LESSONS FROM JEREMIAH – PART 8 – NATIONAL EVILS ARE WIDESPREAD – MURDER, INJUSTICE, NO REPENTANCE, DELUSION
PART 8 - Jeremiah 2:29-35
CHAPTER 2
[A]. YOU ARE A CONTENTIOUS PEOPLE BUT YOU HAVE TRANSGRESSED
{{Jeremiah 2:29 Why do you CONTEND with Me? You have all TRANSGRESSED against Me,” declares the LORD.}}
The people would argue their case for being guiltless, as one against the Judge, such was their arrogance. How can the created being argue with the Creator, but Judah was rebellious all the time? They had no right to contend because they were not qualified, for their sinfulness prevented them from presenting proper counsel before God. Science contends with God all the time, telling Him He is wrong and mistaken when The Creator has already given His account of creation, for “all WISE people, and all science KNOWS” that the unfathomable mass of the universe resulted from the explosion of something no bigger than a grain of sand (big bang theory); and that human beings grew up out of a piece of sludge in a swamp! Yes, man knows better than God, yet one day, man will come face to face with reality.
From about 2010 there has been an accelerated rush to overturn everything that is normal and stable and that applies to God and His absolutes in creation. Satan is inverting everything we have as God’s statutes in the bible. This applies to gender, to marriage, to sexuality, to the raising of children, to our origins, to decency and very largely to just plain, common sense.
Human beings in our age have overthrown God as irrelevant and unnecessary. That is how humanism behaves. There will come a time when God is going to slam on the brakes suddenly. This world can only go so far. Then the Lord removes His Church and such awful judgement will come upon the earth. Man has overthrown God, but God will overthrow man’s evil. Look at this Old Testament verse – {{Haggai 2:22 “And I WILL OVERTHROW THE THRONES OF KINGDOMS and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations; and I will overthrow the chariots and their riders, and the horses and their riders will go down, everyone by the sword of another.”}} Yes, God will overthrow.
God will bring to a ruin all the humanism of mankind and then the Lord Jesus comes at the Second Coming and takes up the Kingdom and rules with no humanism, but in righteousness. This verse is pointing at that - {{Ezekiel 21:27 “A ruin, a ruin, a ruin, I shall make it. This also will be no more, until He comes whose right it is and I shall give it to Him.”}} In the AV that verse is translated this way – {{“I will OVERTURN, OVERTURN, OVERTURN, it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him.”}}. Man now overturns all that God has established but there comes a day when God will overturn all that man has abused, distorted, inverted and rejected. Man transgresses against God but God will have His day and it is very close.
[B]. TWO CHARGES ARE PRESENTED HERE
{{Jeremiah 2:30 “IN VAIN I have struck your sons. They accepted no chastening. Your sword has devoured your prophets like a destroying lion.”}} The first is that God struck their sons, that is, the men suffered through war and judgements all because they would not accept God’s correction and chastisement. They rejected every move God made to draw His people back again. God uses the term “in vain”. He tried every move but it made no difference. In the end expulsion would be the final recourse. The second charge is a most serious one for it reveals the hatred of the nation against any message of God.
In order to eliminate the words they did not want to hear, they shut up the prophets by murdering them. The blood of God’s own is upon them and they will be accountable for what they have done. The sword had run the prophets through or decapitated them and such was the fury of that, that God compares it with a destroying lion. You can picture a rampaging angry lion destroying in fury. That is what happened to so many prophets. We tend to get into a mindset and think of the prophets as only the ones who wrote under inspiration from God in the scriptures, but there are many, many unnamed prophets who were doing God’s work and were killed for their faithfulness. The nation had the blood of the prophets on its hands, and God would remember that in the Babylonian judgement upon them.
God does not forget the blood of His own saints that has been shed. Some of the verdicts at the great white throne will be very intense as people stand there who have murdered the children of God, and, of course, other human beings. The most foul has been Mao Zedong who has the blood of between 40 to 80 million men, women, and children of China on his hands, yet China honours him as a great and honourable man.
In the Tribulation period God will appoint very special preachers; 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. People will turn to God but many will be murdered by the beast and his evil followers. This is recorded – {{Revelation 6:9-10 “When He broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and because of the testimony which they had maintained, and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”}} Their blood will be avenged, but not at the time of their prayer. Vengeance belongs to God and it will fall upon evil. Those who murdered the prophets will not escape.
(C). OBSCURITY NONE, BUT FORGETFULNESS PLENTY
{{Jeremiah 2:31-32 O generation, heed the word of the LORD. Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of thick darkness? Why do My people say, ‘We are free to roam. We will come no more to You.’ Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire, yet My people have forgotten Me, days without number.}}
In the terms of “wilderness” and “thick darkness”, God is pointing out to Judah that He was not absent, or un-findable or was distant. God was close in His care and concern for them all. They are asked to heed His word, to listen to Him through His messengers who were being killed. His word was there to hear. God questions why the nation chose to wander from Him and why they would no longer come. Judah had become willful and wanted to roam in the choice byways of sinful delights.
