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.