During the reign of King Josiah, the LORD said to me, "Have you seen what faithless Israel has done? She has gone up on every high hill and under every spreading tree and has committed adultery there. – Jeremiah 3:6

Today's Scripture Reading (May 9, 2023): Jeremiah 3

Do we learn from history? I don't think we do. I wish we were better students of history, that we would know our histories and understand the mistakes other nations and empires have made that eventually resulted in serious national pain. But the truth is, instead of looking seriously at the sins of the past, we often propose to repeat those old mistakes in our contemporary world.

A case in point might be the debt crisis of the United States in 1779, just three years after it became a nation. I know, it is hard to believe that the United States has had a debt crisis before the current one. The Debt Crisis of 1779 was triggered by the devaluation of the Continental dollar, a result of the United States Congress's inability to levy taxes. The crisis eventually led to the writing and passing of the American Constitution. The debt of the United States was so highly devalued the Continental dollar ended up being redeemed at a thousand to one. By 1781, the currency had become so degraded that it could no longer be circulated in any amount as money in the society.

What is sometimes overlooked is that because France held much of the debt of the United States, they had backed the United States in their fight for independence against Britain, the weight of that unpaid debt of the United States was one of the factors that fueled the French Revolution; a connection between the old and new world that we often miss.

But that isn't what is happening now, right? We shouldn't make that assumption too quickly. Benjamin Franklin argued that even though the country struggled to levy taxes, the devaluation of the dollar was actually an indirect taxation that was paying for the war. Today, we tax, but most Western countries don't tax enough to pay the bills. The debt grows with the yearly deficits, and there cannot be another outcome other than the nation's fall. Except this time, it won't be a revolution in France that will pay for the inability to tax and spend appropriately.

During the reign of Josiah, a good king, God speaks to Jeremiah and reminds him of events that had happened a hundred years earlier in the northern Kingdom of Israel. And he uses provocative language to describe the idolatry of the Northern Kingdom. It wasn't just a choice of who to worship; the image is of Israel as being married to God and selling herself to other lovers. Israel was taking her lovers under every tree and at every high place. God invited them to come back, but they refused. And now they were gone.

God's message to Judah was that they needed to learn from what had happened in the past so that they didn't repeat the same actions and end up suffering the same outcome as their northern neighbors. 

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 4