When bad is good and good is bad

We live in a world that has become increasingly skilled at calling things what they are not. What God declares sinful, culture celebrates as progress. What God calls good, the world often dismisses as outdated or even harmful. This tension is not new. It stretches back thousands of years to the pages of Jeremiah, where two chapters paint a striking picture of how differently God sees reality compared to how we see it — and how dangerously easy it is to get those two things confused.

The Shepherds Who Scattered the Flock
Jeremiah 23 opens with a sobering indictment. God speaks against the shepherds of Israel — not just the spiritual leaders like priests and prophets, but the political leaders as well. Their charge? They had scattered the flock rather than gathering it. They had driven the people away from God rather than leading them toward him.

The priests were entrusted with teaching the law of God. The prophets were called to bring the heart of God to the people. The kings were supposed to protect and guide the nation. But none of them were doing their jobs. The priests had abandoned truth. The kings had allowed and even encouraged idolatry. And the prophets — perhaps the most damaging of all — were speaking lies and calling them the word of God.

What makes this passage so convicting is not just the failure of the leaders, but the reason the people followed them anyway. The false prophets were telling people exactly what they wanted to hear. They were filling the people with false hope, assuring them that God was not angry, that judgment was not coming, that everything was fine. And when you have a hundred voices saying one comforting thing and one voice saying something difficult, it is remarkably easy to go with the crowd.

Sound familiar? The dynamic has not changed. Certain voices today are extraordinarily loud in declaring that what God calls sin is actually beautiful, healthy, and worth celebrating. And because those voices are many, and because what they say feels good to hear, people follow. The false prophet has simply updated his wardrobe.

God's word through Jeremiah cuts through the noise with clarity. In Jeremiah 23, God describes his word as fire, and as a hammer that breaks rock in pieces. It is not gentle. It is not always comfortable. But it is true. And the test of whether a message is genuinely from God is not whether it feels good — it is whether it aligns with what God has actually said.

The Hope That Holds
Before moving past chapter 23, it is worth pausing on something remarkable. Even in the middle of this devastating indictment of corrupt leadership, God inserts a promise. He declares that a day is coming when he will raise up a righteous king from the line of David — one who will reign wisely, do what is just and right, and bring genuine safety and salvation to his people. This is a clear messianic promise, pointing forward to Jesus.

Why does this matter in context? Because God was speaking to a generation about to face catastrophic judgment. Things were going to get very dark. And into that darkness, God planted a seed of hope. The message was essentially this: the current shepherds are failing you, but the ultimate Shepherd is coming, and he will not fail.

That same hope belongs to us today. As the world grows more morally chaotic, as the distance between what God calls good and what culture calls good continues to widen, we are not without hope. The righteous king has come once, and he is coming again. His return and his eternal kingdom are the anchor for every believer navigating confusing times.

Good Figs and Bad Figs
Jeremiah 24 shifts the scene dramatically. God shows Jeremiah two baskets of figs placed before the temple. One basket holds beautiful, ripe figs. The other holds figs so rotten they cannot be eaten. Then God asks a simple question: what do you see?

The answer seems obvious. But the meaning behind the vision is anything but simple.

The good figs, God explains, represent those being carried away into exile in Babylon. The bad figs represent those staying behind in Jerusalem — including King Zedekiah and those who would flee to Egypt rather than submit to Babylonian captivity.

Here is where the title of this reflection earns its weight. From a human perspective, who would you rather be? The person being dragged away from their homeland in chains, or the person who gets to stay? The answer seems obvious. Exile looks like punishment. Staying looks like blessing.

But God sees it differently.

The exile, as painful and humiliating as it was, would serve as the very thing that purified the nation. After seventy years in Babylon, the Jewish people emerged with something they had never consistently maintained before: a rejection of idolatry. The captivity broke the cycle. What looked like devastation was actually restoration in disguise.

Those who stayed behind, meanwhile, were not staying out of faithfulness. They were staying out of defiance. God had specifically instructed the people through Jeremiah to submit to Babylonian authority and go into captivity. Those who refused were not the righteous remnant — they were the disobedient ones, convinced of their own wisdom while ignoring God's direction.

Learning to See What God Sees
This is perhaps the deepest challenge these two chapters present to us. We are not very good at seeing things the way God sees them. We evaluate our circumstances through the lens of comfort, preference, and immediate outcome. God evaluates them through the lens of his eternal purposes.

Romans 8 reminds us that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. Notice the promise is not that all things will feel good, look good, or make sense in the moment. The promise is that God is working all things — including the hard things, the confusing things, the things that look like bad figs — toward a good end that only he can fully see.

The invitation is not to pretend that hard things are easy, or that painful seasons do not hurt. The invitation is to trust the one who sees clearly when we cannot — the one who calls things what they actually are, even when the world disagrees, and who works faithfully even through the things that look like ruin.