2002-01-01
Good Morning Faithful Ones,
The Lord bids me to continue sharing the citations that reveal Him as Jehovah Tsidkenu, the Lord our Righteousness. You will remember that the Lord had commanded and commissioned Jeremiah to put his faith on the line and deliver a very unpopular message calling the increasingly sinful people to righteousness. The Lord’s angst is revealed in JER 17: 9-10, “Who can understand the human heart? There is nothing else so deceitful; it is too sick to be healed. I, the Lord, search the minds and test the hearts of men. I treat each one according to the way he lives, according to what he does.” It doesn’t hurt for us to read a passage such as this, because it allows us to have a view into the heart of God. If we understand that He feels pain when we sin, we might think twice before we make it a lifestyle. Imagine how He felt when His chosen people ignored him and He realized that forcing them into dyaspora was His only choice to get their attention! As you know the northern kingdom of Israel was scattered in the Assyrian Captivity for 160 years, and the southern kingdom of Judah, in which Jeremiah lived, was in Babylonian Captivity for 70 years.
The story of Jeremiah at the Potter’s House is enormously revealing of the conflict that occurs at times between God’s sovereignty and mankind’s all-too-often sinful response to it. JER 18: 1-6, “The Lord said to me [Jeremiah], ‘Go down to the potter’s house, where I will give you My message.’ So I went there and saw the potter working at his wheel. Whenever a piece of pottery turned out imperfectly, he would take the clay and make it into something else. Then the Lord said to me, ‘Do I not have the right to do with you people of Israel what the potter did with the clay? You are in My hands just like the clay in the potter’s hands.” I notice that Jehovah Tsidkenu uses the name “Israel” and not “Judah.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that He is not pleased at the political division of Israel into two kingdoms at the time. The use of the name “Israel” can be construed to mean that God has no intention of allowing His children to remain as a divided nation. There is also the statement inherent in this question of His own sovereignty. God is not asking permission to be sovereign here; He is reminding His children through Jeremiah that He is sovereign!
God’s statement is further illuminated and He makes His will plain in JER 18: 7-12. “If at any time I say that I am going to uproot, break down, or destroy any nation or kingdom, but then that nation turns from its evil, I will not do what I said I would. On the other hand, if I say that I am going to plant or build up any nation or kingdom, but then that nation disobeys Me and does evil, I will not do what I said I would. Now then, tell the people of Judah and of Jerusalem that I am making plans against them and getting ready to punish them. Tell them to stop living sinful lives-to change their ways and the things they are doing. They will answer, ‘No, why should we? We will all be just as stubborn and evil as we want to be.’” God wanted them (and us) to know that He really is the Potter, and we really are the clay! He really does have to put a limit on how much sin He will tolerate, or He cannot demonstrate His righteousness [RO 3: 26].
The people of Jeremiah’s time had no excuse for continuing in their sinfulness. They had knowledge of Jehovah Tsidkenu’s history of keeping His promises, and they had the Law to show them the difference between right and wrong [RO 7: 7]. Just look at GN 15: 13-16 to see what I mean. “The Lord said to him [Abram], ‘Your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land; they will be slaves there and will be treated cruelly for four hundred years. But I will punish the nation that enslaves them, and when they leave that foreign land, they will take great wealth with them. You yourself will live to a ripe old age, die in peace, and be buried. It will be four generations before your descendants come back here, because I will not drive out the Ammorites until they become so wicked that they must be punished.” We have even more hindsight from mankind’s history of interacting with God than the people of Jeremiah’s time, which gives us even less excuse for sinning than they had. One passage in Matthew, MT 11: 20-24, comes to mind. It is the one where Christ is rebuking the towns of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum telling them that they will be shown less mercy than Tyre and Sidon (in their past) will be on Judgment Day, because these past towns had less exposure to God’s ways from the hindsight of history.
I would wish that I could always write an uplifting devotion. It is painful to be thrust into the reality of sins we may be committing. But, I know that Jehovah Tsidkenu is leading me to say these things, because He knows that for us to benefit from the love He has for us, we must face these issues squarely. If it isn’t apparent now, I promise God’s wisdom and His profound love for us will be apparent before He is finished having me discuss Him as Jehovah Tsidkenu. I urge you to persist in reading all these messages, and feel it will be worth our time. God inspired the author [who I think is Paul] of the book of Hebrews to say in HE 3: 12, “My fellow believers, be careful that no one among you has a heart so evil and unbelieving that he will turn away from the living God.” We do live in a world that is full of trials and temptations. The more I hear about the aftermath of our former president’s pardons, the more I realize just how high in our very own government sinfulness has been pervasive. Congregations that are paralyzed by divisive politics, families that are breaking down due to unfaithfulness, towns not far away amidst horrific spiritual warfare, schools which are forced to exclude any mention of our Lord and His Son-all of these and more are the reasons why we must work to expunge sin from our lives.
PRAYER: O Lord, You are indeed supreme and sovereign! We frequently forget that and put our own human agendas in front of Yours. How foolish that is! When we have faith, we can take comfort in knowing that You, our Lord Who is perfectly righteous all of the time, are our Potter, and we are Your clay. It is only when we are being sinful that we are uncomfortable about this. You must feel such pain, when You see us trying to usurp Your sovereign right to govern our lives. When You see spouses being unfaithful, unmarried people living together in uncommitted relationships, political wrangling in Your congregations, Your name and teaching excluded from public schools, shady dealing in businesses, greed, evil agendas being carried out in our towns, abortions being performed, and all the other evils of our modern society, mankind brings You pain You do not deserve. You warn us by bringing us stories of the same sort of sinfulness and the consequences it brought to people in the past in the Scriptures. By doing this, You demonstrate You truly are Jehovah Tsidkenu, the Lord our Righteousness. We must face the pain of any sin we commit, so that we give You the opportunity to show us the depth of Your love. We humbly come before You today to dedicate ourselves to expunging sin in our lives and beseech You to show us Your mercy. You deserve nothing less than our adoration, worship, trust, obedience, loyalty, honor, glory, praise and thanks. We offer these things in Christ’s name, amen.
The sinfulness of mankind is nothing new. Neither is Jehovah Tsidkenu’s patience and compassion. While we are reminded that God has put limits on how much He will endure from us, we, who are living “in Christ” can take comfort in knowing there will be a time, sooner than we think, when evil will be defeated once and for all. That He sent His Son to do the work of the cross and gave us the Holy Spirit is ample demonstration that our Jehovah Tsidkenu loves us. Tomorrow, we will look at more revealing citations that further the topic at hand. Peter and I send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn