LESSONS FROM JEREMIAH – PART 10 – TWO TREACHEROUS SISTERS POLLUTED THE LAND
PART 10 - Jeremiah 3:5 – 3:13
CHAPTER 3
[A]. TREACHEROUS ISRAEL INFLUENCED TREACHEROUS JUDAH TO IDOLATARY
{{Jeremiah 3:6-7 Then the LORD said to me in the days of Josiah the king, “Have you seen what FAITHLESS ISRAEL did? She went up on every high hill and under every green tree, and she was a harlot there, and I thought, ‘After she has done all these things, she will return to Me’, but she did not return, and HER TREACHEROUS SISTER JUDAH SAW IT.”}}
This is an extraordinary passage of tenderness and forgiveness. God asked Jeremiah a question about Israel, drawing his attention to the idolatrous state of that nation. The picture is of a wife having an illicit love affair and with her lover/lovers, she went to chosen places there to engage in adulterous acts. Israel chose the greenest trees and raised heights to practise her unfaithfulness as she engaged herself with all the gods and goddesses of the surrounding nations. She prostituted herself openly in every place showing deep devotion and allegiance to all the idolatrous practices she could sate herself with. Her devotion was to be to the Lord, her Deliverer and Protector but she abandoned Jehovah for the alluring delicacies of sinfulness. The adulterous wife of a husband abandoned her husband and engaged in acts of prostitution, while at the same time, showing a false acknowledgement of her husband. She joined in whatever took her fancy.
This prostitution was a spiritual one, an apostate one, as Israel abandoned God and adopted all the idols of surrounding nations. In the Old Testament books of history it frequently spoke about the high places, and these were ones on raised up ground like a small hill or rocky outcrop. A place under a green tree was usually chosen and an altar or/and a shrine was built to that specific god. Sacrifices were made and for some of the heathen gods such as Moloch, human sacrifices were made of children. All these high places were detestable in the sight of the Lord God, but when the nation He redeemed from Egypt and blessed, did all these same things, the Lord was angry and strong judgement was about to fall. It already had on Israel when overthrown by Assyria, and Judah was right of the verge of judgement by Babylon. Our world today is on the edge of judgement in the Tribulation. We are that close. God tolerates sin for a period but the cut off time comes quickly.
The thing with Israel is that she did it over and over again. God punished her and she returned momentarily, but departed again. That was her sad history. There was nothing concrete or enduring with the nation and all her foundation was on sandy ground for she moved the goalposts to a godless oval. During all the paramour episodes of Israel, God waited patiently, waiting for her return. Like the prodigal son, He waited for conviction and realisation to take hold, and for the offender to return home. Most men would have blown up and kicked the wife out, even after one offence. The union would have been finished. It was bad enough, I suppose, if your wife had been caught up in adultery with one man but there was a multitude of lovers involved in Israel’s case. No god was missed, no extravagance spared.
Often a marriage partner is not aware of an affair when it happens, but here we are clearly told God knew all about Israel. How many men would forgive their wives and wait for their return, wait for them to come to their senses? Some would but I suggest very few. In our world some of the men are doing the same. I suspect it all depends on the depth of love the man has for his wife. God’s love is utterly so deep. The world looks at affairs as normal behaviour today with an incredible number having affairs. It seems to be a modern acceptance in some countries. It is the spawning ground for crime writers who turn affairs into murder novels and all the rest of today’s entertainment. God waited for Israel and sent many prophets to call the nation to repentance, but the prophets were persecuted and killed.
The heart of God is revealed in verse 7 – “and I thought, ‘After she has done all these things, she will return to Me’, but she did not return”, which shows a God of prolonged longsuffering, a God who endures the shame and the loss for the return of the nation He loves. Like a self-willed and wayward donkey, Israel wandered all over the land after having thrown off the tethering bond of love that connected her with God. What was bought and ransomed by God, and had made her healthy and secure, was rejected. Now the nation was determined to go its own way but God was ever waiting for the people to return. All they had to do was to reconsider their current state compared with their past one, and see that the new Baals or masters were oppressive and exacting and hateful.
