Jeremiah
has a stark message for those who have abandoned God. The shortcomings of
Jeremiah’s intended audience may seem enormous to us, but in many ways our
collective and personal failures are similar. Our societies may not be
literally idolatrous, but they have lost sight of God. Collectively, we have
allowed extreme injustice and inequality to spread and the environment to be
compromised. At the personal level, and in countless ways, we are not the
people that God wants us to be. Jeremiah expresses vividly the consequences of
these shortcomings. The calamities that befall the Israelites do not come about
because of the actions of a supposedly vengeful God (which is how non-believers
commonly imagine the God of the Old Testament), but as inevitable consequences
of these serious shortcomings. The people whom God has called to follow Him
have turned their backs on him, and as a result stand to lose not only their
land and their freedom, but their very identity ‘in a land you do not know’.
However,
as Christians, we know that the single glimmer of hope that Jeremiah alludes to
in this passage, ‘Lord, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in time of
distress’, is true. We know that God always seeks to find his people again, and
we know about his redeeming love for us. If we can turn our faces towards God
and respond to this redeeming love, and if we allow our actions and our
engagement with the world to be inspired by that love, we will surely find the
abundance of life that God promises.
Nicholas
Deliyanakis
A Mighty Fortress is Our God
By Kuehl, Gotthardt, 1850-1915.
From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity
Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55770 [retrieved
March 1, 2019]. Original source:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gotthardt_Kuehl_Ein_feste_Burg_ist_unser_Gott_crop balance.jpg.
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