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.