Jeremiah 36

When I was an impressionable teenager in the mid-90s, Doritos developed an advertising campaign for their tortilla chips that I still remember to this day. Maybe you remember it, too. The catchy slogan was, “Crunch all you want, we’ll make more.” I thought about that ad campaign as I read today’s chapter from Jeremiah. I could just hear God saying, “Burn all you want, I’ll make more.”

Jehoiakim was an evil king. After making a political alliance with Egypt, Jehoiakim thought he was sitting quite securely on his throne. Then, the Babylonians conquered the Egyptians! All of a sudden, Jehoiakim was looking for ways to make sure Jerusalem didn’t get conquered, too.

But in his quest for ways to escape the Babylonians, there was one avenue Jehoiakim surely didn’t want to explore: help from the God of Israel. In fact, God had been sending messages through the prophet Jeremiah for many years, begging the Israelites to repent and come back to Him, promising help and security if they would.

They wouldn’t. And Jeremiah had finally been banned from the Temple; he was no longer allowed to share his messages with the king or the people there.

So, God devised a way around Jeremiah’s banishment: “In the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now. Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I plan to inflict on them, they will each turn from their wicked ways; then I will forgive their wickedness and their sin.’” (vs 1-3)

What a great idea! It was certainly a reasonable solution to the problem of Jeremiah’s expulsion from the Temple. But God wasn’t dealing with reasonable people: “The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll, and Jehudi brought it from the room of Elishama the secretary and read it to the king and all the officials standing beside him. It was the ninth month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him. Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire.” (vs 20-24)

This has to be one of the earliest-known instances of book burning! And I guess that’s one way to get rid of something you don’t like—burn it! Hitler and his associates did the same thing at Nuremberg in 1933, although in the days of Jehoiakim, written material was extremely rare. If you burned a scroll, you couldn’t just replace it the next day.

Or could you? It seems this course of conduct didn’t deter God in the slightest: “After the king had burned the scroll that Baruch had written at Jeremiah’s dictation, Jeremiah received this Message from God: ‘Get another blank scroll and do it all over again. Write out everything that was in that first scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah burned up. And send this personal message to Jehoiakim king of Judah: “God says, You had the gall to burn this scroll and then the nerve to say, ‘What kind of nonsense is this written here—that the king of Babylon will come and destroy this land and kill everything in it?’” (vs 27-29)

God can’t be stopped. Ignoring His messages won’t make them any less true. Burning the Bible won’t make it disappear. As God says, “Burn all you want, I’ll make more.” If we reject His first advance, He’ll come again and again and again, and He’ll keep coming until we either stop resisting or resist for so long that we ruin ourselves.