Do you know who this guy is? Have you seen him before??
[‘Anger’ from movie Inside Out on screen, describe character/attributes]
Good movie that one, I think I’ve mentioned it before – focusing on all the different emotions we have as humans.
Today in our first reading we hear about God’s anger, God gets angry!
What do we hear about God’s anger there, why is he angry, what is he angry about?
He’s angry at the Israelites for ‘defiling his land,’ ‘making his inheritance detestable’ (strong language!)
He’s angry at his people for rebelling against him, for following worthless idols.
God says his people have forsaken him, and they have ‘dug their own cisterns’ for carrying water, but their cisterns are broken!
And he compares them to other nations who don’t worship him, saying that Israel is even worse than them as they have ‘exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.’
So we’ve got a fired up, fiery God here today!
A God is who is definitely not happy with what his people are doing. A God who is outlining all the things that are wrong, and also > what he’s going to do about it.
One of those consequences mentioned here is that God will ‘bring charges against his people,’ and ‘against their children’s children’ too – this isn’t a single generation thing, the anger of the Lord extends to multiple generations.
And there’s also a tinge of sadness in God’s anger here > in the first verses of this chapter God is almost reminiscing about the ‘devotion of his peoples’ youth, when they ‘loved him as a bride.’ But now his people who have followed worthless idols have become worthless themselves. Pretty serious fall from grace there, form a loving relationship with God to being worth nothing in his eyes. The people have become vain, they’ve become empty, other words we can use to understand what’s going on here.
God is making his judgment known, he is laying down the law here.
How can we understand this judgment, how can we make sense of it today, and where is the hope in all this? We know God is a merciful judge but we’re not really seeing that here are we!
If we read on in Jeremiah, in the very next chapter, chapter 3 verse 12, we see a different tact from God there:
‘‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will frown on you no longer, for I am faithful,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will not be angry forever.’
We see in the tinge of sadness here that God is not a God who wants to condemn or to destroy.
If that’s what God was all about, he wouldn’t be sad at all would he! He’d be enjoying this, he’d be happily putting us in our place as worthless people who can offer him nothing. That sounds more like a bad guy in a movie who wants to play god, rather than the good and gracious God we know we have.
But that’s not who God is, that’s not how he operates.
We see the parent, the teacher God is when he says he will acknowledge his peoples’ guilt in verse 13, but he will not be angry forever.
Have you ever done that as a parent, when you’ve been teaching something new to your child?
Like teaching your child how to ride a bike, you’ve got the training wheels on and they might run over your foot or the bike might fall over on you a few times, and that might hurt a bit, but you won’t be ‘angry forever’ will you! You won’t stay angry or frustrated because you don’t want them to fail, you want them to be able to ride the bike and you’re proud of their efforts as they learn aren’t you!
The parental side of God the Father is that he has enough patience and enough love to stick with each of us – each of us who are each his own children – in all of our mess and in all of our mistakes, all of our learning and our growing pains, all of our failures and shortcomings. Why is he that patient with us? Because he loves us that much.
So God is angry and he tells Jeremiah all about it today, but we also know now by reading on a bit further how long his anger will last – it won’t last forever.
So Jeremiah is in a position to know how angry how God is, but also how faithful he is and will be.
We have to remember those two together here > God is not only angry, he is also faithful.
God’s word is not only warm and comforting like the campfire we talked about last week, sometimes it is also the heat of that fire and hits us like a hammer as we heard in the first week of this series.
Let’s jump back a bit for a moment now, to the part where God tells Jeremiah what he’s angry about, what are the significant issues God’s anger is being stirred up against??
A few key words there, a few charges God brings against his people >
They have defiled the land, they have made their inheritance detestable. They have been rebellious, and now they are considered worthless.
Remember that God gave them the land they live in, and their inheritance is God’s promises passed down from generation to generation.
And he has given them his law to live by, ways to love God and love each other.
And when God made his people they were worth something, worthy of his love for them simply because he made them.
So the people have gone from having land provided for them, having an ongoing inheritance, having purpose and direction in their lives through the law God gave them, and all that on top of being not only worth something but being loved dearly by the creator of all things. A serious fall from grace as I said earlier.
We also remember that everything we have is from God. The good things in our lives are gifts from God, our own lives, our own safety and security, our financial wellbeing, our church and the people in it, a place to receive from God, to serve each other and a community to belong to > all good gifts from God.
We remember we are only the latest in a long line of receivers of this inheritance, of God’s promises not to harm us, but to give us a hope and future. Jeremiah received this promise, we receive this promise as part of God’s family.
We remember God’s law is not only a list of things to do and things NOT to do, but more importantly a way to help us know how to love God and how to love each other.
And finally, we remember by God’s love we are worth something, not only worth ‘something’ but worth so much to him that he would send his only son to die for us.
We remember all those things right now as we mention them, but how quickly do we forget them when we’re out in the world.
When we’re faced with life’s challenges, when we’re dealing with the ‘grey areas’ of life we could say.
We forget, and we stuff it up. Sometimes we haven’t forgotten, but we still stuff it up.
We also defile what God has given us, we make dirty what God had given us clean.
We waste and we ignore the abundant inheritance God has given us, to the point where God says it is detestable.
We too rebel against God’s law, meaning we have heard it and we choose NOT to follow it.
We know how we should love God and how we should love other people – that’s actually the easier part when we think about it, easier to know what to do than to actually do it. We know how but we don’t do it, sometimes we actively DON’T love God and we choose to NOT show love to others as he has called us to do.
We can add that all up and see why God’s judgment could easily be that we are WORTHLESS.
Even when we know how much he loves us, we still go looking anywhere and everywhere else we possibly could to try to find recognition, validation, assurance, all of those things and more that our God already has for us.
It is right for God to be angry with us. His judgment is fair. We are not good enough, worse than that – we have actively opposed our God and have made ourselves his enemies. Bad result for us there.
But we know his anger doesn’t last forever.
The offer still stands, the offer to receive what he gives.
To live in the promises and the hope that he has plans and a future for us.
To follow in the way of the cross, to love God and love each other, not on our own or by our own efforts but with the Holy Spirit working in and through us the whole time.
And to know and to live in the freedom that comes with being a child of God.
A loved, forgiven, hopeful, worthwhile child of the living God.
Praise be to God for that, let’s pray:
Lord we thank you that we are not worthless to you, despite our own weakness and failings you say that we are worthwhile, to you we are worth the price your son paid for us. Remind us of what we have in you, help us when we are tested in the world around us, and keep us safe and secure in your love. These things we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Tom Kitson 