Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Obedience
- Obedience: Genuine and satisfying obedience comes out of our identity. Our true identity comes only from our Father.
This is
another difficult chapter to read in Jeremiah.
This chapter is full of God’s insistence that the people won’t
repent. God insists that Jeremiah will
be like a bronze wall to them. In other
words, the people will rise up against him, speak against him, and try to
overcome him in spite of their inability to do so. This chapter is all about how the people may
claim repentance but their lives don’t bear it out.
One of my
favorite passages in this chapter is the claim that Moses and Samuel couldn’t
help these people. God’s not trying to
be rude to Jeremiah. He’s not trying to
say that Jeremiah is inferior to Moses or Samuel. What he is actually trying to do is to make
Jeremiah feel better.
Remember
that the generation that was with Moses was the generation of the exodus. These are the people who got to see God’s
plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the manna from heaven, the water from the
rock, and several other things. They saw
all of these great things and had Moses as their leader. Yet they rebelled so much that the whole
generation died in the desert.
Or, take
the generation with Samuel. God was
their king. Yet, they rebelled against
God’s nature as king. They wanted a
human king. So they got Saul. But the point is that even though Samuel was
an incredible man and a very righteous leader the people rebelled. They got something in their mind that was
contrary to God and they disobeyed.
The
generation that Jeremiah lives among is no different. Jeremiah is a righteous man like Samuel and
Moses. But the people still do not
obey. The people are not getting their
identity from God. Jeremiah 15:6 is a
telling verse. They are so disobedient
that God is weary of withholding His judgment.
That’s not a great place to find oneself.
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