Living with God's favor!
We can’t live anyway that we desire and expect God to bless and protect us.
October 10
So I will throw you out of this land and send you into a foreign land where you and your ancestors have never been. There you can worship idols all you like – and I will grant you no favors.
Jeremiah 16:13
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Living with God's favor!
God is telling Jeremiah to make some pretty harsh predictions to the people of the nation of Israel. God is telling Jeremiah that He has already removed His hand of protection and peace from them and that they should not expect grace or mercy from Him either. The reason is because they have turned away from God and worshipped other gods. These idols are worshipped to satisfy their own evil desires and it sickens God. The Jews are God’s chosen people and He views their actions as adultery.
In our verse for the day God tells them what the consequences are for their adulterous activities; to be driven out of the Promised Land. This is the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants forever. God is driving them out because they have defiled the good land with their evil practices. God tells them that if that is the life they want, they can have it but not in the land that He promised to bless them in.
God goes on to tell them that He will grant them no favors while they are in the land of their exile. He was not going to help them in any way while they were in their backslidden state. The nation of Israel had experienced the protecting hand of God for hundreds of years. It is unlikely that they truly understood the magnitude of what was about to happen to them. They believed that they were safe and secure in the land and that God wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to them.
We can’t live anyway that we desire and expect God to bless and protect us. God promised us a life that is rich and full. That life is found in and lived in Jesus Christ. As we abide in Christ, we experience the life that Christ died to give us; a good and blessed life. Our problem is that we are just like the Israelites, once we are safe and secure in the land of promise we begin to think we can live any way we choose. This ultimately leads to us not following God and following after other things instead. God calls that idolatry and adultery.
Because of God’s great and infinite love for us He will try repeatedly to get us to repent of those things and return to Him. If we resist and continue to live our lives for ourselves and in our own way, God will slowly begin to withdraw His hand of protection and blessing from us. If we still don’t respond He will send an enemy into our lives to attack or torment us. His desire is that we would realize our need for Him and dependence upon Him and turn back to Him. If that doesn’t work, He will drive us out of the life He promised us and turn us over to our fleshly lusts. He stills hopes that we will realize our error and return to Him. All this is avoided by a life lived in close communion with Christ. Jesus, help us to stay close to You.
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