Chapter 23

I could go into the role of the leader here again, but that isn’t really the point of Jeremiah 23.

Although he does mention the problems with leaders, this is in fact only the first few paragraphs. After this we move onto a topic I have not discussed before in this commentary, and it is time to give this concept a look.

I refer here to the reliability of prophecy.

Jeremiah reports on God’s heartache when He sees people who have no relationship at all with Him, who then go around saying “This is what the Lord says.” It’s not only a lie, it’s an incredibly damaging lie – for example, when God is saying that He will destroy Jerusalem (escape while you can!), these people could be saying “God is going to deliver His people again”. In other words, this lie could conceivably cost peoples’ lives.

Not surprisingly, God takes a very dim view to this indeed. He promises stern punishments on those who do this particular misdeed. A prophet must be the one God chooses, and if that person is not the designated prophet, then to claim oneself to be so is a serious matter indeed.

Well, it’s the 21st century now, so people are unlikely to go “Thus saith the Lord!” today, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

How many times have we seen people who claim to have spectacular Spiritual gifts?

I wonder how many of those people genuinely do?

Now, of course, God still can (and I believe still does) give those gifts to some. But in some cases a temptation exists to pretend one has gifts when in fact they don’t.

We live in an era of Grace, and God probably won’t strike you dead for such a thing now. But a read of Jeremiah chapter 23 is enough to tell us that He doesn’t like it even so.

We need to make sure that we are honest with each other about the gifts God has given. They are all important. Some are more visible than others, but God needs people gifted with administration just as much as He needs prophets or tongues – speakers. Don’t pretend. Instead, give your gift back to Him, whatever it happens to be, and He will take that and build it into something amazing.

Chapter 22

So what is it that Jehoiachim has done that has God so upset?

I wasn’t sure, so I googled it. Turns out that Jehoiachim was involved in some dodgy dealings, especially having his brother taken out of the way so that he could have the throne.

So we’re talking a fairly nasty dude here, and God isn’t turning the blind eye.

In fact, this passage is basically a dissertation on how God will apply justice, not only to the people involved in the incident itself, but to those in charge, to leaders.

There is little else that can be said about this passage – it uses a lot of flowery language to say the one basic point – that God is in no way going to let leaders have special treatment. In fact, they are facing harsher punishment than the people under their command. They should have known better, and it is to their great shame that they did not lead the people of Israel to follow God, but instead taught them to go against Him.

We can apply this, even though most of us (all of us reading this?) are not ever going to be kings or queens. The fact is that we’re all going to be leaders at some point or another, and it is important for us to understand that a leader is responsible for those under their care.

Leaders have so much more to lose than others. Yes, leadership is a noble role, and it’s one that we certainly shouldn’t shirk. But we need to go into leadership with our eyes open. As well as the rights of leadership we need to remember the responsibility.

In this case, Josiah HAD lead well, but his sons less so. So God pronounces the judgement on them.

Ask yourself one simple question: If you were one of the leaders of Israel at that time, would you be one of the ones God would criticize?

Chapter 21

You want to know how you can tell that Jeremiah’s messages come from God?

If you have a look at the name of the guy sent by the King to plead his case to Jeremiah, and to ask Jeremiah to pray for his victory, it may seem familiar.

That’s right! It’s the same guy who ordered a whipping for Jeremiah in yesterday’s chapter!

Now, if Jeremiah were simply doing his own thing, he’d milk that moment for all it was worth. Here’s the big bad, having to crawl to him! Who wouldn’t love that? I can certainly think of a number of people who have hurt me over the years. What I wouldn’t give to see them crawl at MY feet! I’d drag that moment out as long as I can.

Maybe that’s why the King sent him. Maybe the king was thinking “I’ll send the very guy who ordered Jeremiah scourged to talk to him. Once he’s humiliated the man, I can go to him personally.”

But Jeremiah isn’t going to respond normally. This is because he’s unable to do so. God has once again taken charge of him, and Jeremiah will once again give God’s response to the Priest (and through him, the King).

In passing, we might just note that the King is being pretty cynical. It’s not as though Zedekiah has been faithful all his life and is asking God for help as a result. It’s not even an example of a person finally reaching the point of repentance and calling God to forgive him.

No, it’s straight up and down a person looking for an ace-in-the-hole. Zedekiah realizes he’s in trouble when he hears reports of the size of Nebuchadnezzar’s army, so he simply asks for God’s help.

God is (rightly) furious at this. Nobody likes a user.

So He decides to ensure that the King knows in no uncertain terms that He (God) will not be backing HIM (the King!).

But God also knows that not everyone in the city is disobedient. So what God does is to announce that there is an escape clause. The escape clause, though, is one that few self-respecting Israelites could stomach – that is, they’ll need to surrender to the Babylonian army.

There are is something I’d like to highlight from here.

Firstly we have the unwise nature of trying to sweet talk a prophet of God. Honestly, he should have known better! What did he expect was going to happen?

Then, of course, we have the challenge for the royal line of Israel/Judah. They are to humble themselves, and look after the poor, and MAYBE God might come back to listening!

It’s pretty heavy stuff (And yes, the escape clause does apply to the leadership). The people of Israel are going to be exiled, destroyed, and nothing is going to prevent that now.

So where are we with all this?

I think for me the lesson is about the difference between lip-service and actually following hard after God.

When I was a kid, I knew the words to a dozen and more hymns in the Believers’ hymn book. I could recite verses from the Bible, I could rattle off common prayers.

But it wasn’t until I was about 12 that all this started to gel. From that point, my lip-service began to take on substance.

Jeremiah’s faith has substance. He will do whatever God asks of him (and let’s face it, none of us would change places with him!).

Contrast that with the King. A cynical, cupboard-love situation.

Maybe the words are the same, but there’s a world of difference between the two heart attitudes.

Which one is closer to your attitude, and which is closer to my attitude?

Chapter 20

So Jeremiah is getting attention, but it’s not the fun kind of attention. The priests have noticed his predictions, and presumably the public have been a little disturbed. So he’s been whipped and put on display in front of the Temple.

The priest comes out to let him go the following day. And Jeremiah, with calm dignity, walks away without a word. . .

. . . No, scratch that. He gives the Priest a new nickname – Danger Everywhere!!! – and informs him that the coming battle, all his friends would die, but he’d live on, to be dragged into exile where he would live out the rest of his miserable life.

O-kay, that’s a bit daring.

Or is it?

It actually comes from God, and Jeremiah isn’t all that thrilled about it. We read in verses 7-10 how Jeremiah complains to God about the words that he’s required to say. In all he does, the prophet simply is unable to stop himself speaking God’s word!

The irony of this is that prophecy is a gift that I once craved. I wanted to be the person who walked up to strangers and told them that God Has A Message For You!

Here we see the dark side. You may have God’s words – but you need to SPEAK God’s words, whether you want to or not.

And the thing is, in a sinful world, God’s words can get you into an awful lot of trouble.

Once again, we see the freedom of Jeremiah’s relationship with God in that he feels that he can say ANYTHING to God. When I was growing up, I would probably have been reprimanded by my mother for being irreverent if I was sarcastic towards God. Yet check out verse 13 – either Jeremiah is breaking the mood for one verse and then getting back into his tirade, or he’s actually being sarcastic IN A PRAYER!

But Jeremiah is not finished. He continues, cursing the very day he was born.

There’s an internet meme at the moment – “Ever get so angry?” What you do is you take a photograph out of context that appears to show someone doing something extremely amazing, and put the context “Ever get so angry that you prodded a bear with a stick?” or “Ever get so angry that you kicked a Russian cop?” or whatever.

Here Jeremiah could be a part of that. . . .


And yet – God doesn’t destroy Jeremiah (and there’s another 32 chapters of this to go!). We’ll find out how God responds tomorrow, but it’s not the instant kill one might expect.

Meanwhile, what lessons can we learn from this?

I’ve already talked about Jeremiah’s openness with God, so we’ll give that one a rest. I think maybe the best way to describe this is to simply say “Be careful what you wish for.”

Many people want to be used powerfully by God. We may even ask to be a part of the miraculous stuff that God does. Yet I wonder if we’d be so keen on volunteering to be in the plan if we really knew what it entailed. If you had the chance of doing what Jeremiah was doing – involuntarily pulling a wedgie on various powerful leaders – I’m not sure most of us would be happy about that.

More than that, we need to be aware that sometimes God will ask us to do things that are really uncomfortable. He means us to CHANGE the world. And that might mean discomfort for us.

The good news is that God loves us, and wants the best for us.

So what? I hear you thinking. Well, so if God asks you to do something, the WORST CASE SCENARIO is for you to face trouble temporally, then be exalted when God comes into His kingdom.

That means that it’s worth doing whatever and saying whatever God asks.

Chapter 19

Note - if you happen to have read this via email before and haven't received a second email with an updated version, this is what last night's commentary SHOULD have looked like if I hadn't fallen asleep several times at the keyboard!

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I have mentioned the Valley of Hinnom (or the valley of Ben Hinnom) before in my commentary. This dark and evil place had been the site of temples to Molech and Baal[1]. Now Jeremiah is saying that it will become a place for discarding rubbish and burying bodies.

To be sure, we know that this one happened. The Valley of Hinnom indeed became a place of horror, with the fires to burn the bodies of the dead, and various nasty biting creatures.

But when Jeremiah writes, this is still in the future.

In the future, moreover, where the city of Jerusalem is to be destroyed.

