“Then they said to Jeremiah, “May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act according to all the word with which the Lord your God sends you to us. Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we are sending you, that it may be well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God.”” (Jeremiah 42:5–6, ESV)
In my days, I have found that people will make commitments and just fail to keep them. It happens in business, in personal relationships, in all walks of life. You might think that it does not happen among a people’s relationship with the living God, but even here people will not keep their commitments.
Here in the saga of Israel, we see the same thing happening again. After the commanders and the forces left in Judah defeated Ishmael’s band, they and all the people seek Jeremiah for a word from the Lord. They are seeking direction from the Lord as to where they should go and what they should do. They make a promise that what ever the Lord tells them though Jeremiah, that is what they will do.
The people’s request sounds very noble and correct. You would think that they would listen to the word Jeremiah would bring to them. After all, up to this point every word the prophet Jermiah brought to the nation from the Lord was true and came about just as he stated. He had absolute credibility. Yet the people did not heed the word of the Lord brought to them.
They waited for Jeremiah to bring the word of the Lord to them for ten days. After hearing what the Lord had stated, they made a contrary decision.
Through Jeremiah, the Lord instructed the people to remain in the Land. They were promised the Lord’s protection, prominence, and provision in the land. They were forbidden from going to Egypt and told that if they did so, they would all die in Egypt by sword, famine, and pestilence. They would never return to the land of Judah.
What did the people do? They went against their commitment to obey the word of the Lord that came to them through the prophet Jeremiah. They rejected the word of the Lord and His promise. They rebelled against the Lord and decided to go to Egypt to their own demise.
The fickleness of people plagues not only those outside the body of faith today, but also those inside the church. Many professing Christians are rejecting portions of the word of God, the Bible, as absolute truth and authority today. They are rejecting the moral authority of the word of God and are caving to the cultural norms of the day. In doing so, these professing believers have allowed the world to sear their moral consciences and have led may astray.
This is not just a problem with individual believers, but with institutional churches and denominations. Progressive thinking of the world has taken over many and corrupted these churches. They too have had their institutional consciences seared.
Those of us that hold to the truth, infallibility, and authority of God’s word, must stand firm in a world of compromise and deception. We are to be the pillar and buttress of the truth and that without compromise, without compromise to the word of God.
