Year 9, Day 61: Jeremiah 8

Theological Commentary: Click Here

In Jeremiah 8, we hear more words from the Lord about His people.  It is prudent to take the warning of Jeremiah 8:17 seriously.  “Behold,” the Lord says, “I am sending you among serpents and adders and they shall bite you.”  God is promising judgment.  He is promising a judgment from which He will not relent.  It’s one thing to see a snake.  It’s another to come in contact with it.  It’s still another thing to hold it.  The experience isn’t really bad, though, until it bites you.  That’s God’s point.  The time for warning and pleading is past.  Judgment comes, and it will hurt.

What is the offense?  Interestingly enough, it isn’t correct to say that it is their sin.  Of course, God is offended by their sin.  Sin breaks relationships.  But God isn’t railing on in this passage about the Hebrew people’s sinfulness.  He does that in other chapters, but not so much in this one.  In this chapter, God is offended by the fat that they won’t repent.

God knows that human beings sin.  He knows we are not going to be perfect.  Once we bite into the fruit of sin and taste it, we can’t help but continue to eat from it.  God knows this fact.  It is why He sends us a savior.

What God can expect us to do, though, is to repent.  He can expect us to see the error of our ways, recognize how the sin hurt us, and stop.  He can expect us to resist the sin.  God is offended that the Hebrew people aren’t repenting from their sin.

Perhaps even worse, the Hebrew people don’t even know how to blush from their sin.  The people don’t see it as wrong!  The people aren’t shamed – or even capable of being shamed.  This is how God knows that it is time to deal with the people harshly.  The fact that they cannot even be shamed means that it is time for the Hebrew people to not just see the snake but to be bitten by it.  God brings judgment down not so much because of their sin but because of their inability to be shamed by it.

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