Whilst a lot of this book is heavy going – the full scale of the destruction is heartbreaking, and Jeremiah’s gloomy predictions just keep on coming – this chapter at least is quite understandable, and one is left thinking “Well yeah, that’s fair enough.” I mean, Human sacrifice – especially the sacrifice of babies – is reprehensible, and most of us would be quite against it.

Once again – here we have a running theme – God would cease His judgement if the people of Israel would simply repent.

Really, they’re choosing the hard way. But make no mistake, it’s what they choose. So generally we say “Well, God, yeah – fair enough.”

But there’s a point which deserves a little consideration – It is hard for us to think whether or not we would have accepted the deal or not. Do you sacrifice your child in return for blessing? Or do you take the stand that requires you to go against others when their minds are made up?

I want to think I’d have been in group 2 above, but realistically I have to ask if I really would have done so. You see, I have a tendency to be a coward. Generally I’m happy with that description. I’d rather people said “He IS a coward” than “He WAS very brave”.

Yes, what the people of Israel were doing was horrendous. How can you get otherwise normal parents to be so devoted to a god that they’d be willing to literally place their screaming infant onto the white-hot hands of a specially heated statue – killing the child! How could they do that?

Or, to put it another way: Can you imagine how powerful must be any social pressure great enough to make that happen?

Okay. NOW we are in the right place to ask ourselves whether or not we’d do what the people of Israel did. It was still evil, it still is unbelievable that people would let things get to this place (and incidentally, it also helps us to understand the depth of God’s anger against His people, that they’d leave HIM behind, and sacrifice their very children to this horror of a God!); but we now understand that the pressure to conform would have been enormous.

NOW you may understand the cost to stand up against it. Evil though it was, I suggest that many of us might have gone along with it anyway, simply because it takes a lot of guts to stand up and be counted. One may also say that it takes Him.

To live a life willing to go against the mainstream in such a big way requires supernatural intervention. More than that, in this case, one would be risking not just their social standing but potentially their life (bear in mind that priests willing to sacrifice babies would have no compunctions killing an adult who resisted them!).

To do this takes strength that comes from God.

What things might we face in our own life that needs US to take a stand against? I’ll leave that to your own mind, but I’ll bet there are things that all of us would see as great injustices. How many of them do we ignore because we’re afraid?

Time to pray. What would God have us take arms against?

[1]The word “Baal” is Aramaic for “Lord.” There were three or four gods worshiped under this title, but the most popular (and therefore the one that we assume is intended in most of the Bible’s references) would be Baal Melqart, a lightning God. This would seem to fit with Elijah’s challenge to the Prophets of Baal, given that the contest was to bring down fire from heaven!

Chapter 18

A potter and clay is a potent image. And curiously, while many things have changed over time, the image still works today. The wheel is generally electrically powered now, rather than simply kicked into motion; the wheel therefore generally turns somewhat faster than its ancient ancestor; and potters have access to better clay, of far greater consistency than that available to the ancients; nevertheless, every technique used by ancient potters is easily recognized by potters (or even students of pottery) today.

So it is that Jeremiah’s prophecy comparing God to the potter and Israel to the work God produced connects deeply even now.

It’s hard to understand why God has the right to do some of the things He does. It’s tempting to say “God, hands off. Stop interfering with my life. Let me be.” But that’s not how it works. To say such a thing overestimates our own significance before God considerably – remember, using the clay metaphor, we are in fact the creation, not the creator.

Put bluntly, God as our creator has the right to do as He pleases with us. We are His creation! If God looks at us and does NOT like what He sees, He has the right to take the same lump of “clay” and make it into something else!

In the same chapter we also catch up with something else – Some of the big end of town dislike the things that Jeremiah has been saying. Apparently they have found that a can get rid of him. More about that in a few days’ time.

So what is our cash value? What can we learn from this passage?

I think that the fact that God shapes our lives, like a potter shapes a pot on a wheel, is a really encouraging image. Not only does it give a reason for some of the events that happen from time to time, it helps you to recognize that such incidents are necessary in the process of bringing each one of us to the highest degree of perfection God can bring us to.

Chapter 17

The book of Jeremiah is prophecy, of course – written by one of the great prophets. But some parts of it read like biography, some like a letter, and some – including this part we will examine tonight – even sound like Proverbs.

Although God doesn’t wander from the theme of the previous verses – namely, that God’s people have failed to follow Him, and therefore they will be exiled as punishment – the tone of this passage is just a little less dark than previous chapters. And as I previously said, there is the hint of wisdom literature here.

In the process, Jeremiah gives us some really good hints on how to understand the nature of God. The main concept we have is that of where we place our dependence.

People are pretty good value – MOST OF THE TIME. Usually they are kind and decent. Yet sometimes when you depend on them, the bottom line is that you’d be wiser not to do so!

But each of us have our weak spots, and without His guidance, presumably many of ust may otherwise be the same – that is, headed for justice, which in this case would have meant separation from God – maybe permanently.

We know that we can trust some things and some people, and not others; that’s just the way of things. God Himself compares relying on humankind to building on a tumbleweed (at least in the “Message” translation!)!

Let’s be honest – that’s pretty common. Yet somehow bad experiences with trusting Humankind rather than God Himself doesn’t stop us from doing it again

Contrasting this, we have a line which is popular amongst Christians of all stripe – “Blessed is the man who trusts in me.” And Jeremiah compares THIS person with a tree with deep roots.

When everything is going well, it’s easy to stand on one’s own feet. But what about when things are going badly?

If you’re relying on humankind, a turn for the worst in your luck is awful. Humans won’t know what to do. But if you’re relying on God, you are still safe. Things may hurt, but they can’t destroy you. You have something beyond the visible, and you are safer and stronger than anyone around you might otherwise believe.

Chapter 16

So it seems as though I’m losing sight of God here. The defining characteristic of the God I have worshiped all my life is missing.

The God I have known (and know!) is steadfast, loyal, loving, slow to anger, abounding in love, compassionate and gracious. It is hard to read these passages because they are so alien to what I know.

Now, in the first book that I examined in Johno’s Commentary, we explored the differences between God in the Old Testament and the New Testament. In Numbers, we found that the differences weren’t so great – you could easily see that it is indeed the same God in both Testaments.

So what gives here? Why does He seem so different, so vengeful?

The starting point here is that I will make the assumption that God ISN’T actually being vengeful, and that His actions here are fully understandable.

Firstly, it is as though God can’t BEAR what He is saying here – in the middle of His stern rebuke, God can’t help Himself; He speaks verses 14 and 15, in which He previews the Return from Exile. He makes it clear that one day He will bring His people back, and that this period of exile won’t last forever.

Personally I can see this in some ways as like being a teacher and a parent.

In both of these roles, there are times when one has to artificially amplify your emotions. You actually don’t feel angry, but you need to simulate anger in order to correctly model appropriate reactions to the child’s actions. In doing this you have to go “over the top”, because if you try to be subtle, kids won’t pick up on it.

I think in some ways that is what God is doing here. If He wants His people to repent, He must go over the top and make His anger appear extreme.

The unfortunate thing is, also like a parent, He’d rather not do that. He wants to shower His people with love and grace. He cannot – that would be enabling their bad behaviour, like giving a large sum of money to a compulsive gambler – but He would love to be able to.

Yet in the midst of all this, even when God is laying out His judgement strongly, God desires to forgive. And He wants His people to be aware that they shall be sent away from their homeland for a season, after which they will return. It won’t help THESE people – they’ll be stuck off in other countries! – but there IS that promise that this exile is not going to be forever.

Chapter 15

“I’m tired of letting you off the hook!” says God in verse 6 of Jeremiah 15. “I made sure you’ll lose everything, since nothing makes you change!”

God has a problem. And it’s a problem that goes on to this very day.

The problem is that simply, God hates sin. Really hates it. It is repulsive to Him, to the degree that He cannot look at it. To Him it is worse than seeing blood, vomit, dead bodies. It is simply something He cannot abide.

On the other hand, there is something God regards as very precious, and that is the freedom of people to choose to love Him or not. Many people find it hard to understand this, but for me it’s easy – I could simply program my computer to say that it loves me, but I’d rather spend time with my kids than my computer! Why is this?

Because my kids have a CHOICE to love me. Whilst they do, the fact is that they could choose to hate me instead – they have that freedom – and yet they love me anyway.

Now I could be facetious and say that that’s because I’m such a lovable guy – but really, I’m far from perfect, and they know that. Both my kids, young as they are, have been on the receiving end of my imperfection! Yet knowing that they still choose to love me! The computer has no such choice. It will reliably say “I love you”, every time I issue the command for it to do so. If this particular computer exists after I die (I sincerely doubt it, but you never know!), it could go on saying “I love you” long after I’m dead and gone. It wouldn’t know that I’m not there to read it, and frankly it has no way of caring. It will faithfully follow its instructions day in, day out, until it can’t function any longer.

So here’s the issue – God’s love and God’s holiness are in conflict.

People often get the wrong idea of Jeremiah. They think God is getting really vengeful. In some respects He is, but it’s important to note that He hasn’t rejected His people – they have rejected Him!

God is sovereign, and even now He could rescue His people. In fact, in similar situations throughout history, He has even done so. So why doesn’t He do this here?

It’s because God has His limits – and He’s not about to continue getting His people out of situations when it’s expensive and difficult if they don’t appreciate His help! For God to give help in such situations, people have to repent. As we saw yesterday, real repentance is a long way from the minds of these people!

God is hoping that the people will repent. But He knows all, and He is well aware that they are very stubborn.

Poor Jeremiah is at his wits end here, and he screams out to God to help him – he has to bring this message to the people of Judah, who not surprisingly will be most unimpressed!

