Daily Lesson for March 30, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Jeremiah chapter 11 verses 14 through 17:

14 As for you, do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer on their behalf, for I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their trouble. 15What right has my beloved in my house, when she has done vile deeds? Can vows and sacrificial flesh avert your doom? Can you then exult? 16The Lord once called you, ‘A green olive tree, fair with goodly fruit’; but with the roar of a great tempest he will set fire to it, and its branches will be consumed. 17The Lord of hosts, who planted you, has pronounced evil against you, because of the evil that the house of Israel and the house of Judah have done, provoking me to anger by making offerings to Baal.”

Paul D’Arcy says, “God comes to us disguised as our life.”

I remember those words every time I read harsh words of judgement in Scripture.

We don’t like judgment and preaching judgment seems old fashioned — something from another century. But we can’t preach the prophets without preaching judgment; nor can we preach Jesus either.

God comes to us.  Sometimes God comes with judgment. One way to look at this is as what we call divine retribution.  But God is not vindictive. God does not mete out punishment for the sake of punishment. God’s judgment is for the sake of justice, rehabilitation, and the re- and right ordering of the world. In other words, it’s for our own good. 

H. Richard Niebuhr said of early 20th century liberal Christianity’s basic theology: 

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

It was Niebuhr’s understanding that this kind of judgment-less was what ended in the rise of Nazi Germany’s pagan quasi-Christianity. The fallout was destruction. Judgment came.

God comes to us disguised as our lives. Sometimes our lives need judgment. Most times that means the garden needs pruning. But sometimes it needs razing altogether. 

The Prophet Jeremiah prophesied such a time.  It was a hard word many did not want to hear. But it was the word the people truly needed to hear. 

God was coming in the form of Israel’s judgment. The old world would have to pass away.  

But, behold, the new would come also.