Year 9, Day 64: Jeremiah 11

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Jeremiah 11 doesn’t give us much new information.  The Lord is angry because the people have broken the covenant.  We know this.  The fact that the Assyrians and the Babylonians come into the Promised Land is one of the major points of the prophets.

What does come out of this passage is a reminder of the context.  The people are breaking a covenant that is hundreds of years old.  For those of us in the Western World, understand that the same amount of time between the giving of the covenant and Judah falling to Babylon is roughly the same as from current day and when Richard the Lionhearted was king of England and the Third Crusade took place.  For people who don’t know when that was, it was roughly three hundred years prior to Columbus getting on some boats and sailing west.

Readers of the Old Testament should be careful and not think that this generation of Hebrew people had broken a covenant that had been kept since the time it was given. Remember, even the people to whom it was given were rebellious!  The Hebrew people were constantly cycling between faith and apostasy.  A faithful generation would come along, and that would be followed by several faithless generations that would drag the culture down.  A faithful generation would restore the nation, only to be brought low again by their successors.  Generally speaking, the faithfulness of Jerusalem is like a rollercoaster ride that goes up and down but generally is always getting closer and closer to the ground.

This is powerful to remember.  This shows us the patience of God.  In the midst of the prophets, it is easy to see God as a God of wrath and vengeance.  However, He has been watching this spiral happen for dozens of generations.  He has been patient for almost a millennium.  He has been giving chance after chance after chance.  He has allowed generations to grieve Him, only to hope for a loyal generation to come along and return to Him.  Our God is a patient God who is indeed slow to anger.

However, even His patience is not endless.  There comes a time for judgment.  There is a time for correction.  That time is during the time of Jeremiah as Babylon heads west for Jerusalem.

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