In his moment of despair, Jeremiah says something that I have sometimes said myself (and I believe many other Christians have said too) – “You’re nothing, God, but a mirage; a lovely oasis in the distance – and then nothing!”

There are many times in life, especially when things are going wrong, when you feel like God is far away. The infuriating thing is that other Christians will (well-meaningly) mouth platitudes like “Just pray about it!” or “You’ll feel better tomorrow.” Some may even go as far as accusing you of being the problem – “If you feel like God is far away, guess who moved?”

It’s all very well to say that, but often there’s more to it than that. And what I read from here is simple – That even heroes of the faith, like Jeremiah, got to those moments of critical doubt!

Now, there’s no question that Jeremiah is in the wrong here. God’s not going to turn to him and apologise – for in fact it is God, not Jeremiah, who actually understands what is going on. And indeed, God DOES demand an apology – but compare the gentleness of God’s rebuke to Jeremiah with the pronouncement of doom upon the people of Israel!

There is a world of difference in God’s mind between the faithful person with honest doubts and the faithless people who have never had even a thought for repentance. One is to be judged – the other to be gently restored. If you are ever worrying about whether God is angry at you for doubting Him, set your mind at ease. You may owe Him an apology – but “Take back those words, and I’ll take you back; then you’ll stand tall before me.”

Chapter 14

Repentance. It’s a word we use a lot as Christians. “Repent and sin no longer!”

I think we use it less of ourselves than maybe we should – how seldom is the word “repent” preceded by “I”?

In any case, I think it is even more seldom that we truly understand this word.

“To repent” once had a common meaning – to turn around and walk the other way. When we repent, we are acknowledging our sin (that part is usually fairly easy) and then committing to walk the other way and not do it again (and that part can be very difficult).

Looking at Jeremiah chapter 14, God continues to pour out His anger on Israel, albeit from the company is a hamster rancing all the time..

Verses 1 – 6 describe a terrible famine. Verses 7 – 9 contain Jeremiah’s heartbroken repentance on behalf of his society – which God does not accept.

Why not?

That part, at least is simple. Jeremiah repents, but by and large his people do not. V10 – 12 has God saying in His anger “Don’t believe the preachers who have told you everything will be alright. It’s not going to be alright, and it’s going to get ugly.” His accusations of false prophecy are aimed at whoever tries to tell people that everything will be “Business as usual”. It’s not. God’s anger is burning down, and nothing will be the same again.

In this, Jeremiah laments again. He weeps for his people. As well one would.

As he weeps, once again he pleads for God to rescue them. God has already stated that He will not listen to the prayers of Judah, that their wickedness is too great. Jeremiah knows that – but he also knows that God is a God of mercy. And though God is saying in His anger that “We’re through,” you can see in His past records that he will sometimes show mercy – and Jeremiah is rather banking on that right now.

So where does this impact us?

When we have sinned, it’s sometimes hard to know what to say to God. How do you face God knowing that He knows what’s going on in our hearts or our head.

So when we face moments like this, it can be good to pray through a confession from the Bible – sometimes, when you don’t have the right words to say, it can be a relief to say what actually happed.

Bad things happening are mandatory. They must happen, and we must respond to them. My challenge for today is simple – when you have sinned during this week, for goodness’ sake, kept short records with God. Confess to Him amd do not hold back. Contrast the behaviour of people in Judah against your own against your own willingess to talk to Him;

Chapter 13

Can a leopard change its shorts?

This misquote of Jeremiah 13:23 is common in Terry Pratchett’s books. It’s doubly appropriate when you realize that Peterson’s translation of “Linen belt” is “Linen shorts”. Anyway, let’s get started.

God gives Jeremiah two signs to share with the people of Judah. Both of these are fairly esoteric, and I have to admit I didn’t understand them at first.

I mean, what is God wanting to do with the linen shorts? And what exactly is God trying to do with the reference to drinking too much wine?

This is a bizarre image God gies Jeremiah. In the end, though, the message is fairly prosaic – that Judah is the shorts.

Like the shorts, Judah was created clean, white and pure. Like the shorts, Judah had a purpose – to clothe and protect.

Like the shorts, when they weren’t doing what they were supposed to do, they fell apart and became useless.

There are many parallels we could draw between these two! But let’s try and apply it to ourselves.

We sometimes see ourselves – like the shorts – as purposeful and valued by God. And that’s true, and it’s important that we recognize that we are loved unconditionally.

But if the shorts are not doing what they are meant to do, they don’t just say as they are now; they deteriorate.

If we are not doing the things that we are designed to do, then we too will quickly become useless. And not only useless – useless in a disgusting and offensive way. Useless in a way which is hard to imagine ever being clean ever again.

Here’s where the analogy breaks down somewhat – one day, God will be finished punishing His people, and will take them back. It’s hard to imagine that ever happening to the shorts . . .

Chapter 12

One of the truly great questions, a question that has kept many a Christian awake late in the night, is this: Why do bad things happen to good people?

And there are all kinds of answers to it, all kinds of counters to the answers, and all kinds of counters to the counters . . and counters to the counters to the counters and so on. It’s a question, naturally, that argumentative religious people and atheists (and agnostics etc) are all champing at the bit to answer most of the time. Throw that one in at a university bar and see what happens! You’ll find it’s a bit like throwing a choice steak into the middle of a dog pound.

Less discussed, but no less important, is what could be considered the converse or the inverse depending on how pedantic you are with language. And that question is this: Why do good things happen to BAD people?

This takes a bit more explaining, and is much more uncomfortable. I think this is because of people in the “Underbelly” class. Criminals make crime look so exciting and rewarding – they have the money, the fame (infamy is much the same thing!), the power, the girls (not to put too fine a point on it) and anything else they could like.

Sometimes, the fact that they might get caught is a little bit if a “Well, so what?” kind of question. “They got 8 years before being caught,” one might think. “Didn’t they get away with it more than you or I would?

This questions is actually older than dirt, evidenced by the fact that Jeremiah discusses it in chapter 12.

In passing, it is worth commenting on the relationship between Jeremiah and his Creator seen here. How close are they? They must be close when you consider that what you read here isn’t meant to be the deepest level of Jeremiah’s communication with God!

Anyway, this chapter has Jeremiah making his complaint from verse 1 through to 16. In the process, he uses some amazing imagery, grappling with the God who loves and the God who in His sovereign will can’t interfere with bad things happening.

But it is hard for Jeremiah, until God delivers His message, to live with what he sees. He sees the crooks seemingly winning[1]. He sees the countryside laid to waste by the greed of the few.

Finally God answers – and his answer is surprisingly uplifting.

It starts with what we have started to expect in this book – basically “I will smash the evil.” But then something changes. Instead of predicting universal doom and disaster, God changes the way He is relating.

Instead He is saying that he will, after a period of exile in which the evil people are plucked out, rescue His people of Judah.

For us, the message is fairly clear. God isn’t shocked when we ask Him why the bad people win, but He isn’t impressed either.

In fact, this tendency is illusory. Seen over all of History, there is actually going to be justice. But up close, it may not look that way.

Today I was deeply challenged, and it is only appropriate that I pass that challenge on to you. This world is screwed up deeply, so much so that there’s nothing that we can do to fix it.

Yet all that is Christlike within us will demand that we try to do things about the injustices we see around us.

[1] And how abused this word has been, especially by Charlie Sheen of late!

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

Note:
I have been greatly enjoying these commentaries, and getting a lot out of writing them; however the school term is now bearing down in full force and if I don’t make some changes I will not be able to continue.

From now on, commentaries will be getting considerably shorter as I endeavour to allocate 15 minutes to their writing (until now it has sometimes taken me an hour or more to write a particularly troublesome episode). If I am preaching at church on Sunday, I will continue to publish my sermon’s transcript as Saturday’s edition.

Also, finally, I plan to go away with my family during April. During this time we will be camping, so there will be no computers! I considered bringing my notebook computer so that I could write entries during that time, but I have since decided that I should instead concentrate on enjoying the time with my family; so from April 21 – 24 I shall be off line. Sorry for any inconvenience; You’ll just have to find another source of borderline heresy for those dates!

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I have a book that was given to me in hard times. It’s called the Bible Promises book, and in it the author goes through and finds all God’s promises. The idea is that when you’re facing difficulties, you open up this book and you find what God has promised you.

It’s a good book, and has been helpful to me.

Yet there’s another side to God’s promises; one which will be unlikely to turn up in Christian books aiming to encourage people. And this is that God ALSO gave us a bunch of other promises.

We’re quick to look up the part of Deuteronomy where God describes the blessings He will raind down on His people if they obey His commands. We’re good with that, because we want to be blessed also; so we learn what God has said, and attempt to hold Him to it.

But there are other promises, and they are much more frightening. God promises that if people DON’T obey Him, a whole bunch of other things will happen. Shocking things. A lot of them are the very OPPOSITE of the promises God gives if His people pray.

There are a lot of concepts in the Bible that are hard ones today (just to be clear, this is no different from any other time in history. Don’t get the idea that life is any more godless now than always! Which concepts are hard may change.).

The concept of Hell, for example. The idea that someone may be consigned to eternal punishment for sin seems horrendous to us. Yet this is a promise – that one day the wicked will face judgement.

But God’s promises, be they pleasant or unpleasant, are promises; and God is faithful to keep them.

That’s good news if you’re looking at God’s positive promises; but as God tells Jeremiah in vs 1 – 5, God’s unpleasant promises are also true. The people need to realise that God isn’t playing around here.

