good for me

Sometimes it’s hard to live for God in this world. Intellectually I know all the reasons I should, and I like to think my heart goes along. But day to day, man, it can be tough. So much seems off limits. So much seems to invite abuse.

The whole book of Jeremiah is a long cautionary tale of what happens when God’s people choose the world over God’s way. The outcome then was to lose everything, to be carted away into exile. To be subject to every whim of the pagans.

I’ve been struck this summer by the similarity between God’s people in exile in Babylon and his people living now in an increasingly post-Christian society in America, or in post-Christian Europe. Where we once lived in as a nation that followed God, we now find ourselves in a culture with many other gods. 

I wonder sometimes if the accelerated moral decay, and the accompanying assault on the church, isn’t what happens when the Christians flirt so outrageously with the world. There’s a place somewhere where scripture says God gave sinners over to their own sin, to be mastered by it. Is that what’s happening to us?

But there is hope. For the Jews of Jeremiah’s day, there was this promise, in Jeremiah 32:38-41. “They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.”

When this exile has taught you to obey me, God says, when you have been forged by this adversity into the shape I want you to have, life is going to be good. In fact, God promises never to stop doing good for his people, to rejoice in doing good.

What words of comfort! What encouragement to live courageously and obediently in these times! The end is assured, even though what’s to come looks daunting. But it isn’t me against the world, it’s God and me against the world. That means the world doesn’t stand a chance.