The Divine Sling: When God Evicts His People Text: Jeremiah 10:17-18
Introduction: The Unsentimental God of the Covenant
We live in a soft and sentimental age. Our generation has fashioned for itself a god who is more like a celestial guidance counselor than the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth. He is a god of affirmations, not ultimatums; a god of unconditional tolerance, not of holy jealousy. This god would never, ever, kick anyone out of their home. He would never sling his people out of the land. He is, in short, a god who is nothing at all like the God of the Bible.
The God of Scripture is a covenant-making and a covenant-keeping God. And because He is a covenant-keeping God, His promises have two sides, like a coin. On one side, there are the glorious blessings for covenant fidelity: life, fruitfulness, prosperity, and peace in the land He gives. On the other side, there are the severe and terrifying curses for covenant treachery: famine, pestilence, sword, and exile from that same land. Our modern sensibilities recoil from this, but to recoil from the curses is to cheapen the blessings. A God who does not take His own warnings seriously is a God who cannot be trusted to take His promises seriously either.
Jeremiah’s ministry was to a people who had grown fat, complacent, and deaf. They presumed upon the covenant. They thought that possessing the Temple, the land, and the rituals was a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card. They treated the covenant promises like a deed to a property instead of vows in a marriage. They committed adultery with every idol on every high hill, and then came to the Lord’s house on the Sabbath and acted as though all was well. They had forgotten that the covenant Lord is a jealous husband, and that persistent, unrepentant adultery leads not to counseling, but to divorce and eviction.
The passage before us today is a bucket of ice water in the face of all such presumption. It is a sharp, sudden, and shocking command. The time for deliberation is over. The time for gentle warnings has passed. The siege is at the gates, the divine eviction notice has been served, and God Himself is about to throw His people out of their house. This is not just history; it is a permanent lesson on the character of God and the nature of sin.
The Text
Gather up your bundle from the ground, You who inhabit a land under siege!
For thus says Yahweh, “Behold, I am slinging out the inhabitants of the land At this time, And will cause them distress, That they may find it.”
(Jeremiah 10:17-18 LSB)
The Urgent Command (v. 17)
We begin with the startling imperative in verse 17:
"Gather up your bundle from the ground, You who inhabit a land under siege!" (Jeremiah 10:17)
This is not a suggestion. It is a battlefield command shouted over the noise of the coming invasion. The phrase "gather up your bundle" is a picture of a refugee hastily grabbing what few possessions can be carried. It speaks of sudden displacement. All the things they had accumulated, all the stuff they had trusted in, all the material blessings of the covenant which they had turned into idols, must now be abandoned. They are to pack a go-bag. The siege they are under is not just from the Babylonians; the siege is from God Himself. He has surrounded His own people.
The language is deliberately contemptuous. "Your bundle from the ground." It’s as though God is saying, "All that you have valued, all your prosperity, is nothing more than a pile of rags on the floor. Pick it up. You're leaving." This is what happens when we make God's gifts into gods. He has a way of showing us how flimsy and worthless they are. When we cling to the creation rather than the Creator, God will strip the creation away to get our attention.
This is a direct assault on their false sense of security. They lived in a fortified city, in a land promised to them by God. They trusted in the geography, in the stone walls of Jerusalem. But God is telling them that no wall is high enough to protect them from Him. When God decides your time is up, your fortifications become your prison. The very thing you trust in for safety becomes the instrument of your entrapment. This is a word for us. We can build up our retirement accounts, our reputations, our secure careers, but if we are in rebellion against God, He can turn our safe harbor into a trap overnight.
The Sovereign Explanation (v. 18)
Verse 18 gives the reason for this sudden, panicked flight. It is not Nebuchadnezzar's geopolitical ambition. It is the sovereign, judicial act of God.
"For thus says Yahweh, 'Behold, I am slinging out the inhabitants of the land at this time...'" (Jeremiah 10:18a)
Notice who the actor is. "I am slinging out." The Babylonians are merely the instrument. They are the stone, but God is the one with the sling. The image is one of violent, swift, and forceful rejection. Think of David slinging a stone at Goliath. There is no gentleness here. This is not a reluctant nudge toward the door. This is a violent expulsion. God is picking up His people like a rock and hurling them out of His sight. He is sick of their sin, and He is ejecting them from His presence.