This should galvanise us into action. Let’s face it, we all know people who are not friends of God. Are they to simply face God’s judgement without preparation[1]?

No. Never. A thousand times no.

We need to get out there and be prepared to share what we know of Christ to ANYONE who is yet to know Him personally.

[1] As I have previously said, God’s power is greater than our stupidity. This is not meant to be saying that God will automatically ignore anyone who is not a Christian, and that without us all these people will go to hell. Rather my model leaves the results to God – but the thing is, we don’t know.

Chapter 10

Can you identify the God you worship in a line-up?

I spend a lot of time among atheists. There are plenty among the scientific community. A common quote they say is that they “only believe in one God fewer than you do, and when you understand why you disbelieve in the others, you’ll understand why I disbelieve in yours.”

It’s an arrogant claim, but it does raise a very real question – what is it about the God that we worship that makes us so sure that He is the reality, and that others are fictional?

Such a thought in our world is so unusual as to be scandalous. This is because our society enshrines values that are pluralistic – that is, your beliefs are equal to my beliefs in value.

Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and point out that there is good in this philosophy (I know this might get me branded as a heretic for some Christians!). There is merit in accepting that someone else sees things differently to yourself, and that there may be more than one way to interpret the same data. I accept this.

But on the other hand, not all beliefs in fact ARE equal. If one believes that there are no cars on the road, they face the problem that their beliefs don’t square with reality, especially when they try to cross the road!

In Jeremiah 10:1 – 10, the Prophet attempts to compare the God of Israel with the gods around them. He dismisses the local gods as being false; “a tree chopped down, shaped with the Woodsman’s axe.”

The concept to which Jeremiah refers is that the usual methods of worship for many of the local gods of his time involved what is known by historians as a “cult image”. There was a statue or a picture of the god, perhaps a representation, perhaps seen as a focus for belief. Either way, though, the image was viewed as being connected to the god in a real way.

God, the God of Israel, tells them that there is to be no cult image.

I have sometimes wondered why this was – where’s the harm in allowing people to use a cult image if they want to?

There are a lot of reasons, I suppose, but we will examine a couple now.

One reasons is that it encourages people to see God as a physical being – and so promotes a mythological view of God as a “super-human” – with all the pluses and minuses that implied. This was how most of the ancient gods were seen – say, Egyptian gods[1], Roman gods, Greek gods. Of course, God’s people understood this fairly early on, but as they went to other gods, the practices of other religions became part of the Jewish faith; and God wanted to stop that.

As instead of being seen as a cartoony being God wants to be seen as present and active. He isn’t a statue stuck in a temple somewhere, He is present everywhere, whether he is worshiped there or not.

Finally, God wanted to demonstrate an objective difference – that He is interested in each of us, though not all of us reciprocate.

God is very different from all other gods – and the sooner we get this through our heads, the better.

[1] Okay, perhaps super-humans with weird animal heads.

Chapter 9

This book is going to be a long read . . How many more chapters of sadness can one take?

But that’s kind of the point, really. When he’s told of God’s judgement against His own people, Jeremiah reacts kind of as one would if they’d just been told of a close friend’s terminal illness.

Which is really very similar to what he’s been told, when you think about it. Jeremiah loves the city of Jerusalem and its people, and to hear that this city will be destroyed – in his own lifetime, as we discover later – must be hard to bear. I can easily imagine how I’d feel if the prophecy was against Sydney. I’d cry, I’d rail against God, I’d demand of God that he relent . . .

Just as Jeremiah does here, really.

It all seems so hopeless, so forlorn. . .

And then suddenly, from nowhere, we get this amazing little passage in verses 23 and 24. It’s here that I intend to concentrate the rest of this devotion – I think I have handled quite enough sadness for now!

Jeremiah throws in this gem: “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

We often pride ourselves on many things. I know my own weak spots tend to be related to how much I know; My brains vs your brawn any day of the week. Or perhaps other people might find that their weak spot to be their abilities or their possessions.

None of these are bad things, but the only thing worth boasting about is God!

Everything we can do is something that we were designed to do in certain circumstances, and boasting is no exception. But we are called to boast in God instead of in ourselves!

What opportunies have you missed lately?

Chapter 8

We often think of God as having emotions. He is described in the Bible as being angry, loving, caring, joyful, grieved.

There’s one emotion I wouldn’t normally associate with God, and that’s frustration.

On the surface it seems strange – the omniscient and omnipotent God who created everything frustrated? What gives?

But there is a point that we often forget, and that’s that God VOLUNTARILY chooses to avoid exercising control that could be His. Free will matters to God, so He allows people the right to choose the way that they act.

Doing this opens him up to being frustrated. VERY frustrated. Because being omniscient means that God knows both what people are doing and where that will ultimately lead them, even when they don’t; and since God is incredibly loving, He wants what is best for them.

But since He wants us to be free, He must restrain Himself from acting when it would be so easy for him to simply change one parameter somewhere in our brains, which would make us make what He knows to be the right decision.

This is hard enough to think about when you consider a single individual – but in Jeremiah chapter 8, God is dealing with an entire nation.

God is baring His feelings here, and He alternates between grief and sorrow and anger – but the frustration is ever present.

A side issue – God is clearly using some hyperbole here (exaggerating with the intention of making a point, in case you missed that bit in English!). We know from history that He didn’t completely abandon His people. We know that they went into exile – but God brought them back, and the nation was re-established in time for the coming of Messiah.

But whilst he knows God will ultimately deliver, the prophet is heartbroken meanwhile. He laments his people, and weeps for what has been lost. Ironically the expression “Is there no balm in Gilead” towards the end of the chapter has been used for a variety of fairly happy songs, but it’s kind of the opposite of the intention of the phrase!

So what is the value to us today? A challenging question, all things considered; but there is one big thing that I think overrides everything else. And that is the personality of God.

God isn’t an impersonal force, like Star Wars. He is a person, with emotions and will. He feels things that we feel, only on a vastly larger scale; and He is not going to lie or prevaricate.

When you and I sin, it hurts God. God feels emotional sorrow over what we have done. When we do something good, God feels elation. If we love God, He loves us back.

We need to understand this – if God is the most loving person in the Universe, then He is also the most vulnerable to emotional pain.

This is important because we can seriously expect God to know how we feel when things happen. When things are not right, we can believe that God understands the frustration we feel – He’s felt it Himself.

Of course, since God took on human form as Jesus, He has an even better claim to understanding how we feel. But we will look at that some other time.

Chapter 7

Note to my readers:

The last two days I have been doing my devotion very late at night, and they haven’t really met my own standards. On the one hand, I can simply leave them as they are; after all, they’re just my personal devotions. But since friends of mine are now reading this regularly, I owe you more than that. So after I upload this installment, I intend to go back and do a bit of a facelift to chapters 5 and 6. If you get this via email, I’ll send you the uprated version.

Thanks for your help in keeping me on track!

PS – Blog readers, I haven’t actually succeeded in uploading either of the suspect episodes, so I’ll clean them up before you get to see them! :-)

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The Temple was a potent symbol to the Jews.

Every single part of it was carefully crafted, with some deep significance. For example, the two pillars at the front had specific names (Jakin and Boaz), and represented aspects of the nature of God. The carvings on the walls each had a meaning. The Holy of Holies (the room where the Ark of the Covenant was stored) was a specific size, and the size was chosen for a reason.

When we were looking at the book of Numbers, we looked at the building of the Tabernacle, and we saw how intricate that was. The Temple was even more so, and no surprise there. It was a permanent building, whereas the Tabernacle had only been a tent. Years of time and effort had gone into its construction, and the people of Israel were incredibly proud of it.

So imagine the shock that Jeremiah would have engendered by these comments – that the Temple itself wouldn’t protect people from God’s anger!

It would have sent disquiet throughout his audience. “Surely, he must be kidding! Why should we worry? God’s always gotten us through!”

But there is more. God isn’t going to leave people wondering why He is angry.

He catalogues a list of sins, in grisly detail. Many of them are bad. But the one that upsets Him the most is one which He has mentioned many times before in this book – the exchanging of Him for other gods!

Some might ask if God is being insecure here. That kind of misses the point. God made these people His own. He came down to them, brought them out of Egypt and turned them into a rich and prosperous nation.

One might expect that the people would be grateful to Him. It would be reasonable when you consider how much He has done for them. But people forget things, and the next thing you know the people are cooking sacred meals for other gods, and offering sacrifices to them.

So far, most people of today might say “Okay, but is that so bad?”

Yes. The sacrifices they were offering were THEIR OWN CHILDREN.

The thing that had God upset wasn’t just that they were offering to other gods. He didn’t like that, but he could take it. It was that they were killing their own kids as a sacrifice to these other gods. In other words, we’re not talking about an incident in which they thought they were doing right but simply misunderstood. When one had to burn their child on an altar, there was no way that they could possibly have seen the god they were worshiping as Holy, righteous or good. Some people ask about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac – but that’s kind of the point! When Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his own son, God made it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that it was not necessary!

In contrast, the people of Israel not only did this horrendous act, but they did so IN GOD’S TEMPLE. It’s hard to find a way to express God’s disgust at this, but you see stirrings here of what was to become known as the Exile.

Incidentally, one of the places where this human sacrifice was done was in the Valley of Hinnom (see v 32). In time it eventually fell into disuse, and eventually was used as a place where human remains were cremated (presumably because, with its grisly past, nobody wanted to use it for anything else). The term that Jesus uses for “Hell” is “Gehenna” – the name this accursed valley had by Jesus’ time.

