Have you not noticed that these people are saying, ‘The LORD has rejected the two kingdoms he chose’? So they despise my people and no longer regard them as a nation. – Jeremiah 33:24

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 27, 2017) Jeremiah 33

Author Paul Coelho once wrote, “Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” I sometimes feel like that every time that I log onto Facebook. People believe what they are going to believe. Even if what they think makes absolutely no sense. (Or maybe it is because what I think makes absolutely no sense.) Everything that we understand comes from the way that we perceive external reality. None of us are objective. We believe what we believe. We hear comments that support that particular belief, and we ignore messages that go against that belief. And it often takes a catastrophic event to get us to reconsider what it is that we believe.

It was a catastrophic event that Judah was experiencing. In the midst of the unthinkable, the people were trying to figure out exactly what the event meant. In a world that understood the power of a particular God was displayed with the force by which that God protected a nation, the God of Judah and Israel looked weak. After all, both of the nations that had chased after him had been destroyed.

Or maybe it was that God had walked away; that he no longer cared for his people. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was on the prowl for a new people who would honor him better than the ones that had now been destroyed.

But for a remnant led by Jeremiah, they were willing to wrestle with the situation. Had God stopped caring for his people, or was there something else at play in the negative response in which Judah currently found herself. Could it possibly be that there was another answer to the emerging question? Is it possible that God was merely trying to get their attention, to provide the catastrophe that was needed to get his people to reconsider what it was that they believed?

For Jeremiah, this was the only possible answer. God had not left them alone as he walked away, and his arm was not too short to reach out and save them. But God, in his wisdom, had realized that the only thing that will cause his people to take their responsibility to the world seriously was a catastrophe. And he is willing to withstand the gossip of the nation’s who would question his love and power to get his people into the place for which they were intended. God was on the move, and a remnant would respond to his move, and change the world in which they lived.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 34