This is the word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning the drought – Jeremiah 14:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 14, 2020): Jeremiah 14

We use the word “God” very loosely in our conversation. And it is not always in a “using God’s name in vain” sort of way. Our culture, whether or not they believe, sees God as a source of justice, and that belief is reflected in the way that we use phrases concerning “the gods.” In sports, we talk about the “football gods” or the “hockey gods” every time there is a missed call and or a lucky break on one side, which is then returned by a similar event that goes in the direction of the opposing team. Or maybe it is when a player behaves in an unsportsmanlike way, and then suffers from an unlucky turn of events that puts the same player at a disadvantage. It is evident that the gods were watching. It is not that God is concerned about such trivial things, but the football gods are, and they act to even the score.

I know we don’t really believe that. It is just the way that we speak of this kind of justice. In actuality, what we are talking about is closer to the Hindu or Buddhist idea of Karma, than it is the action of any god. But referring to the “football gods” is a convenient way for secular people to get their minds around the concepts of justice in sports and life.

But don’t pray to the “football gods” if the problem that needs to be addressed is taking place in basketball. That is the domain of a different set of gods, and a separate set of rules. We don’t take any of these ideas seriously, but what if we did. If we can get our head around this idea, then we would be getting closer to the genuine beliefs that existed in the ancient world. The “football gods” were not some nebulous idea relating to Karma or justice; they were very real deities that governed everyday life.

This section of Jeremiah’s prophecy deals with drought. The word “drought” is plural, and so it should probably be translated as droughts. In an agricultural society, drought was the dire enemy of those involved in food production. A single drought devasted the nation and weakened the society; a series of droughts made the situation exponentially worse. And so, the people prayed to their God for rain. But most often, the god that they chose to pray to was not Yahweh or the God of Israel; it was Ba’al because the people believed that he was the god of the rain. As Jeremiah struggled to get the people to return to their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the series of droughts that Judah was experiencing was driving the people toward Ba’al. It wasn’t that they did not believe in Yahweh. If they needed to cross the Red Sea or defeat the walled city of Jericho again, they would pray to him. But what they needed was rain, and that was the domain of Ba’al.

Jeremiah knew that the problem was cyclical. The people had disobeyed their God, and the law declared that drought would be the penalty for that disobedience (see Deuteronomy 28:23-24). But rather than drawing the people toward Yahweh, instead, the drought caused further disobedience, driving the people toward Ba’al. Jeremiah blamed this further disobedience on the multiplying droughts, and it was a cycle that he desperately wanted to stop.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 15