This is the language of covenant lawsuit. The land was never unconditionally theirs. It was always the Lord's land, and they were tenants. Their lease agreement was the Mosaic covenant. Their rent was obedience and faithfulness. For generations, they had failed to pay the rent. They had trashed the property. And now, the Divine Landlord is carrying out the eviction He had warned them about centuries before in the book of Deuteronomy.
The phrase "at this time" underscores the imminence and the certainty of the judgment. It cuts off all avenues of appeal, all hopes for a last-minute reprieve. The time for probation is over. The time for judgment is now. Our culture hates this kind of finality, but God is not a procrastinator. When the measure of iniquity is full, judgment falls. And it falls right on schedule.
The Divine Purpose (v. 18b)
The verse concludes by stating the purpose behind this severe action. This is not random, capricious anger. It has a goal.
"...And will cause them distress, that they may find it." (Jeremiah 10:18b)
God is going to cause them distress. The Hebrew word implies being hemmed in, cornered, with no way of escape. He is putting them in a vice. But for what purpose? "That they may find it." Find what? The commentators debate this, but the sense of the Hebrew is powerful. It can mean "that they may be found" or "that my Word may find them" or even "that they may feel the consequences." I take it to mean all of the above. God is bringing a distress so severe that they can no longer ignore reality. He is making them "find" the truth of their situation. He is making them "feel" the weight of His covenant warnings which they had for so long dismissed as empty threats.
This is a severe mercy. It is the action of a surgeon who must cut deeply to remove a cancer. The pain is intense, but it is purposeful. God's goal in judgment is not ultimately damnation, but reclamation. He distresses us in order to get our attention. He brings us to the end of ourselves so that we might "find" Him. He slings them out of the land of promise so that, in a foreign land, they might finally remember the God of the promise.
This is a foundational principle of God's dealings with His people. When we grow comfortable in our sins, God will make our circumstances uncomfortable. When we refuse to listen to His Word, He will shout at us through His providence. The distress is designed to make us "find" the connection between our sin and our suffering. It is to make us say, as the prodigal son did in the pigsty, "I will arise and go to my father." The exile was a terrible, painful, and violent act. But it was also the act that cured Israel of her idolatry. They were slung out of the land as idolaters, but they returned as monotheists. The distress worked. They found it.
The Gospel Sling
This passage is a stark picture of the law and its consequences. It shows us what our sin deserves: not just distress, but total eviction from the presence of God. Every one of us, because of our own idolatries and covenant-breaking, deserves to be slung out of God’s world and into outer darkness. That is the trajectory of our sin.
But the story does not end in Jeremiah 10. This pattern of judgment and exile points us to a greater and more profound reality. On the cross, God the Father took up His only Son, Jesus Christ, and treated Him as a covenant-breaker. Jesus, who knew no sin, was made to be sin for us. He became the one who was under siege.
On that cross, Jesus was slung out. He was cast out of the camp, outside the city gates. He was slung out from the presence of His own Father, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He experienced the ultimate exile, the ultimate distress, so that we who deserved it would not have to. He was slung out so that we could be gathered in. He was made a refugee so that we could be made sons and daughters in our Father's house.
And God caused Him distress, that we might "find" salvation. The wrath of God that was due to us found its target in Him. Because He was slung out, the promise of the gospel is that all who are in Him will never be cast out (John 6:37). He took our eviction so that we could receive an eternal inheritance, a heavenly country, a city whose builder and maker is God.
Therefore, when God brings distress into our lives, when He commands us to "gather up our bundle" from some earthly comfort we have idolized, we should not despair. We should see it as the Father's loving, severe, and purposeful discipline. He is not slinging us away from Himself, but rather slinging the sin out of us. He causes us distress that we might find, again and again, that our only true security is not in this land, not in our bundles, but in the Son who was slung out for us.