Jeremiah 21:8-10. God is telling the people to get out of Jerusalem. "Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death. He who stays in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but he who goes out and surrenders to the Chaldeans ... shall live and shall have his life as a prize of war. For I have set my face against this city for evil and not for good. It will be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire."

Remember, this is God's chosen people and his holy city, yet he is telling his people to surrender to their enemies because he is about to allow the city to be burned with fire! But it is because he loves his people. He is trying to save them by getting them into exile before he allows the city to be ravaged. He loves Jerusalem, too, but it is necessary for the city to fall in order to eventually rebuild it the way he meant it to be as his holy city.

This is the story of the Garden of Eden, the story of Exodus, and our story. God gets us out of the places we become too comfortable in, often because they are leading us to idolatry and sin, although in the garden he got us out in order to preserve the place - the heaven on earth that we will all eventually be called back to. In Exodus, it was to get his people out of slavery, slavery to which they had become accustomed and in which they were too comfortable. In the passage here it was to allow him to destroy the city, which had become very evil and was affecting his people with that evil.

But we can see that God does not want to destroy his people, even when they are sinning. Here, he protects them by allowing them to be taken into exile. Any who stayed behind would die, if not physically then spiritually, because they made a conscious choice to not listen to God and to cling instead to the "safety" of the evil city.   

Right now, God is allowing us to be very uncomfortable indeed in this world that he created for us. We cannot honestly say that we don't deserve this discomfort, we have been acting very badly. But God loves us, and knows that the suffering that we and the world are going through is going to eventually lead to the world being rebuilt the way he wants it, as the holy place he always intended it to be. Eventually, he's going to re-merge heaven and earth, as in the garden, but we must be ready for that - we must be ready to leave our sinful place to enter his kingdom. We are suffering through things akin to the Egyptian plagues right now, so that we will be ready to follow him to the garden, the promised land, our true home.