The Attributes of God:

Listening to What We Do not Want to Hear Jeremiah 36-40. “Yet the King and all his servants who heard all these words were not afraid, nor did they rend their garments.” (36:24)                   When writing to Timothy, Paul warns, “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4).  The hardest thing to do is to listen to a warning that challenges us to change.  We want affirmation so that we do not need to change.  We want to be told that God loves us and that we are exempt from judgment.  But the one thing we do not want is to be told is that we must change or face the consequences of our sin. We want heaven, but reject hell, even...

The Greatest Hope in a Time of Darkness Jeremiah 31-25 “Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.”                   The heart of Jeremiah appears dark and foreboding as he pronounces judgment upon Israel. Yet within the book that seems to focus on judgment, we find one of the greatest statements of hope in Scripture. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, gives a message that becomes the foundation for the entire New Testament. In chapter 31, we find the connecting link between the Old and New Testaments, a link we still regularly celebrate today. It is so central that it forms the basis for the title, “New Testament”.                   When Jeremiah arrived on the scene, Israel was in shambles. They had completely forsaken the La...

Hope in a Dark Period Jeremiah 26-31 “’For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” Jeremiah was not called the weeping prophet without reason. As we journey through the book, the central theme repeated is the certainty of God's judgment for their rebellion against Him. While false prophets were proclaiming peace and victory over Babylon, Jeremiah consistently emphasizes the certainty of judgment. Because Israel had abandoned their covenant with God, God was using Nebuchadnezzar as His instrument to discipline Israel for their sin. Their only hope for survival was to capitulate to Nebuchadnezzar's demands and accept their fate of being taken into captivity and transported back to Babylon. This required them to admit their sin and accept God's discipline. Yet, just like today, some denied God's justice and only proclaimed peace and prosperity. But they would be judged severely by ...

Following the Right Leaders Jeremiah 21-25 “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you.  They are leading you into futility; they speak a vision of their imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord.” (23:16).                   We live in the age of noise. Not physical noise, but spiritual and moral noise. The radio and TV fill the airwaves with talk shows where celebrities and news commentators give us their opinions on every moral, cultural, and political issue we can think of. We turn to the internet, and “social influencers” clamor for our clicks to push their profits. Surveys indicate that 51% of Americans follow macro-influencers (those with 100,000 to 1 million followers). 25% of people listen to mega influencers (1 million+ followers). They influence people in many ways, from the food we eat to the political and social views we embrace. The tragedy is tha...

The Challenge of Self-Assessment Jeremiah 16-20 “The heart is more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick; who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according tohis ways, According to the results of his deeds.” The threat to our spiritual life is not the world we live in or the evil that seems to grip society. The greatest threat to us is ourselves. It is much easier to spot the sin in others than to be honest about the sins in our own lives. We are masters of self-deception. John Calvin writes, “The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.” Stephen Charnock points out that “self is the great anti-Christ and anti-god in the world, that sets up itself above all else.” There are several ways our heart deceives us. First, it deceives us into denying the presence of sin. We easily see the faults in others and...

Listening to the Right Message Jeremiah 11-15 “The Lord said to me, ‘The prophets are prophesying falsehood in My name.  I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility, and deception of their own minds.” (14:14).                   In our age of information, we are flooded with people telling us right from wrong. Thus, we can easily find a preacher who tells us what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear. The age of information has become the age of misinformation, and the age of misinformation has become the age of self-deception. Today, we are not just faced with false teaching; we are faced with the greatest deceiver of all—ourselves. We no longer seek the truth; we only seek what agrees with what we want to believe. We now live in an age of confirmation bias, where we search for information that...