God then poses a question as to whether a virgin (or a young lady who is marrying?) can forget those ornaments used to make her pretty and delightful to all around, or can a bride forget those beautiful robes she has for marriage. The inferred answer is that the virgin and bride can not forget, yet Judah has forgotten her Lord for unnumbered days. It is so easy even for Christians to forget all that God has done for them and become careless about their walk and thoughts, and to become au fait about it all. Are Christians allowing non-God attitudes and thoughts to take over the territory once treasured and delightfully owned? We must all be disciplined in this regard and not let slip the valuable things like the Ephesian Christians did, when they slipped back from their first love and did not realise that it had happened.
In our days we are trying to swim in a sea of liberalism and WOKEism, and regrettably it is taking over some churches. Greed is turbo charged in some churches. All that has caused many to forget God and pursue materialism and greed and run after false teachers. What God said to Judah in its closing days before great judgement came upon it from the Babylonians, here in Jeremiah 2:31-32, God would say to you today as the great judgement of the Tribulation is about to crash into the world.
(D). LOVE OF IDOLS PLACED BEFORE LOVE OF GOD
{{Jeremiah 2:33 “How well you prepare your way to seek love. Therefore you have taught your ways even (to) the wicked women.”}}
They were TOTALLY NEGLECTFUL AND CARELESS toward the way of the Lord and to His Law, yet they were so diligent in preparing the way so they could love their idols. It is unimaginable the love people shower on worthless things and to things that are evil thinking they are doing well. It is the greatest of distortions. This verse is a bit obscure. It means that even wicked women are leading the way in this idolatrous worship and pursuit, or it means that the nation is so evil that even more evil is taught to women who are wicked enough already. No doubt evil was networked though every aspect of the nation.
Without stirring up a hornet’s nest, I will say that a lot of the cults founders, and those who claim to see visions, and those who say the Virgin Mary appeared to them at Lourdes or Fatima, etc. are women. I think because Satan confronted Eve and not Adam it might indicate women are more sensitive to emotion and feeling while men are more pragmatic and decisive. {{2Corinthians 11:3 “but I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”}}
{{1Timothy 2:12-15 “but I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet, for it was Adam who was first created and then Eve. It was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived, fell into transgression, but women shall be preserved through the bearing of children if they continue in faith and love and sanctity with self-restraint.”}}
I know some women might want to nail me to a tree for saying all that but it is those women who would want to do that, who are the guilty ones. God made the sexes to be different so they could be complementary as “one flesh” before God.
(E). SELF-DECEPTION IS DELUSION’S FRUIT, ESPECIALLY IN JUSTICE
{{Jeremiah 2:34-35 Also on your skirts is found the lifeblood of THE INNOCENT POOR. You did not find them breaking in, but in spite of all these things, yet you said, ‘I AM INNOCENT. Surely His anger is turned away from me.’ Behold, I will enter into judgment with you because you say, ‘I have not sinned.’}}
This is a most depraved situation. The guilty people are marked with the blood of innocent victims, especially the poor, but they deny any wrongdoing. The prophet says the blood is found on the skirts which pictures a man walking through those innocent ones killed, and the skirts of his clothing becoming stained with blood. I think this could be a reference very much so, to the idolatrous priests in their priestly, idolatrous robes who cared not at all for decency and justice, but slaughtered as they wished. In any case, the nation had the blood of the poor upon it. It is symptomatic of the degradation to which the nation had attained. The whole leadership was corrupt before God.
Amos is very vocal about the repression and ill-treatment of the poor, as were most of the prophets. God takes special note of the poor and how they are treated. In our day certain government policies and tax laws favour the rich at the expense of the poor. The poor seem to have fewer and fewer rights. The worst abuse is in third world countries where dictators live like opulent kings, but many of the people are poor and starving. North Korea is a case of that, and several African nations.
In Judah, the response was, “I am innocent”. How blind can a nation get that the abuses perpetrated, can no longer be seen as abuses, but just normal behaviour. They were callous and had no conscience or conviction of their crimes. In fact they even took the position that God approved of them. They said God had turned His anger away so they were in the clear. This is another case of delusion, and the great white throne will see the judgement of many delusional people. God had had enough of this wickedness and the judgement was about to fall as God would enter into judgement with them. Their time of reckoning had arrived. The nation denied any wrongdoing (I have not sinned).
At the end of the Church age where we are right now, there is one law for some and a totally different law for others. We are seeing that in the United States with the corruption of Biden and his possession of a large number of secret Government documents, but nothing will be done about it, but they hound and pursue Trump. The whole machinery of government is corrupt; protection for criminals and persecution of the defenceless such as protesting Christians against abortion. Is it little wonder God’s Tribulation judgments are close?
If a thief broke into your home and in defence of your property, even of yourself, you struck the thief and he died, according to the Law in the bible, you are innocent of the blood of that thief. This is set out in {{Exodus 22:2 “If the thief is caught while breaking in, and is struck so that he dies, there will be NO BLOOD-GUILTINESS ON HIS ACCOUNT.”}} It is a terrible travesty of justice in my nation where if you took measures against the thief breaking into your home, and injured him or killed him, then you’d be charged with grievous bodily harm, or manslaughter at the least, unless you could prove it was in self defence like he was shooting at you then you might have a hope of getting off. If you tackle a thief in your home, he has the right to sue you now for personal injury. Justice has been turned upside down. Corruption is the order of the day. We are so devoid of common sense in so many of our laws. Justice has bitten the dust and is corrupted.
