Year 9, Day 55: Jeremiah 2

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Jeremiah first focuses on the complaint from the Lord.  He asks the important questions right up front in the very beginning.  What fault did the preceding generations find with God?  When reading  bit more closely, we realize that God is not actually believing that others found fault in Him.  God is not looking for the mysterious chink in His proverbial armor.  God is asking the Hebrew people why they have stopped being in relationship with Him.

God rescued the Hebrew people out of Egypt. From that moment, the relationship with the Hebrew people has always gone in cycles.  The people would fall away until God raised up a judge to save them.  Then there were the kings.  The faith was strong with David as king, and it waned until Josiah was king.  Then it was strong for awhile before waning until Hezekiah was king.  Then the people went into captivity.  What we see are cycles of faith and unfaith.

This should be able to teach us two things about humanity and our relationship with God.  First, people will naturally fall out of relationship with God.  We are inherently self-interested and self-serving; therefore, we will seek our own ways instead of God.  This is why we need the faith of the previous generations to speak into our lives.  The faith of the prior generations helps to correct us when in our youth we stray after our own desires.  Jeremiah recognizes this, which is why God asks what fault the fathers of the current generation found in Him.  God knows that the contemporaries of Jeremiah are straying because the generations ahead of them are not grounded in Him.

The second thing that we can learn about this chapter is that it takes a serious event to correct a people when they fall away from faith.  In the Hebrew people’s past, it takes a war.  Outside threats of domination bring people into a realization of how much they need their relationship with God.  It is when the Hebrew people are struggling against Egypt, or Syria, or Assyria, or Babylon that they ultimately turn back to God in earnest.

Learn the lesson.  We keep the faith because of the wisdom of the generations that come before us.  When that wisdom has evaporated and is no longer present, then it usually take a large event like a war to force people to recognize the gaping hole in their life that they can otherwise ignore.

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