With that conviction one would think the people would see reality, and come back to the Lord, but they did not. God waited and they never returned. Sin darkens reason and pulls the blind down on truth. God thought, “I will let them have their way and then they will return.” God was willing to let them have that freedom but there would be no return. The returns seen in the 400 years of the Judges were a thing of the past. So perverse was Israel, that it was incapable of repentance and return.
Verse 7 says that Judah saw all the carrying on of idolatrous Israel which led to its demise under Assyria, and while it did so, it was termed “treacherous”. Judah was treacherous but would squarely have the right of decision to cleave to the Lord or go the way of her failed sister Israel. Later prophets and history tell us Judah took no heed of the Lord. She mapped her own disaster and followed the same path to destruction that Israel had done earlier.
[B]. TREACHEROUS, IDOLATROUS JUDAH PRACTISES DECEPTION
{{Jeremiah 3:8-10 “I saw that for all the adulteries of faithless Israel, I had sent her away and given her a writ of divorce, yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but she went and was a harlot also, and it came about because of the lightness of her harlotry, that she POLLUTED THE LAND and committed adultery with stones and trees. Yet in spite of all this, HER TREACHEROUS SISTER JUDAH DID NOT RETURN TO ME WITH ALL HER HEART, BUT RATHER IN DECEPTION,” declares the LORD.”}}
The theme of dual unfaithfulness is still being considered. As a result of Israel’s prolonged keenness with her idolatrous ways, after much time, the Lord obviously knew there was no chance of return for that nation. God knew from the start because He is omniscient but gave time to Israel to repent so that Israel could not say to God, You never told us. You were not being fair to us.” He had allowed enemies to come against them, and He sent plagues and trials, and sent prophets and warnings, all to no avail. Finally, all He could do was to expel them from the land and hand them over to Assyria, and that coincided with a writ of divorce against the nation.
In our culture a writ of divorce is nearly always permanent, except for Hollywood unrealism where they are in and out of marriage. In Israel it was also considered final. Jehovah divorced half His wife (the other half was Judah, and her divorce was coming in a matter of one or two decades, for Jeremiah lived at the time of the end of that nation), and that divorce was His giving Israel into the hand of Assyria, and later, Judah into the hand of Babylon.
The divorce was associated with extreme suffering as Assyria made havoc in the land and ruined it, ruined it in a different way from which Israel had done to its own land through pollutions. Judah saw all that, and instead of being fearful about its own destiny, treacherous Judah pursued the same idolatry that brought Israel down. The terms here are simple. It is like having two sisters in a family and one of them enters prostitution and comes to great grief through it. She becomes estranged from the family, and in the end is killed in the world of harlotry, but what effect does that have on the other sister? Well you’d expect she would run in the opposite direction, but instead she embraced the very same practices that brought death to her sister. How could the second sister do the very same thing? How could Judah do the very same thing that ruined Israel?
In verse 9, adultery with stones and trees is the way Jeremiah expresses the fact. Sacred and green trees and man made idols of stone and wood were all over Israel. The Lord called that pollution. Israel polluted the land but considered that as if nothing. She almost disregarded what she was doing, and considered it only a light or small thing in God’s eyes. That is no more than the blindness of sin. Anything that displaces God and takes the downward path of deviance from the declared will of God, is pollution.
We had once, what could have been called loosely, a Christian nation, but at the time of writing this, we are on the steep, deviant path. God has been replaced by greed and materialism. Never has there been so much pleasure entertainment, drugs, immorality, pornography, full faced lying and deception and New Age occultism. We have departed from all the revelation and will of God. Consequently, God would consider Australia today as polluted, and the United States doubly polluted because that is where much of this wicked deviance originates.
God then goes on to reveal the deception of Judah’s return from apostasy. “’Judah did not return to Me with all her heart, but rather in deception,’ says the Lord.” This is so like many people. They flirt with Christianity and are spasmodic about any Christian walk. They are nominal in the extreme, with no progressive or active Christian life with God. It is no more than a veneer, a façade of appearance. Jeremiah lived at the time of Josiah, the most godly and righteous of all the kings of Israel and Judah, probably along with David. Josiah brought in many reforms including a return to the Law, and cleansing of the male prostitutes from the temple, and the abolition of the Baal factories from the temple. He was truly righteous and godly, but the nation served Baal and all sorts of gods. They only showed a façade of worshipping God in the time of the godly king. That is why the Lord calls it deception. To return to God with a partial heart like Judah is said to have done, that is, not with a full commitment, is worthless. That is like what we see in the digital age. A digital format for a song such as Mp3 either works or does not work. You can’t have a good digital format for a song and an ultra digital format. It either works or does not work because of a broken file. If there is a broken link it is flawed. You either return to God with a total repentance and commitment, or you don’t return at all. A partial return won’t work. Judah never returned in repentance.
