Friday Communication - 16th June 2023
Faithfulness in an age of apostasy
On the 16th July we will be starting a ten week series on Jeremiah in all three services and I am writing now to encourage you to give time to reading and meditating on it as we consider what God is saying to us in its pages. Jeremiah is a long book [fifty two chapters] that covers a ministry of forty plus years as Jeremiah persevered with proclaiming the Word of the Lord through the reign of four kings. It was not an easy time to be the LORD’s spokesperson 1:9. Jeremiah’s was a time when successive kings and many of the people were turning their back to the LORD, refusing to listen to His word and worshipping idols while at the same time claiming both that they worshipped Him and expected His intervention on their behalf. It was a time when their rebellion was being openly supported by the teachers and prophets, where “the lying pen of the scribes has made it [the law] into a lie” 8:8, where the prophets “are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds”. It was a time when the prophets and priests were reassuring people they were right with God, saying “Peace, Peace” when there was no peace 8:11, when God was in fact warning of imminent judgement, destruction by the Babylonians, and calling for repentance, a call the people did not want to hear.
Jeremiah is a timely book that asks and answers many of the questions living in our own times raises for us. What is it to be called by God to be faithful to His word, a word that pronounces judgement on sin yet hope to sinners who repent, when people are turning their back on God, don’t want to hear, and there are many false teachers who are assuring them that God will never judge? What is it to live faithfully when the popular religion is compromised and syncretistic – that is trying to combine the worship of the true God with other gods? What do you do with the anger people’s stubborn refusal to listen to the good God, to take refuge instead in lies, provokes in you? How can you deal with the grief of knowing that stubborn refusal will ensure a dreadful judgement on people you care for? Does God care for what you are experiencing? Does He know and share in that anger and grief?
And where is hope when the Word seems to be constantly rejected, and your society looks like being caught up in a time of great international and social turmoil, subject to destructive forces well outside your control, while turning their back on God’s help? How great is that hope? Can we have confidence in the Lord when our own lives, because of faithfulness to the Lord, seem characterised by hardship and apparent failure as Jeremiah’s was?
The book of Jeremiah, the Word of the Lord in the words the Lord gave to Jeremiah to speak and write, will help us live faithfully through our times by letting us hear and know the living God, the God who is despised but whose word rules, not just the people of Judah, but the fate of all nations; the God who can say when His purpose to have a people of His own living in His presence seems to be in ruins because of that people’s stubborn refusal to listen “Behold, I am the God of all flesh. Is anything to hard for me?” [32:26-27] and promise a time when He would not only restore them to His land but Himself make possible His rescued people being able to live in His presence by giving them a new covenant where their hearts would be determined to do His will and He would forgive their sins forever [31:31-34, 32:36-41]; the God whose rejected love will triumph in the vindication of His word of judgment and salvation, the vindication of the words of His faithful suffering servant Jeremiah.
Give yourself time to reading and meditating on Jeremiah, God’s word written for our instruction. And please pray for me that the Lord would help me understand His word and teach it faithfully and truthfully, so that “through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” [Rom. 15:4]
Give yourself time to reading and meditating on Jeremiah, God’s word written for our instruction. And please pray for me that the Lord would help me understand His word and teach it faithfully and truthfully, so that “through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”