So what does this mean for us?

If I were in more of a gadfly mood, I could compare the similarities between abortion and sacrificing one’s child on the altar, but I choose not to. Instead I want to discuss “Grace abuse”.

The Israelites had come to the point where they thought the temple itself would save them from whatever came their way, despite God’s anger. They had forgotten that the God who owned the Temple was what was important, not the building itself. Rather than a relationship, they had reduced their religion to a simple ritual – do the sacrifices and everything will be alright.

It seems distasteful to us, but I wonder if we could be said to be doing the same.

We have it drummed into us that God operates by grace alone, and all we need do to be forgiven is to come to God and confess to Him.

Sometimes, though, I think we might treat this grace mechanically – say the magic words and you’ll be forgiven.

I wonder how God feels about that – when we simply say to Him “Yes, I did X Y or Z” and expect His forgiveness.

Yes, God DOES operate solely by Grace, and anyone who repents and turns to Him, no matter how great their sin, is forgiven. However, the other side of the coin is that it isn’t magic, and there’s no formula.

Because in the end, what God is wanting is a relationship, and forgiveness is part of the relationship between us and Him being restored. How much relationship is expressed in a mechanical transaction where confession is exchanged for atonement?

Chapter 6

Jeremiah 6 would have been a frightening thing to read in its day. It doesn’t seem too scary now because it has been long enough for these things to recede back into the mangled swamp of memory.

And there’s another reason. Not only is it long ago for us, it was in a place most of us have never visited. So what happened there was comfortably remote.

Not so for the Israelites, who had to face this situation themselves.

Now, prophets telling them that they faced disaster was nothing new for the Judeans. But there was something else that would have made this passage all the more frightening.

Do you catch it? It’s in verse 9.

The Jews are used to God backing them up 100% - David vs Goliath, that sort of thing. But here God tells them he’s not backing them this time. In fact, He’s backing their enemies!

Why would God do such a thing?

Many people get really concerned about how a loving God can allow evil and suffering to flourish in this world. In fact, one of the famous arguments against God’s existence goes like this: If God exists, He is either powerless to stop the suffering or complicit in it.

In this passage, it certainly looks like the latter. How can God allow this?

The trouble with the reasoning I have just mentioned is that it leaves out one crucial fact – God may have a loving reason for allowing suffering.

At first glance, this seems ridiculous. How can the two ideas co-exist?

I have two daughters. I can remember the elder one’s first injection. She was looking at me, frightened but trusting me. Then the pain of the needle. Suddenly the look on her face was anger, upset. She didn’t understand why I had let this happen to her.

She didn’t have the understanding at this point for me to say “It will immunize you against disease.” She just understood that Dad and Mum, up till now, had never let me down.

The look on her face when the needle went in was horrid – a little girl who, for a brief moment, didn’t have any understanding on her face.

And it absolutely broke her daddy’s heart as he had to watch her in pain.

I believe that God’s heart is similarly broken here as He tells His people that He cannot stand with them during this crisis. Yes, His anger burns against their sin, but at the same time God is the most loving being in the universe. His love has NOT diminished in the slightest as He punishes.

Yet God understands as nobody else does that this suffering is NECESSARY for His people to be all that they can be.

Needless to say, all this is very difficult for Jeremiah. He breaks out of God’s messages for a bit, in verses 10 and 11, trying to express his feelings at what he has to say on God’s behalf. But then he too can see what God sees, and his anger is also aroused.

And verses 12 – 30 bring down judgement after judgement on the people of Israel.

So aside from this understanding of suffering, what else can we learn from this passage?

One thing we can learn from Jeremiah’s comments here is that when we bring God’s word to people, we can expect that it won’t necessarily thrill them.

Come to think of it, there are messages from God that won’t thrill us!

Much of what is seen to be normal in our world is against God’s laws. And whilst sometimes we can understand why that is, often we may feel like simply giving in and traveling with the stream.

We might even be desperate to do this.

Hold on, is what I can say. Do as Jeremiah did, hold your nerve and keep telling God’s truth. He’s going to make it right in the end. And this is no guarantee that everything will be easy; matter of fact, I can guarantee that it won’t. But you can be sure that if you keep doing what God means you to do, though you might make a few enemies, you will definitely have a friend in Him.

Chapter 5

There are three distinct sections in Jeremiah chapter 5. Each of them deserves to be tackled differently.

The first section goes from verses 1 – 9. This section is about God’s search for righteous people. And as it happens, the search is not going to reveal a great deal. God will search long and hard for ANYONE who will repent!

Let’s just make this clear – God is getting Jeremiah to verify in his own mind that the people of Israel aren’t interested in repenting. And just to make sure that the concept is crystal clear in Jeremiah’s mind, God uses the same imagery we saw a chapter or so back – the images of a wife breaking her vows.

Verses 10 – 25 then develop the theme further. This time Jeremiah is given the image of vines in a vineyard. He is told to give the vines a savage pruning. This is to represent God’s people, Israel (often represented by a vine), being invited to return to Him (few take Him up on this, but few actually go ahead with it).

Finally we have verses 26 – 31 telling us of how the wicked have infiltrated everywhere among His people. And we read of how they have horrified God – mostly by callous lack of concern for the poor.

I want to concentrate here on that first idea – a God who is seeking righteous people. People often have a go at God, saying that He isn’t being fair if so many people die without having the chance to acknowledge Him.

Well, here’s the answer. God wants them ALL to be saved. He’s desperate for them to be saved! He’ll do anything, up to and including traveling through the city looking for someone who does right!

Just to make this abundantly clear, we’re not talking about a God who is trying to do a “Gotcha”. Many of us (even Christians!) have the image of God as being there with a cosmic clipboard and whistle; watching us to find the inevitable moment when we slip up, and then gleefully calling us out, humiliating us in front of our friends and then (in extreme cases) dropping a piano on us[1]. To people with this mindset, God sets us going, knows exactly what we’re going to do, and derives pleasure from destroying us because of this.

However, there’s another way to look at it. God creates us with free will, and although He knows everything, He chooses to not control us in this way (though He certainly could). What He cares about is that we choose Him voluntarily. And in this passage we see this image of a God looking everywhere to find the person who WANTS to be with Him!
Yet sadly He is so often unable to find that person.

This can be an encouragement or a warning, depending on who we are and how we see it.

It could be terrifying if you happen to be one of those who has no interest in God, and no desire to do as He asks. To a person in this category, God is giving you abundant chances to come to Him, and sooner or later you get your last chance.

On the other hand, this gives us some encouragement if you happen to be one who struggles with God, who finds the commitment difficult, who asks awkward questions of Him.

To you, I can point out that this passage says that God is hunting for someone; and that someone is you. If anyone is going to show interest in Him, God wants to meet with that person and forgive them!

And just one last thing – I believe that this gives the final answer to the age old question, “What happens to those who have never heard?”

The answer is that God is seeking them. I don’t know how that works with missionary work – I am absolutely convinced that such work is of value – but I also know that God is both desperately seeking those who wish to know Him and also sovereign, over all circumstances and challenges.

So don’t worry about those who have never heard. God has things sorted out for them. Rather, worry about those who HAVE heard – specifically ourselves!



[1] Fans of the Far Side Unite!

Chapter 4

The term “Prophet of doom” gets bandied around a bit. It’s almost a figure of fun.

Well, that’s Jeremiah in this chapter. And I’m afraid I don’t find much humour in it at all.

In chapter 4, Jeremiah is having to speak exactly what God has given him to say, and he’s not liking it one bit. Well, neither would you if you were told that your city – that you love greatly – was to be destroyed because of its unfaithfulness.

Worse still if you could see God’s point, and Jeremiah can.

But as he writes, he sometimes inserts a little comment.

The first of these is found in verse 10 – Jeremiah accuses God of telling lies to Israel.

It’s important to note that God has done nothing of the kind. God doesn’t lie. The only “lie” here is the people lying to themselves, lulling themselves into a false sense of security. But God is quite willing to let Jeremiah say this anyway. He is emotionally tough, and He can take criticism from His creation!

Now, of course God isn’t likely to say “Yeah, that was wrong of me”. That’s not the point. The point is that Jeremiah has a close enough relationship with his Dad that he feels free to say things like this to Him.

It is sometimes hard to tell which bits are Jeremiah’s reaction and which bits are God’s reaction to what must happen. It’s clear that God does not want to bring suffering and pain to His people, but for some reason it must happen. In this case, it is said to be for God’s judgement.

This is disquieting to me, particularly today. For posterity, this blog was written about 48 hours after the massive Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and at the time of writing, we’re still not quite sure if a nuclear reactor is going to go into core melt. So this connects.

DOES God still send disasters for judgement?

If not, why doesn’t he do this now when once he did? Or, alternatively, Why DID he do this back then and not today?

I don’t really know. But there is a principle I believe we can apply to understand ANY such event.

It’s this: God is loving and kind – as Adrian Place likes to say, “God is NICE.”

Some people say that this cannot co-exist with the God who punishes. I say it can. All it requires is some reason that a perfectly loving God would see that this is the best possible option. If you like, a loving reason that some disaster may strike.

That sounds odd at best, right? But it’s not so weird if you think about it.

God understands us better than we do ourselves. It’s His world, and He understands better than we do what it means to cleanse a world of Sin.

Chapter 3

Jeremiah’s message from God in chapter 3 is quite shocking to read.

The brutal frankness with which God speaks is confronting. And when all is said and done, Christians remain (as they have been) somewhat ambivalent about sex. We don’t feel comfortable discussing it (and the world knows that to be one of our hang-ups, by the way!).

