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.