An Astonishment

One of the things you run into again and again in counseling is the practice of blameshifting. More often than not if someone’s life or marriage is falling apart, someone else is to blame. You see it in politics, you see it in reality TV shows like Hoarders, whether it’s your ex-husband, or your parents, or your children, or your boss, it’s always someone else’s fault that you are living in a house with 5,000 cats, 2000 dolls, and every copy of the New York Times every printed. Someone else is responsible for what’s going wrong.

If you had asked the leaders of Judah in 605 BC, the year that these verses were penned by Jeremiah, who was to blame for the problems facing Judah, they undoubtedly would have answered. “King Nebuchadnezzar and The Babylonians of course! Well the Egyptians are also “kind of” to blame, because as our allies if they hadn’t lost the battle of Carchemish we wouldn’t have been stuck in this situation facing a Babylonian invasion!”

But God is having none of this blameshifting, and through Jeremiah he sets the record straight.