[C]. A CALL TO REPENTANCE AND A SUMMONS TO CAPTIVE ISRAEL
{{Jeremiah 3:11-13 The LORD said to me, “Faithless Israel has proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah. Go, and proclaim these words toward the north and say, ‘RETURN, FAITHLESS ISRAEL,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will not look upon you in anger, for I AM GRACIOUS,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will not be angry forever. Only ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR INIQUITY, where you have transgressed against the LORD your God, and have scattered your favours to the strangers under every green tree, and you have not obeyed My voice,’ declares the LORD.”}}
Jeremiah addresses the nation of Judah through God’s instruction. God makes a comparison between Israel and Judah and Israel comes out better. When you think of it that is amazing, for a study of Hosea and Amos shows that Israel was so engrossed with idols that it was irreparable. Hosea said the nation was joined to idols just like it was stuck with superglue. Israel was so idolatrous, one could think it could not get any worse, yet God says that Judah was even worse.
Why is this? Firstly you have the two adjectives, “faithless” and “treacherous”. Israel sinned grievously and was fully faithless to God, but Judah saw all this and took no heed, rushing with eagerness to surpass Israel in idolatrous worship. In that way Judah was treacherous because some light had been revealed to it by a number of godly kings and prophets, and God had laid bare before them the plight and overthrow of Israel, but in spite of all that, they concerned themselves not with the lessons God was giving. In all, Judah behaved treacherously and would bear the greater guilt.
I think there is a parallel here with what the Lord said when on earth about the old cities including Sodom – {{Matthew 11:21-24 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, THEY WOULD HAVE REPENTED LONG AGO IN SACKCLOTH AND ASHES. Nevertheless I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you; and you, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you? You shall descend to Hades for if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which (have) occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. Nevertheless I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you.”}} The old cities would have taken note and repented when seeing God’s power in the Lord’s miracles, but Chorazin and Bethsaida and Capernaum remained stiff-necked and aloof and brazen against the Lord. Judah saw what the Lord did to Israel/Samaria, and yet it remained defiant and unrepentant.
God instructed Jeremiah to proclaim the message towards the north and address faithless Israel. The northern kingdom had finished but Judah is in mind. I think Israel is being used here in the wider sense, and the message was for repentance, return and forgiveness. In spite of all her waywardness, God is declared to be gracious and would forgive them of all the gross spiritual immorality and idolatry. It is touching that God would forgive because He is gracious and will not be angry. In spite of all, God is loving and gracious. It is a striking literary touch to say, “scattered your favours to the strangers under every green tree” and is the picture of illicit love affairs with many partners in designated places. If there was repentance, God was wanting to forgive them and count them new again. The call was to return, but the return was to be with contrition, and genuine hearts convicted of the wrong they had done.
I see also in this passage, the case where a marriage partner must have the mind of God if one partner has strayed and shown “favours under every green tree”. When there has been unfaithfulness, pride is so often displayed and the person is kicked out immediately and pride and hurt won’t allow forgiveness. Let the mind of God be yours. God was gracious and would forgive, not rush to divorce which was the final option, but only when there was no hope of repentance or resolution. I believe for a Christian marriage partner not to forgive an adulterous husband or wife, is very wrong, and contravenes the example of God towards the nation He loved. That is the key – “He loved”, for where love exists there will be forgiveness. Even more than that it says God will not be angry. The Lord is so willing to forgive and restore. So must a marriage partner. In verse 13, all God wanted was for them to acknowledge their evil and return. As prodigals, He would forgive and restore and prepare a feast for them as a father did in a certain parable. Also in verse 13, disobedience is mentioned and that is one of the specified sins. Judah had disobeyed the declared will of God. Obedience is enjoined on the people of God, be it old Israel or His redeemed Church people.
ronaldf@aapt.net.au
