Year 9, Day 63: Jeremiah 10

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Jeremiah 10 gives us an opportunity to hear what seems like a ridiculous argument.  In our modern understanding of life, biology, physics, and astronomy we hear things about the ancient culture and wonder how stupid they could have been. After all, how could anyone take a piece of wood, carve it themselves, and then think that it was a god?  How could anyone see a stone and think that it had power over the rain, ground fertility, crop production, or victory in battle?  From our highly educated perspective, it seems hard to believe that anyone could see a god in an inanimate object.

On the other hand, in our modern world, how many of us worship our cars, our bank accounts, our homes, or our jobs?  These are things of our own making, yet we worship them!  Is worshipping our car or our house any different than worshipping some rock or carved figure?  Perhaps we worship our own physique, our strength, or our intelligence.  Is that not also something of our own making?

Fundamentally, here are why all of those things break.  Suppose something is of my own making.  I worship that thing.  How can that thing have more power than me if I made it?  How can it have more wisdom than me if I made it?  How can anything I make – figurine, object, attribute, or possession – actually do anything more than I can do on my own?  If that’s true, then how can it be a god?  If I cannot walk out of my door and change the weather, why would anything of my own making be able to do the same thing?

This is why God is so upset.  He made the world, not us.  We can simply reform what He has given to us.  He deserves our worship.  He deserves to be the center of our focus.

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