Babylon, bad! Isn’t that how we tend to think about “that place.” You know, that place of exile. That place where the people, who had polluted their own land through their spiritual adulteries, had been sent for a 70-year timeout. That pagan place. That place in which the songs of lament supplanted the songs of Zion. That place that screamed, “This is not my home! I don’t belong here!” Babylon. Can any good thing come out of Babylon? Evidently.

The word of the LORD came to me: “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Like these good figs, so I regard as good the exiles from Judah I sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldeans. I will keep my eyes on them for their good and will return them to this land. I will build them up and not demolish them; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God because they will return to Me with all their heart.”

(Jeremiah 24:4-7 CSB)

The LORD was always coming up with object lessons for Jeremiah to help the prophet convey the truth of the reality in which the people of God found themselves. In Jeremiah 24 it’s an object lesson using two baskets of figs. “One basket contained very good figs, like early figs, but the other basket contained very bad figs, so bad they were inedible” (24:2). The bad figs represented those who would remain in the ruins of Judah, the land which had once been widely regarded as a “godly nation”. The bad figs were those who clung to a reputation of what they perhaps were once while the reality of what they were now indicated something very different. Those who sought to still claim the glory of the good old days when, in fact, the glory had departed. Bad move (or lack thereof) on their part. Bad figs.

The good figs, on the other hand, where those who submitted to exile. Those who allowed a foreign land, “that place”, to once again fan into flame a whole-hearted desire for their faithful God. For in “that place” they would know again that their God was the living God and not at all like one of those lifeless idols they had come to bow to for so long. A living God who had claimed a living people for Himself.

A living God able to form such a people through with his living “I will”. One who would keep His eyes on them for their good. One who, amidst the trials of exile, would build up within them the spiritual muscle which had long ago atrophied. One who would plant them firmly, establish roots deeply, even as He called them to Himself eternally. One who would give them new life as He implanted within them, by His Spirit, a new heart — a heart to know Him as they had never known Him before, and to love Him as they were meant to love Him. A living God who would bring them again into the land of the living because He would work within them to “return to Me with all their heart.”

Maybe Babylon ain’t so bad after all. Not that it’s easy, but that it’s necessary. A place to be stripped of our idols. A place to be humbled in our arrogance. A place to be awakened to the reality that we may not have really been the moral majority we thought we were once were. Instead, to realize that we have been called out to be a prophetic minority, God’s holy, set apart people living in a dark world that needs some light and in a rotting world that needs some salt. A land full of bad news in need of some good news.

So, let’s be good figs. Longing for the promised land but realizing this isn’t it. Living for the Redeemer even as we know the Redeemer is keeping His eye on us. Waiting for that city to come but knowing that it’s in this city — right here in Babylon — where He will build, He will plant, and He will grow within us a heart that knows Him.

Good figs in a bad land.

By His grace. For His glory.