Have you ever read an article about someone who did something so outlandish – so counter-intuitive – that you can’t fathom why in the world they would have thought that this was a good idea? (Some of these stories are fake, I’m sure, but others are unfathomable.) There are times when we have to just shake our head at what people do or say, but it seems fair since we probably do things that are incomprehensible to them (and sometimes to ourselves, especially in retrospect).
In Jeremiah 2:9, God brings charges against His people, and in verses 10-11, He begins to outline those charges:
Cross over to the coasts of Cyprus and look,
send to Kedar and observe closely;
see if there has ever been anything like this:
Has a nation ever changed its gods?
(Yet they are not gods at all.)
But my people have exchanged their glorious God
for worthless idols.Jeremiah 2:10-11 NIV
https://bible.com/bible/111/jer.2.10-11.NIV
This statement seems incredulous. Apparently even the pagan nations around Israel didn’t abandon their gods or replace their gods with new ones. This is more shocking when we realize that the other nations were remaining faithful to false gods, while God’s own people gave up the God of glory – the actual creator and sustainer of the universe – for idols that were carved out of dead wood and stone!
What do you call someone who turns their back on a person, country, or principle that has been good to them in the past? Perhaps you would call them a traitor, sell-out, or just plain stupid? That’s what the Israelites had done here, and from an informed perspective, it wasn’t very smart.
Having said that, we probably don’t have a lot of room to judge them, since each of us has made decisions that “put God second”, and have pursued things that were neither God nor God-honoring.
In verse 12, God calls for the heavens (whether parts of His creation or the residents of Heaven where He dwells, who – at least metaphorically – see all that happens on the earth) to bear witness to the atrocities that are taking place. Verse 13 continues…
“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.Jeremiah 2:13 NIV
https://jeremiah.bible/jeremiah-2-13
To illustrate this, let me get a little “engineery” for a moment: The laws of Thermodynamics have been humorously described this way:
Law 0: There is a game.
Law 1: You can’t win.
Law 2: You can’t break even.
Law 3: You can’t even get out of the game.
Ginsberg’s theorem – Wikipedia
In that light, I might describe Israel’s sins here as follows:
- They gave up the source of living water. (Remember what Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:13-14?)
- Without God, they had no source of living water.
- They tried to create something to hold water themselves.
- But it didn’t matter because what they created was leaky, anyway.
In the end, we might say that the Israelites’ rationale to follow other gods didn’t “hold water”.
It can be tempting to look at Israel’s sins and the consequences of those sins as something that we see in other people around us. However, in today’s text, God (through Jeremiah) doesn’t seem to be calling the Israelites to look around them and judge others (especially others outside of their community). Instead, He is calling them to account for their own actions.
I hope that we appreciate the perils of sin and of following ideas and habits that aren’t from God. However, these warnings aren’t simply so that we can wring our hands and complain about how bad “society” or “culture” has gotten. I believe that they are reminders for us to carefully inspect our own lives: What are we pursuing? Who or what are you following? What am I chasing after?
Only after we have removed planks from our own eyes can we adequately help others remove the specks from their eyes. (See Luke 6:41-42, Matthew 7:3-5) I hope that each of us can pause this week to consider where we put our time, resources, attention, and other worship. Let’s not make a really obviously bad trade.
From Sunday School lesson prepared for June 11, 2023
References:
- The Lookout, June 11, 2023, © 2023 Christian Standard Media.
- Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
- The College Press NIV Commentary – Jeremiah-Lamentations, by Timothy M. Willis. © 2002 College Press Publishing Co.
Those Who Sin Differently 