The Sweet Poison of a Stubborn Heart Text: Jeremiah 44:15-19
Introduction: The Logic of Rebellion
We live in a time that prides itself on its supposed rationality, its enlightened pragmatism. People want what works. They want results. They want a life that is prosperous, full, and free from trouble. And in this, they are no different from the remnant of Judah dwelling in Egypt in the days of Jeremiah. But the great delusion of every fallen human heart is to believe that we are the ones who get to define the terms of that prosperity. We think we can determine the cause and effect of our own well being. We look at our lives, we look at our circumstances, and we draw our conclusions based on what our belly tells us, what our fears tell us, and what our idols promise us.
The passage before us this morning is one of the most stark and chilling examples of this inverted logic in all of Scripture. It is a master class in the art of the self-deceived heart. God, through His prophet Jeremiah, has just laid out an airtight case. He has reminded them of the utter desolation of Jerusalem, a smoking ruin they just fled. He has reminded them that this devastation came as a direct result of their idolatry, their covenant unfaithfulness. The evidence is overwhelming. The verdict is in. And their response? It is not repentance. It is not godly sorrow. It is a defiant, doubled-down declaration of their intent to continue in the very sin that destroyed them. They had their own set of data points, their own anecdotal evidence, and they were going to follow that evidence right off a cliff.
This is not ancient history. This is the logic of our own age. This is the logic of feminism, which sees the created order of male and female as oppression and promises liberation through rebellion. This is the logic of the sexual revolution, which promises fulfillment in the rejection of God's law, and delivers only misery, confusion, and death. This is the logic of every sinner who looks at the consequences of his sin and concludes, not that the sin is the problem, but that he simply hasn't sinned hard enough yet. What we have in Jeremiah 44 is a snapshot of a society in full-throated, open rebellion, a society where the men have abdicated their responsibility, where the women have taken the lead in spiritual darkness, and where the entire community has decided that their own experience trumps God's revealed Word.
And so we must attend to this passage carefully, because the spirit of the Queen of Heaven is not dead. She is alive and well, and she is worshiped today in our streets and, tragically, in some of our churches. She promises prosperity and autonomy, but her wages are always, and ever, death.
The Text
Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were standing by, as a large assembly, including all the people who were living in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered to Jeremiah, saying, "As for the message that you have spoken to us in the name of Yahweh, we are not going to listen to you! But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, just as we ourselves, our fathers, our kings, and our princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food and were well off and saw no evil. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine." "And," said the women, "when we were burning incense to the queen of heaven and were pouring out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands that we made for her sacrificial cakes in her image and poured out drink offerings to her?"
(Jeremiah 44:15-19 LSB)
The Abdication of Men and the Defiance of the Assembly (vv. 15-16)
We begin with the response to Jeremiah's prophetic warning.
"Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were standing by, as a large assembly...answered to Jeremiah, saying, 'As for the message that you have spoken to us in the name of Yahweh, we are not going to listen to you!'" (Jeremiah 44:15-16)
Notice the structure of this rebellion. It begins with the men. But what is their posture? It is one of passive, knowing complicity. "All the men who knew that their wives were burning incense." These are not men who were ignorant of the sin. They were not deceived. They knew. And they did nothing. This is the original sin of Adam in the garden, standing silently by while his wife was deceived by the serpent. It is the sin of abdication. God has established the man as the head of the woman, the covenantal representative of the household. It is his duty to lead, to teach, to protect, and to correct. But these men had become spiritual eunuchs. They had outsourced their family's worship to their wives, and their wives were leading them straight to hell.
This is the essence of effeminacy. It is not about a lack of brawn, but a lack of backbone. These men knew the right thing, they knew what God commanded, but they refused to do it. And because they created a vacuum of leadership, the women, along with the whole assembly, rushed in to fill it with open rebellion. When men refuse to lead in righteousness, they create a culture that will be led by unrighteousness. And notice, the women are not acting alone; they are part of a "large assembly." This is a corporate, community-wide apostasy. The husbands are complicit, the women are defiant, and the whole society is rotten.
Their response to the prophet is breathtaking in its arrogance. "We are not going to listen to you!" This is the core of all sin. It is a refusal to be told. It is the declaration of autonomy against the authority of God. They do not dispute that Jeremiah speaks "in the name of Yahweh." They simply do not care. They have set their own will, their own desires, their own traditions, against the revealed Word of the living God. This is the creature telling the Creator that He is fired.
The Idolater's Pragmatism (vv. 17-18)
Next, they lay out the reasoning for their rebellion, and it is a case study in twisted logic.
"But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning incense to the queen of heaven... for then we had plenty of food and were well off and saw no evil. But since we stopped burning incense... we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine." (Jeremiah 44:17-18 LSB)
Their commitment is not to God's Word, but to their own word. "We will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths." They have made vows to an idol, and they intend to keep them, while the covenant vows they made to Yahweh lie in tatters. This is a profound spiritual inversion. They are faithful to their faithlessness.
