Three Questions

 Jeremiah 15:5-10

When you open the Bible and read what is the intent of your heart; is it to gain understanding and knowledge, is it for insight on how to address those with whom you come in contact?  Do you look at the words as words designed by a Father who loves you and wants most of all for you to believe that He only wants your best, and with the intention of applying it to your life?  If so, these three questions are being asked to all of us who fall short of a walk of dependence on our Lord.  We, like the people of Jeremiah’s time, make choices to run our lives, to sin willfully, and to look to the little gods of this world for our hope and we find ourselves out of fellowship with the Father.  How will you answer these three questions: “Who will have pity on you, Jerusalem?”  Now it’s ok removing Jerusalem and personalizing it. “Who will show sympathy toward you?”  I am willing to bet the farm it is not going to happen from your so-called friends in the world.  “Who will turn aside to ask about your welfare?”  There is only One who has given His Son, His only Son to buy you out of the control of sin, and the Father said to them and us: “You have left Me.”  This is the Lord’s declaration. 

But then the Father shares how we have left Him; “You have turned your back, so I have stretched out My hand against you and destroyed you.  I am tired of showing compassion.  I scattered them with a winnowing fork at the gates of the land.  I made them childless; I destroyed My people.  They would not turn from their ways.  I made their widows more numerous than the sand of the seas.  I brought a destroyer at noon against the mother of young men.  I suddenly released on her agitation and terrors.  The mother of seven grew faint; she breathed her last breath.  Her sun set while it was still day; she was ashamed and humiliated.  The rest of them I will give over to the sword in the presence of their enemies.”

The Father has never left us, but we have often parked Him on the shelf of our life to chase after those little gods.   And our prayer is, please give us the grace to come home to confess, as did Solomon, life without God is futile, and King Solomon found that even pleasure without God is empty.  Now when God used the metaphor of a winnowing fork to toss the nation of Judah, it implies His resolve was not destruction but that a faithful remnant would be spared.

God’s ways are not our ways, and His calling on Jeremiah was to tell a people and the leadership truth they would not listen to and even put his life in danger.  He gets angry with the people that he loves and also with the God who he obeys.  It seems that Jeremiah often wishes that he had not been born.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice