ESOCS Devotional 8 April 2024 – Obed God
MEMORY VERSE: “But I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in obedience to all I command you, that it may go well with you.”Jeremiah 7:23
TEXT: JEREMIAH 7:21-28
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat meat. 22 For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices. 23 But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be My people. And walk in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well with you.’ 24 Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but followed the counsels and the dictates of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward. 25 Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have even sent to you all My servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them. 26 Yet they did not obey Me or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck. They did worse than their fathers.
27 “Therefore you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not obey you. You shall also call to them, but they will not answer you.
28 “So you shall say to them, ‘This is a nation that does not obey the voice of the Lord their God nor receive correction. Truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.
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You have likely heard the old saying about getting a taste of your own medicine. It means having something done to you that you do to others. We see a good example of this in Jeremiah 7:21-28. God was disgusted with the Israelites. They had provoked Him to anger. Now they would get a little taste of what it felt like to be provoked. Enemies would come upon them. They were no longer to be the object of Jeremiah’s cries or of his prayers. The protective covering that they had was removed because even the ordinary things of life were contaminated by idolatry. The people were still very religious outwardly, but Jeremiah told them that they were being hypocritical. Several times Jeremiah said that they refused to listen to God. They practised what is called “syncretism,” which is the combination of what otherwise would be two or more distinct religions. We are the same. We claim to believe in God, but often we act as if everything depended on us, our efforts, and wisdom, our ability to keep all the little planets of our concerns in perfect orbit around the great blazing sun of our inner control freak.
One of the greatest problems of our time is our isolation from one another and from God. We don’t want to ask for help, and we are afraid of being thought of as being “needy.” Some of us will walk in our own counsel right off a cliff, rather than show our vulnerability to another human being, or turn to God in prayer. Jeremiah would agree with that assessment. The world tells us to follow ourselves and trust ourselves, but God tells us that if we do that we will go backwards and not forward. We are just as God made us, and that includes being needy. God made us fit together. We are interlocking parts that hold Creation together. He wants the best for us, but like the Israelites, sometimes, we do not listen, even if we have heard the voices of the prophets, the disciples, God, and Jesus.
The key to Scripture is obedience to God. The Israelites did not want to hear that one day they would have to pay for their sin. They were stubborn. Today, we don’t want to hear that there will be a day of reckoning. We do not want God to have any deadlines. We want to continue saying “we are delivered” even when our ways are horrible mockeries of God’s ways. When God told Jeremiah to stop praying, His voice was heard only in the confines of Jeremiah’s heart. The voice of gladness, the sounds of mirth and celebration that God had intended their life to be, would be cut off. Jeremiah cut his hair and sat in the high place that should have been filled with wonder.
- God’s only demand from us is to obey His voice. How well have you complied with obeying Him?
- Lord, I pray for the grace and wisdom to live my life by your word and according to your will.
Further Reading: 1 Samuel 15:12-23; Matthew 18:1-20; Galatians 5:13-end
ESOCS Devotional 8 April 2024
