Today's Reading - Jeremiah 13-17
Background
Jeremiah's greatest battles were not with the sinful people of Judah but with complacent people who had been lulled by false prophets into an assurance that God would never judge them. In today's reading, he targets these false prophets.
Devotional - False Prophets Preaching Comfort
In the Garden, Satan challenged the Word of God and claimed that God was not speaking the truth. God had said that on the day that they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would surely die. "You shall not die," the Serpent countered. God won't really judge you. Your sin will not have consequences.
He has been telling the same lie ever since. "A God of love wouldn't judge people." "God made you just like you are - he won't be angry is you just do what makes you happy." We hear it all the time. It has become a mantra of progressive evangelicalism today - deemphasizing sin and denying that God will judge sin.
Jeremiah observed the same thing among the false prophets of Judah in the days before the destruction of the Temple, in Jeremiah 14:13-14.
Oh no, Lord God! The prophets are telling them, ‘You won’t see sword or suffer famine. I will certainly give you true peace in this place.’”But the Lord said to me, “These prophets are prophesying a lie in My name. I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a false vision, worthless divination, the deceit of their own minds.
To curry favor with their hearers, the false prophets denied the coming judgment of God. They created their own fantasy version of God that had no basis in the true revelation of God. It is the most common critique that the true prophets give of the false prophets in the Old Testament era. While God was warning his people of the consequences of their sin and calling them to repent, the false prophets were comforting God's people that all would be well no matter how they lived.
No proclaimer of God's truth enjoys preaching judgment and condemnation, but if one is loyal to the word of God, it is unavoidable. God is holy and sin is an offense against his nature. It must be punished - the wages of sin is death. Every sin we commit carries with it the eternal death penalty that God promised in the Garden.
Is God mean? Angry? Spiteful? No! But his holiness is undeniable. and it is this foundation upon which God's love is most clearly seen. Jesus died to pay the price that we owed God. Without a proper understanding of God's wrath the crucifixion of Christ loses meaning. God demonstrated his love for us by sending his Son to pay the price his holiness demanded for our sins.
False prophets ignore this. They preach an empty salvation without judgment or repentance. They preach God's love without providing the background of God's holy wrath as the Bible does. They excuse sin. They affirm our natural condition without calling us to repent of our sins.
False prophets have not changed much since the first one seduced the first humans. Still they proclaim a message of love without standards, of salvation without repentance, of a grace that ignores sin instead of overcoming it, of the absence of wrath and judgment instead of the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
Father, my sin is real. I thank you that Jesus did not ignore my sin, but he defeated it.
Think and Pray
Do you read and study the Bible for its full truth or do you simply take that which you want to hear?
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