So when we read of how God sees Israel’s and Judah’s behaviour, we’re often a little stunned.

Sadly we’re not stunned at the actual behaviour. We’re stunned that God describes it so openly – that God uses the metaphor of sex to demonstrate His feelings about His peoples’ behaviour.

Isn’t it tragic – we’re repulsed by the words God uses, not so much by the activity it describes!

But that’s exactly how God sees it. Remember, the relationship between a man and his wife is INTENDED to reflect God’s relationship with humankind! The traditional marriage ceremony includes the line that Jesus “sanctified marriage by attending the marriage at Cana”. That always seemed a long bow to draw, especially when you look at all the other passages which use this image. Marriage isn’t holy because Jesus went to a wedding! Marriage is holy because IT IS AN IMAGE OF GOD AND US!

God extends the metaphor further. He talks of how he gave Israel her divorce papers, and hoped that Judah would observe and learn. Yet Judah continued to “walk the streets.”

Friends, to God it is shocking and repulsive when we choose sin instead of Him. It is vile, disgusting, distasteful, odious and dozens of other words, many of which are too archaic to make any sense to most of us.

Why are we not shocked when we see it?

Probably for the same reason that seeing malnourished African kids on TV no longer shocks us. It’s something we’ve become accustomed to, something we see all the time.

We lose sight of how we should see it.

God is also talking of how the clock can’t be turned back. Right now I am observing as a non-Christian friend deals with infidelity in his marriage. Both he and his wife are committed to sorting through the problems and getting back to where they once were.

That should settle it, right? Since they’re both wanting to get past this, surely they should just be able to forgive each other and move on, yes?

No, actually. He and another woman didn’t just have an “affair[1]”. They had sex. He went to someone who was not his wife and had sex with her. And if it is shocking to us, how much more shocking is it to his wife?

It will take time and effort – possibly years – for this marriage to be rebuilt. I hope they work things out, but there’s always the possibility that it won’t happen.

Sure, the desire to forgive and forget is an important part of the whole process, but that’s not the whole story. Trust has been lost, and trust must be re-built from the ground up, one painstaking brick at a time. And whatever is built cannot and will not be the same as what they had before. As Jeremiah says in verses 1 – 3,

“If a man's wife walks out on him and marries another man, can he take her back as if nothing had happened?”

That’s the bad news. But there’s good news to go with it.

God has planned what He’ll say to Israel/Judah when they return!

You know the Prodigal son? It’s not a new revelation of God’s personality. You can see here in this book that God always has the willingness to take back the prodigal!

It’s not a matter of letting things be like they were before. It’s a darn sight better than that. God is planning to make things NEW. He’s planning to build a new covenant, one which will leave the old one for dead – people will no longer say “Remember the good old days of the Ark of the Covenant?”, because the new covenant will be better.

I think my message for tonight is simply this – God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. We know that. But guess what – that means that today, just as back in Jeremiah’s day, God is willing to take back the repenting sinner! If it is you or me coming back to God, God is excited about it, just as He was for Israel and Judah!

Look at the language used here – you see God’s longing for a return. “Come back – I can heal your wanderlust!”

And there’s the promise that everything will be repaired.

This is actually a little bit of a holy moment for me, because without anyone else’s words, I can see that this is a prediction of Messiah’s coming. I don’t need any other commentary to tell me this. I feel that little prickle on the back of my spine, telling me of the presence of something supernatural.

Perhaps I’m going to need to get used to this feeling in Jeremiah.

[1] Isn’t it strange how we give such an innocuous name to such a horrifying betrayal of trust?

Chapter 2

It’s quite common today to run events where people can get to know the God of the Bible under the guise of a trial, in which God is called to answer for his alleged “crimes”. In these events, God is invariably exonerated (given that these are usually run by churches, that may well not be terribly surprising); but it is usually God who is facing the charges. God is in the dock, and witnesses are brought against Him.

More seriously, Christians very often struggle with the image of a judgemental God, a God who brings down judgement, punishment and disaster. We often ask if this is fair; if God actually has the right to judge in the way that He does.

Now, I am not going to speak against such things, because they are a necessary and healthy part of the process of understanding God. I even suggest that God probably approves very strongly of his people doing such things, especially if it allows us the chance to share the claims of Jesus Christ with people who are yet to know Him.

That said, we seldom consider the other side of the coin, and tonight that is what we are seeing.

Chapter 2 begins with the usual start for a chapter of prophecy – “The word of the Lord came to me . .” It would appear that the Word of the Lord would have also said “Thou shalt get comfy, and make sure that thou hast a pencil, for I have much I would discuss with thee for thee to pass on to my People Israel,” because this is a fairly generous chapter in its length.

As I often do, I implore you, dear reader, to not just read my analysis here, but to read this passage for yourself. Frankly I could write a dozen commentary articles on this chapter alone, and still have room for more. So take me up on this! And if you’re reading it on the blog, I want you to comment on anything you discover that is different from what I have written!

In verses 1-3 God describes how things were at the start (presumably in the times of the Patriarchs and the Exodus). The metaphor God uses is that of newlyweds, loyal and excited about their love.

Then in verses 4-19, God describes the problem – drifting away from God, the leaders and priests turning to one particular suitor, namely the ancient Canaanite lightning-god, Baal; and in verse 9 He serves notice that Judah is up on a charge – several counts of Neglect Loving God and Serve false Deity.

One objection that people often have to God’s judgement is when God says that he will hold a sinner’s children and grandchildren responsible for a person’s crimes. What is often missing is an understanding that each generation has the ability to turn! If the grandchildren’s generation repent of sin, then the curse is broken and the relationship with God restored. But here we see that the children and grandchildren did not repent. If anything, their responses range from apathy to even more flagrant activity.

In The Message, verses 20-28 are described under the heading “addicted to alien gods”. And indeed the language Petersen uses in paraphrasing these verses is very much related to the image of addiction. I like this way of looking at it. It helps you to see things from God’s perspective.

But God is far from finished. He then describes the way that the people of Judah have rejected His teaching and discipline, and that His worship has been lost to generations of His people.

Finally, verses 33 – 37 try to impress on the people the seriousness with which God regards their misbehaviour.

Well, we have a pretty catalogue of woe here. But before we simply get depressed and forget about it, how may we apply these verses?

It comes down to this – often we ask why God is so hard on sin. Can’t He go easy on a particular person, a specific sin? Must God be so ferocious?

When we do this we forget that God’s side of the situation is also relevant.

You see, sin is repulsive to God. Not merely unpleasant or distasteful, REPULSIVE. With hostile intent. Think about the most disgusting thing you can imagine (for me, oddly, it would be bananas; even worse would be rotting bananas, but the fresh ones are bad enough as far as I am concerned. Go figure). Now, with that thing in mind, recognise that the stench of sin (so to speak) is for God so utterly revolting that He needs the people of Judah to sacrifice to him – to [metaphorically] create a smell so strong that it drowns out the pervasive odour of sin.

Ultimately, it is going to take Christ’s own sacrifice to completely remove this stench and to create a way for us to relate to God directly.

Do we get the picture? Our sins are the worst thing God can imagine!

This puts our “charges” before God in a radically different light. It’s like a convicted murderer daring to jump out of the dock and saying to the judge “Hey, while we’re here, I don’t think much of the Speeding law.” We’re not in a position to make demands of God at all! We are convicted before our creator of crimes against Him that are too unspeakable to name, and we deserve great punishment. We deserve it for the choices of our forefathers that we chose not to repudiate[1] as well as for our own crimes.

This puts a different complexion on the matter. When we sin, we need to repent, and soon. Keeping short records with God, that’s the ticket.

[1] Just so everyone understands this – if there is known sin in your family, and you are able to understand the problem, then it’s a good idea to ask God’s forgiveness. But remember that the main complaint God has about generational sin is that someone winds up making the same choice.

Chapter 1

The first impression I get of Jeremiah is “hmm . . oddly specific.”

The first verse tells you that this message from the Lord went to “Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah of the family of priests who lived in Anathoth in the Country of Benjamin.” Now, if Jeremiah had been a better-known person, he might have been able to start with “Sup dudes, you got Jeremiah here.” Or even “I am Jeremiah, you may remember my Father Hilkiah”.

So right away, the fact that we have to use multiple layers of zooming in tells us that this Jeremiah is a nobody. He’s a regular guy.

Contrast this with the King, Josiah, who is also mentioned in the early part of the book. I think this may be deliberate – ensuring that you can see the difference between the boy who was born to rule (and in fact began to do so at the age of 8!) and the kid from the backward sticks of Benjamin.

Yet God is making it very clear from the beginning that HE was the one who created Jeremiah, and created him with plans.

Jeremiah protests – “Hold it, Master God! Look at me! I don’t know anything! I’m only a boy!”

God shoots right back that he’s NOT just a boy, he is God’s chosen person. God will Himself tell Jeremiah what to do. In a vision, God touches Jeremiah’s mouth, and declares that His words will flow from Jeremiah.

God doesn’t seem to be asking if Jeremiah WANTS to be a conduit for God’s words; he’s getting them, whether he wants them or not!

We then get a glimpse of Jeremiah’s first visions. They are:

• A walking stick. The message interprets this as “I’m sticking with you,” which is not only a terrible pun, it raises the question of whether or not this pun works in both Hebrew and English! More likely, though, it’s compensation for a different pun, one which I can’t check at the moment because, out here in the barbarian Bush, I can’t access any more versions than my Message dead tree edition!

