Jeremiah 35 vs 13-15 is such a beautiful piece of Holy Scripture. I love how God uses practical life situations to show us the stupidity of our arguments that we use to justify our rebellion against God.
Here, Jeremiah 35 vs 13-15, God is highlighting how people follow their ancestors (cultures, social influence, families, positional requirements) teaching, that benefits them, but easily disobey THEE ONLY LIVING GOD.
Why do we do that?
There are a few reasons….
1) We tend to self-preserve, at any cost, that which upholds status and ego.
God tells us that He opposes the proud. By proxy, God isn’t taken in by our human attachment to position, but decidedly watches HOW we function within positions of leadership. We, in our stubborn arrogance, and having not done our homework by working on our attitudes, motives, and desires, want to be validated by position, rather than use character submitted to God’s Authority to direct the position.
The South African government is a perfect picture of status driven positional leadership with little character.
2) We imagine that our position makes us close to God, so we spiritualise our dysfunction by performing duties (not drinking as in this example) to APPEAR holy. We put on a form of godliness. The way to test motive here is, “If God asked you to give up your position and become a low-paid laborer for His Plan, could you?”
If we are attached to position above God’s Purpose, guess what?
3) We don’t like the message from the messengers as it offends us, upsets us, and humbles us. So often, we disregard the message because the messenger doesn’t placate our egos. We do so to our detriment.
4) We refuse to believe in God, even though we know we are lying to ourselves. The root cause of our lying and denial of God’s Existence is so that we can comfortably imagine we are not accountable for our choices within the framework God gave us, “dominion over the living creatures on earth.”
Sorry, folks, those of ya’ll that put-it-into-the-universe-types, the universe declares GOD’S GLORY, our power-space is limited to living things on earth. #justsaying.
HOW RUDELY HUMBLING.
5) WE LOVE EVIL. If we didn’t we would give it up the first time God told us to. We are quite literally addicted to evil and the suffering it brings.
6) We are lazy. We want to be stuck in our ‘devils-we-know’ mentality because we are good in that. Doing what God calls RIGHT means doing what is unfamiliar to us which brings up our insecurities and internalized self-hatred.
BUT, HOW COOL OF GOD THAT IN OUR DOING WHAT’S RIGHT WE LEARN WHO HE SAYS WE ARE WHICH BRINGS JOY AND TRUE SELF-CARE.
7) We are addicted to romanticized superstitious imaginings of “god”. We want to have a belief that feels and seems right. This speaks to our internal god-complex. Rather than facing the discipline from THEE REAL AND ONLY LIVING GOD, and growing in our discomfort we play turtle-in-the-shell romanticized “god”.
CHOOSE JESUS, you are utterly wrong about everything else you call a god.
8) Non-belief in THEE LIVING GOD OF THE HOLY BIBLE brings no peace. This means there is a level of settling for second-best that we fathom as suitable.
A quote says, “People didn’t want the truth. They settled for the beautiful lie.”
IF GOD TELLS US THAT PAGAN (all beliefs other than Jesus) doesn’t lead to peace then we must look around in our world and ask, “Why after all these years of claiming that we want peace, are we not exploring THEE LIVING GOD who says He is the peace-maker?”
Perhaps, we must confess that we like the financial opportunities lack of peace creates?
9) Our god-complex doesn’t want to obey God because we then must admit that the world isn’t about us.
Oopsie daisy, we can’t have that now, can we?
10) We like being rebels with our delusions of causes. We are addicted to feel-good hormones of Self-Righteousness as they help us avoid the monsters we are within.
Jeremiah 34 vs 13-15 is so loaded that staring at ourselves in its mirror is hard.
BUT…… notice the overarching theme- GOD LOVES US SO MUCH THAT HE PUTS UP WITH THE HEADACHES WE GIVE HIM, BY REPEATEDLY BEGGING US TO JUST LISTEN TO HIM SO THAT HE CAN HELP US.
JESUS DIGS US.
Have a blessed week, and earnestly, with ALL your heart speak to Jesus. He is always open to fix our messy business.
💙
#Hayibo 