Readings for today: Jeremiah 17-20
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
One cannot help but look at the history of humanity and be troubled. We are - by nature - a violent, greedy, selfish people. Ever since the fall of humanity from grace in the Garden of Eden, we have been at war. Alienated from God. Alienated from ourselves. Alienated from one another. Alienated from creation itself. It’s why we have so many problems. It’s why - no matter how hard we try - we never seem to make the progress our souls desire. Utopia seems forever beyond our grasp. Justice and righteousness forever slipping through our fingers. The Kingdom of God always just beyond the horizon.
Jeremiah looks around and the diagnosis seems clear. Humanity is desperately sick. We are all infected with a deadly disease. It’s a heart condition. One that cripples us from conception. One that corrupts us from birth. One that keeps us from becoming the people we were created to be by God. Our hearts are deceitful. We lie to God. We lie to ourselves. We lie to those around us. We simply cannot and will not face up to our true condition. We are broken beyond repair. We are totally depraved. We are sinful creatures through and through. God says, “I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” (Jeremiah 17:10) It’s why every single one of us will eventually die. It’s God’s righteous judgment on our sin. It is the penalty we pay for our crimes. No one escapes.
Jeremiah’s words still ring true today. Think about all we are going through in our nation. Political division. Ethnic tension. Economic instability. Global pandemic. A culture of outrage and hate fostered by political leaders and furthered by a complicit media. And yet, the answers they offer only promise to treat the symptoms not the disease. They only address the downstream issues and fail to attack the root of the problem. The stark reality is we want the Kingdom without the King. We want all the blessings of heaven but we don’t want to follow the only One who can get us there. We refuse to obey His commands. We refuse to submit to His will. We refuse to walk in His ways. And our society continues to descend into chaos and anxiety and fear. I love how Pastor Charlie Dates put it in a recent devotional I read on the root of the ethnic tensions we currently face, “The germ of injustice lives in all of us. We can hear the dream of exceptionality in our indignation. We see those troubling images and videos and think we would never do anything wrong like that. Our tweets are rightfully angry, but often unrighteously condescending. Even those who claim the name of CHrist have forgotten that if it were not for the grace of God we too would do to others what we hate to see them do to someone else.” Without minimizing the seriousness of COVID-19, sin is the true pandemic afflicting the human race.
So what can do we do? How shall we respond? Again, I love how Dates puts it, “We human creatures are not all bad, but all of us are bad. The Bible teaches that all have sinned and fallen short of God’s righteous standard. None of us escapes sin’s reach. And what’s worse is that we cannot remedy our world in our own power or fix ourselves. The Gospel is the only message that can cure the problems it diagnoses. Until you recognize that you are susceptible to the lure of sin, you cannot fully enjoy the gift of redemptive grace.” I think Jeremiah would agree. In fact, I believe this is exactly what Jeremiah is getting at when he says, “A glorious throne set on high from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. O Lord, the hope of Israel, all who forsake you shall be put to shame; those who turn away from you shall be written in the earth, for they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living water.” (Jeremiah 17:12-13)
Friends, through Christ, the way to the throne is open. In Christ, we can approach the throne of grace in confidence to find mercy in our time of need. So look to Christ! See Him seated on the glorious throne! Place your trust in Him and invite His Spirit to do His sanctifying work in you, healing you from the affliction of sin. Delivering you from the power of sin. Only faith in Christ can save us from the pandemic of sin.
Readings for tomorrow: Jeremiah 21-24