• A boiling pot, tipped towards Judah/Benjamin. This one, at least, is fairly easy to understand; Judah will face enemies from the North, who will be overwhelming in size and skill. This is described as judgement for “walking out on” God, for courting other gods.

The last section of the book consists of God encouraging Jeremiah, outlining how God is going to take him and build him into a prophet par excellence; he will be prepared to stand his ground against kings and princes; When his enemies fight against him, he will be covered with armour and unscratchable.

So where does this have value for us today? After all, these particular prophecies don’t seem to apply to us right now. We can draw comparisons or extract general principle, perhaps; but the main thing that I can see immediately here is much simpler than that.

It is this: God will choose whom He will choose to do His work. Although we get to say “yes” or “no” to Him, we don’t choose whether or not the call comes to us. Just as Jeremiah was the person God picked, so we are each called to do certain things for Him.

Of course, we all have a call. The question is simply this – what is our particular call to do?

On the other hand, this is anything but a hopeless mission. Just as God grants Jeremiah all that he will need to perform his mission, so too God will grant us all we need to perform our own.

God grants us gifting appropriate to our mission. Take heart – if you don’t have the ability to do something (for example, public speaking), either you don’t need that skill to do whatever God asks of you, or God will grant you the ability and the desire to do it when the appropriate time comes.

Jeremiah was ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, he was, that we need a long list of his relations and his position in the clan just to avoid confusing him with all the other Jeremiahs around.

Yet once God takes a hand, Jeremiah becomes anything but ordinary. And once we accept God’s call, our ordinariness is subsumed beneath the Glory of God, and our lives reach the greatest greatness they can possibly reach when we totally submit our totally ordinary selves to Him.

Intro to Jeremiah

Jeremiah has three strikes against him before I even start reading.

1) It’s a book of prophecy. I like history books, where it’s a simple matter of facts (either you believe them or you don’t). Prophecy books are altogether too full of animals with four heads, flames coming from the north, dirty belts and bizarre personal behaviour dictated by God (see Ezekiel and Gomer). You’re supposed to interpret them somehow, and I have seen too many people interpret prophecy pretty much however they liked.

2) It’s in the Old Testament. I find the Old Testament hard to read at the best of times (here defined as “times in which I’m not reading a prophetic book”). God seems different to the way He appears in the New Testament (although, as I have noted in previous editions of Johno’s Commentary, these differences may well be exaggerated).

3) When all is said and done, our Jeremiah is a man with a reputation. They call him the “Weeping Prophet”. Sounds like this book is going to be a barrel of laughs.

Yet, as with Numbers (and as I discovered in no small measure!) God never does stuff for the Lulz, and there is a reason why He has allowed it to survive to this day.

A curious feature of Jeremiah is that I have read it before, yet I can remember very little of it. My childhood and young-adulthood readings of many books seem to have left much more lasting impressions than Jeremiah. So it’s very much time for me to take another look at this book. Despite my complaints and misgivings, I am under no illusions – One thing that this project has taught me is that God has placed meaning and value throughout His word, and if we ignore those parts we find difficult, WE are the ones who ultimately miss out.

So without further ado, let’s delve into chapter one and see what God has for us today in the book of Jeremiah.

Chapter 28

Note: From tomorrow night to Friday I shall be at camp, so I cannot guarantee the timely release of Johno’s Commentary. It will still be written, but it might not be able to be uploaded until I come home. My apologies if this is the case. Also, people who receive the Commentary via email will be receiving a digest of the three chapters on Friday evening. If email readers are simply PINING for their daily serve of borderline heretical ramblings on an obscure part of the Bible, they should feel free to check the blog and see if I’ve been able to upload.

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At the end of some movies, something happens that I’m sure must have a name if you’re a cinematographer or an English professor. I don’t know what you call it, but you see the hero doing something significant (for example, talking to a parent he hasn’t seen for ages, or working as a cop, or perhaps going back to the lifestyle he loved). As he does, the camera zooms out, showing the hero as smaller and smaller until he vanishes.

The idea of this image is to leave you thinking “This isn’t the end of the story. The hero went on and had more adventures after this.”

I think that’s the kind of ending I imagine to the book of Acts. Tradition tells us that Paul had a lot more living to do after his trial in Rome (which presumably had yet to occur when the book was first circulated); that he eventually traveled to Spain (and according to some accounts, as far North as Great Britain), and that eventually he was executed by the sword at the persecution of Nero. So the scenes recorded in chapter 28 are far from the end of the story.

Zoom out on a scene of Paul doing what he always does – preaching the Gospel.

But how did he get here? Time to skip the disc back to the start of the chapter.

As we saw yesterday, Paul came ashore (with his other bedraggled shipmates) on Malta. It turns out that the local people are friendly and intelligent, and they look after Paul like royalty. They also have a well-developed sense of justice, hence their assumption that Paul was on the run when a snake bit him!

However, Paul impresses them here. Mostly by not dying, if truth be told. And instead of a murderer on the run (their idea when they saw a snake happily chomping onto his arm), they now think of Paul as a god.

Fortunately for Paul and his comrades (given how quickly things go bad when someone thinks you’re divine – see chapter 14! – there is someone on this island with a little more objectivity, who takes Paul into his home. Perhaps Paul damages the credibility of his claim to be no more than a man when he manages to heal their host’s father (as well as basically anyone who visits), so eventually Paul is being mobbed by the sick and demon-possessed.

After three months, the gang all manage to find a ship going to Rome. This time it’s an Egyptian vessel with the figurehead of the “Gemini” constellation. It would appear that the trip to Rome takes relatively little time. On arrival, Paul is permitted to live under house arrest again, and gets talking about the Gospel again. Zoom out and fade audio.

So where does this chapter find us?

We have seen what God does with a person when that person (even reluctantly) makes himself available to God. Acts is really mostly Paul’s story, and we see how he goes from a self-righteous thug to a powerful and innovative (not to mention peaceful, unless you’re on the receiving ends of one of his tirades!) missionary speaker, bringing much of his skill to be used by Christ instead of against Him (to be fair, he can still be a bit self-righteous!).

It’s also the story of the other apostles, as they receive the Holy Spirit and change from the bumbling fools they were for most of the Gospels to the powerful, wise and passionate leaders that History remembers them to be.

Finally, Acts is the story of God’s people as a whole – a church, existing out on the edge long before it was cool to do so. A church which, in the first flowering of its youth, went through the most explosive growth imaginable in the most appalling of circumstances, simply because they went out in the power of the Spirit, not imagining they could ever fail.

I wonder what the characters in this drama would have said if you could some how lift them out of their time and into ours? Would they shake their heads at the way we are now, silently willing us to lift our game and return to our previous excitement? Or would they say “Glory to God!! The Church will survive!”?

I don’t know. I DO know that the book of Acts has inspired me to be a better leader, better Christian and better follower than I was before, and to return to my old life more willing to share the Gospel.

Maybe if that’s the result, Paul would feel that he’s succeeded.

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Next time: Introduction to the book of JEREMIAH.

Chapter 27

Note 1: The poll for the next book of Johno’s Commentary is closed. The winner is . . Jeremiah!!!!![1]

Note 2: From Wednesday night to Friday I shall be at camp, so I cannot guarantee the timely release of Johno’s Commentary. It will still be written, but it might not be able to be uploaded until I come home. My apologies if this is the case. Also, people who receive the Commentary via email will be receiving a digest of the three chapters on Friday evening. If email readers are simply PINING for their daily serve of borderline heretical ramblings on an obscure part of the Bible, they should feel free to check the blog and see if I’ve been able to upload.

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So Paul heads off to Rome. Just him, Luke . .

. . . And 274 of his closest friends!

No, really, there were a lot of people on the ship. And sailing at this time of history was a chancy business, as we find out in this passage. I note that there is a certain depth at which a ship is at risk. Right in close to harbour, the ship is fine; out on the open sea, no problem. But I can see that the sailors get worried when the depth is about 90 – 120 feet. There’s probably a metaphor in that somewhere.

In any case, some things never change. The ship has a good place to winter (Crete), but they’re running behind time, and the crew of the ship (as well as Paul’s gaoler) decide to take a chance and go a little farther.

That’s an EPIC FAIL there for you.

Paul gives them a prophecy that the ship will be wrecked if they head out when they do, but they do so anyway, and so begins perhaps one of the more bizarre chapters of maritime history. Note this – once things are looking bad aboard the ship, people don’t seem to look to the Captain or the Centurion for leadership; it’s all Paul. Even the Centurion seems to be obeying Paul’s instructions, even when they are a little unusual (for example, in verses 30 – 32 where a group of sailors try to sneak off, Paul says they need to stay aboard. Why God says this, who knows; but anyway, the Centurion believes Paul, so the soldiers cut the ropes the sailors are pulling, which turn out to be connected to a boat. One would guess they were a little upset about this development).

It is Paul who encourages everyone to not despair, and Paul who ensures everyone has a good bellyful of food before the grain gets thrown overboard to lighten the ship.

It’s also worth mentioning that this charisma that can be seen in Paul is enough that the gaoler wants to save his life, so he has to prevent his men executing the prisoners (which, given that an escaped prisoner would cost his guards their lives, was a fairly sensible thing for them to do). In so doing, they manage to struggle ashore on what they will learn next chapter to be the island of Malta.

So, in our second last chapter of Acts, what can we learn?

A simple lesson this time, but an important one. You notice that the crew of the ship didn’t do what God (through Paul) told them.