And who is this "queen of heaven?" This is a title for Ishtar, or Astarte, the Canaanite goddess of fertility and war. She was the consort of Baal. This was a sensual, materialistic religion. It was a religion of the belly. And this is precisely their argument. Their theology is governed by their stomachs. They perform a simple cost-benefit analysis. "When we worshiped the Queen of Heaven in Judah, we had plenty of food. We were prosperous. Life was good. When we stopped, under the reforms of godly kings like Josiah, everything went south. Therefore, the Queen of Heaven is the one who delivers the goods, and Yahweh is the problem."
This is the logic of a fool who jumps from a ten-story building and, as he passes the fifth floor, thinks, "So far, so good." They mistook God's longsuffering patience for approval. The temporary prosperity they enjoyed was not because of their idolatry, but in spite of it. It was the mercy of God, giving them space to repent. But they did not see it as mercy. They saw it as the blessing of Astarte. And they mistook God's eventual, righteous judgment for the anger of their spurned goddess. They have completely inverted cause and effect. They are blaming the cure for the disease. The "sword and famine" came precisely because they worshiped the Queen of Heaven, not because they stopped.
This is the constant temptation for the people of God. We are called to live by faith, not by sight. We are called to obey God's Word, even when our circumstances scream that it is not "working." But these people were pragmatists. They wanted a god who would deliver tangible results on their terms, right now. And if Yahweh brought judgment and discipline, they would find a god who promised bread and peace, even if it was a lie.
Feminist Theology, Ancient and Modern (v. 19)
The final word in this exchange is given to the women, and they reveal the true nature of their rebellion.
"And," said the women, "when we were burning incense to the queen of heaven and were pouring out drink offerings to her, was it without our husbands that we made for her sacrificial cakes in her image and poured out drink offerings to her?" (Jeremiah 44:19 LSB)
The women step forward to take ownership of this idolatry. They are the primary drivers. And their defense is telling. It is a rhetorical question that functions as a piece of theological buck-passing and a declaration of feminist solidarity. On the one hand, they are saying, "Don't just blame us! Our husbands were in on it too. They approved. They gave us the household money for the ingredients. This was a family project." And they were right. The men were absolutely complicit, and their sin of abdication was foundational.
But there is something else going on here. They are asserting that their worship was legitimate because it had male approval. "Was it without our husbands...?" This is a twisted appeal to the principle of headship. They are using their husbands' sinful permission as a cover for their own rebellion. It is a perversion of submission. A wife is commanded to submit to her husband, but never to follow him into sin. Her ultimate allegiance is to Christ. But here, the women are saying, "Our husbands let us, therefore it was okay." This is what happens when the created order is corrupted. God-ordained roles are used as excuses for sin, rather than as frameworks for righteousness.
This is the ancient root of modern feminism. It is a religious rebellion. At its heart, feminism is a rejection of God the Father and an attempt to enthrone a goddess. The Queen of Heaven is a goddess made in their own image. The cakes they baked were "in her image." They were creating a god who looked like them, who affirmed their desires, and who operated outside the covenant structure established by Yahweh. They wanted a divine feminine to worship, because they wanted to be divine. This is a direct assault on the patriarchy of God Himself, who has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The women were the vanguard of this rebellion, and their husbands, in their passivity, were the willing accomplices.
Conclusion: The God Who Works
The people in Egypt had a simple demand: they wanted a god who works. They looked at their circumstances and concluded that Yahweh had failed them and the Queen of Heaven had blessed them. Their conclusion was perfectly logical, and eternally stupid. They had all the facts, and they arranged them in exactly the wrong order.
The central lie of all idolatry is that we can get the blessings of God without God Himself. We want the food, the peace, the prosperity, but we do not want the Lawgiver. We do not want the Lord. And so we invent gods who will give us what we want without demanding what we are. The Queen of Heaven was a transactional deity. You give her cakes and incense, and she gives you fat babies and full bellies. It was a religion of works, a religion of the flesh.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the ultimate offense to this kind of thinking. The gospel tells us that we are in a far worse state than the exiles in Egypt. We have not just been kicked out of our land; we have been exiled from the presence of God Himself. We are not just hungry; we are dead in our trespasses and sins. And the reason for our ruin is not that we failed to appease the right idol, but that we have broken the law of the Holy God who made us.
And the solution is not to try harder, to bake more cakes for a different god. The solution is a grace that is utterly scandalous. God the Father did not wait for us to get our act together. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into our ruined and rebellious world. And on the cross, Jesus took the full force of the sword and famine of God's wrath that we deserved for our cosmic treason. He took the curse for our idolatry.
The people of Judah said, "We will not listen to the word of Yahweh." But Jesus said, "Not my will, but yours be done." They trusted in what they could see and taste. But Jesus, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame. They wanted a god who "worked" on their terms. But God works on His terms, and His greatest work was to take the greatest evil, the crucifixion of His perfect Son, and turn it into the greatest good, the salvation of the world.
Our choice is the same as the choice that faced that remnant in Egypt. We can trust our own experiences, our own bellies, our own traditions. We can fashion gods in our own image, whether it is the Queen of Heaven or the modern idol of self-fulfillment. Or we can abandon our stubborn rebellion, confess that God's diagnosis of our problem is the right one, and trust in the finished work of His Son. We must stop listening to the word that comes from our own mouths and start listening to the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. For He is the only one who truly works, and what He works is eternal life.