A couple verses stood out at me as I read through Jeremiah 2 this morning:
I brought you into a fertile land so you could enjoy its fruits and its rich bounty. But when you entered my land, you defiled it; you made the land I call my own loathsome to me. (2:7)
As I read this verse, the song “The Heart of Worship” came to the front of my mind and this verse was immediately associated with worship. Our worship is something that is supposed to be pleasing to the Lord, but when we make it about our pleasure, our preferences, and our glory, we defile it and make it loathsome to him (and quite frankly, I don’t think we truly enjoy it either because it makes us bitter and critical). When we make it about him, however, it becomes what it was meant to be: pleasing both to God and to us.
What good will it do you then to go down to Egypt to seek help from the Egyptians? What good will it do you to go over to Assyria and seek help from the Assyrians?…Moreover, you will come away from Egypt with your hands covering your faces in sorrow and shame because the LORD will not allow your reliance on them to be successful and you will not gain any help from them. (2:18, 37)
Israel was often guilty of what most people are guilty of: seeking help from human sources instead of from heavenly sources. If Israel had turned to God and obeyed his commandments, they would have prospered. Instead, they chose the easy way out and sought help from Egypt and Assyria, two traditional powers in the area, and it led to their destruction. As American Christians, I think we need to be careful of this as well. Too often I think we take the easy way out in our quest to bring faith and justice to our nation. We vote, we write letters to our Congressmen, we protest. In essence, we put our faith in the American political process to help us fulfill our call from God. While none of these things are bad in and of themselves, we must be careful not to put our trust in them to work, for the political system was established by humans and thus cannot even be trusted to fulfill human plans much less God’s plans. Our trust should always be in the processes that God has established for us to use: ministering to children, widows, and the poor, preaching God’s word, and loving God and our neighbor.