has given, and the person has received, a heart to know Him.