Since they had disobeyed, it would be reasonable for them to be destroyed. After all, they were given a chance; God doesn’t have to rescue people who don’t want to be rescued. Even people who struggle with God’s anger can generally accept that.

But here we have something else entering the scheme – God has a plan, and that plan requires Paul to be brought to Rome. His plan for Paul is too important to be screwed up by bad decisions. So God works out a way for all those on the ship to be saved.

We see this pattern time and time again in scripture. We see how God’s plans cannot be frustrated. Even when things go wrong – badly wrong, like this; a shipwreck would rank pretty highly on the “that’s not good” scale – God’s plan cannot be thwarted by people, no matter how hard they try.

To me, this is one of the most encouraging features of my walk with God.

I say this because I am imperfect. Boy, am I EVER! I seldom have a day when I get everything right. And sometimes I get cross with myself and beat myself up over it.

But you know what? If I’m part of God’s plan (and I believe that I am), then the plan ISN’T going to be thwarted. It’s impossible. It’s God’s plan, and it’s going to come to pass. “No power of Hell, no scheme of man”, as the song says.

Even if I get shipwrecked, God will make sure that I wash ashore on Malta (so to speak). And He will even ensure that everyone else gets ashore as well.


[1] 5 exclamation marks – the sure sign of an unsound mind . . . .

Chapter 26

NOTE: The poll to select the next book of Johno’s Commentary closes tonight! Go to the blog at http://johnoscommentary.blogspot.org to vote!

It’s hard to know what Agrippa and Festus are thinking when they confer together at the end of this chapter.

We know that neither of them believe that Paul deserves to be imprisoned. In fact, Agrippa goes as far as suggesting that, had he not appealed to Caesar (and therefore booked himself a trial in Rome), Paul may have been released.

It is possible that Paul may not have seen a release at this point as a positive. Some historians suggest that Paul was on bad terms with some of the leadership of the Jerusalem church, and even if this is not true, the fact remains that he had already decided that he wanted to go and preach the Gospel in Rome; the fact that he was to be tried before Caesar would give him an excellent opportunity to do so.

In any case, this chapter finds Paul repeating his story before Agrippa (and his . . consort, Berenice – since she was his sister, the relationship between the two appears frankly a little disturbing!) and Festus.

Once again we have the opportunity to read Paul’s story, but this time told to a non-Jew (Festus) and a person who was theoretically Jewish (Agrippa) but embraced little or none of his Jewish heritage. As you can see therefore, Paul’s testimony here differs in its audience.

Much of what Paul says you have heard before, so I shall not concentrate on these statements. Rather, I shall concentrate on the last few words of the chapter.

Bear in mind that Paul is actually on trial here. So it’s quite amazing to see him take the opportunity to preach the Gospel to his judges! Festus can see what is happening, and he declares Paul to be insane, although in the process he confirms our suspicions that Paul is a very clever man – “Your great learning has driven you insane”. But Paul denies this, suggesting that Agrippa is in fact a believer in the statements of the prophets.

(By the way, in doing this, Paul cleverly puts Agrippa in a difficult situation. He’s the legally appointed king, representing Rome in a place where Romans are unpopular. He’s also considered by many to be a pretender to the throne, with little or no legitimate authority. So if he is caught saying that he DOESN’T believe in the scriptures, it puts him up the creek without a paddle. Perhaps this is why you can almost hear a cheeky grin in Paul’s “I know you believe!” call. It also explains why Agrippa throws back the “do you think you’re going to make me a believer?!” exchange.)

In any case, whether the judges question Paul’s sanity and methods or not, it’s fairly clear to them that the accusations against Paul are at best incorrect, and at worst downright vexatious.

So what can we learn from this passage?

We’ve talked before about the Christian’s responsibility to speak to others about God. Here Paul puts it into action. I doubt you could find a worse scenario in which to minister than when you are on trial for your life. But when Paul was in that situation, sure enough he shared the Gospel!

I am not saying that next time you’re in a bad situation, you should hand out Bibles and start preaching. What I AM saying is to consider this – is your situation so bad that Paul couldn’t have preached the Gospel in your shoes?

I personally find this challenging. Generally speaking I (and remember I am rather bold!) would be intimidated by circumstances like these. But Paul chooses not to let the circumstances win.

Let’s apply this to our own situations. What would stop you preaching the Gospel? Would it be fear (as it often is)? If so, what fear is stopping you?

Chapter 25

This chapter is a rich one in politics. I find it a really interesting read, with a lot of interest and suspense.

Curiously, then, I find it hard to write about.

This isn’t because of any deep mysteries; simply because the chapter is mostly a matter of narrative; and what it is narrating is mostly stuff we’ve seen before (namely the to-ing and fro-ing of Paul and the legal eagles of the Jews).

There is, however, one rather important incident that deserves some attention.

Paul’s appeal to Caesar, in verse 11.

This is rather a desperate gambit. Paul is facing off against Jews, people whose beliefs he knows backwards. He’s in the local court, and his connections with the Sanhedrin (or ruling council) would have been quite usefull.

It says a lot that even with all these things Paul STILL chose to go to Rome, and argue his case before the Emperor.

It’s a gamble, and a dangerous one. Paul has no idea as to whether Caesar likes Christians or not, or whether he sees Paul’s position as tenable or not.

At times Rome has already seen persecution of Christians. What is Paul’s game here?

I hate to break it to you, but I suspect Paul was a little crazy about his mission.

Okay, maybe a LOT crazy. But still . . .

He wanted to go to Rome for missionary work. He believed that God was calling him to go there. He saw this as a way he could do it.

I wonder how many of us would be willing to risk like Paul did here? Would we see this as an opportunity to go the place we were desperate to go? Are we as bold as him?

I think not.

So the challenge for today is to think of situations in which boldness is required during this week, and then GO for it.

Let’s start with one just to whet your appetite. How many people have you shared the Gospel with this week?

Chapter 24

Chapter 24 is longer than many other chapters in Acts.

I don’t mean that it contains more words. I mean that it covers a period of about 2 years!

In the process of what must have been an incredibly frustrating part of Paul’s life, though, we get to read yet another amazing defence of himself and his faith. Let’s get into it.

Verses 1 – 9 outline the charges against Paul, brought by the well-known lawyer Tertullus. I suppose many people at the time would have looked at him and thought “You have no chance” given the legal talent arrayed against him.

But this is Paul. Remember, we’re talking about the guy who trash-talked the High Priest when the same slapped him in the face! And he isn’t going to be incarcerated by some legal hack, not our Paul!

So in verses 10 – 21, Paul stands up and gives his defence. This one concentrates firmly upon the resurrection.

Verses 24 – 27 outline the irritating two years to follow, in which the governor (Felix) continually questioned Paul, without actually making any decisions on Paul’s future. This was to last until Felix was replaced with Festus. The passage hints that the governor’s motive was an attempt to extract a bribe from Paul; if so, he obviously failed at that! Finally we read of the Governor’s time eventually ending as he is replaced with the (rather more talented) Festus.

So how do we behave differently having read this passage?

My own answer is this: as Christians we are going to deal with some times that are frustrating. God promises to answer our prayers, but he makes no promises about how fast He will be. In fact, God is often slow to answer by human standards, even though He always answers at just the right time.

It doesn’t matter, though, whether He answers quickly or slowly, we’re still called to do as He asks.

And really, it’s not like we’re often going to face imprisonment (even for one day) for matters of faith. Paul, by contrast, had to spend 2 entire years in prison!

So when we are in the dark pit that’s not of our own making, we need to be patient and wait on God. And if worst comes to worst we should remember that Paul didn’t crack in two years.

Chapter 23

NOTE: I had an internet issue last night and couldn't upload today's episode until this morning. Sorry!

I once referred to Paul’s ability to make enemies. He’s a craftsman.

You want proof? Check out Acts 23:1-3!

Paul is so completely unafraid of the High Priest that he tells the Priest off for daring to slap him! How’s that for boldness?

In fact this chapter is quite an enjoyable read, because Paul really cuts loose. He’s taking the approach of “no more Mr Nice Guy”.

Not content to give the High Priest a spray (complete with sarcastic follow-up – ‘Really? That stuffed shirt is the High Priest? Go on . .”), Paul recognizes the composition of the crowd, and throws an inflammatory subject into the midst.

Now, an image from today might help us to understand what is going on here.

The crowd seems to be composed of Pharisees – staunch believers in miracles, prophecy and the Resurrection – and Saducees, who didn’t believe in miracles etc.

Paul understands this (the Saducees are currently in the ascendancy) so he stirs up the fight by simply referring to the most contentious issue – the resurrection!

To avoid a bloodbath, Paul gets them so busy fighting each other that they have no energy reserves for fighting him!

The cops pull them away as a near-riot breaks out. I can imagine that the Centurion wouldn’t have been pleased.

Things are getting a little heated, though. Paul’s nephew gets a message to him that he’s in danger. It must be a credible threat because Paul passes it on to the soldiers, who immediately send him to Caesarea by another route, guarded by a whole maniple of troops. He wants this man to get there alive, to go before Felix.

Can we learn something from this?

I believe so.

Paul’s defence at the beginning, stirring up the Pharisees, is frankly impressive. And one of the impressive things about it is that Paul doesn’t seem to mind that he is making things harder for himself. He understands that this is going to lead to a riot; he just doesn’t care.

Paul, in short, is more concerned that the message gets out to all rather than consolidating his position. He’d rather cause a riot in the cause of Christ than be safe. He could water down the message, but he’s not going to do that.

I wonder if the same could be said for each of us. Would we rather tell the truth? Or would we settle for a cut down message?