Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols. – Jeremiah 2:11

Today's Scripture Reading (May 8, 2023): Jeremiah 2

I lived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, maybe best known as the home of the Calgary Stampede, for a total of ten years of my life. Eight of those years were when I was an older child and a young teen. My family moved to a rural town when I was sixteen. Currently, I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, a city 300 km (185 miles) north of Calgary. Calgary and Edmonton are the two largest cities in the Canadian province of Alberta, so you can probably imagine the rivalry between the two cities. But my Calgary experience, probably because of my age then, has proved to be foundational to who I am. I mentioned that I lived in Calgary for about a decade, but as I write these words, I have lived in Edmonton for the past twenty-six years, more than two and a half times the time I spent in Calgary. I haven't lived in Calgary for almost forty years. Yet, I still cheer for the Calgary Flames hockey team over the hometown Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Stampeders Canadian Football team over the Hometown Edmonton Elks. I profess to be a fan of Alberta, but honestly, it is sometimes hard to cheer for Edmonton teams.

Calgary and Edmonton don't have local gods. The closest we can come to local deities is the celebration of our sports teams, especially for a sports fan. But we don't seem to change favorite teams easily; at least, I don't. Four decades after leaving the southern Alberta city, I still follow their sports deities.

Jeremiah makes a similar observation. He says that people don't change gods, even though the gods that they serve are nothing more than clumps of clay, wood, or metal. I recently spoke with a friend who said he believes in many gods, of which Yahweh, the God of Israel, was the most powerful. He argued that that was what the Bible taught. But we need to be directed to passages like this in Jeremiah. There is no God except for the God of Israel. Those things that others worship are not gods at all.

Jeremiah looks at his nation and discovers that while the worshippers of these false gods are settled in their worship, Israel, which has experienced the miracles of the actual creator of the earth, seems to flit from false God to false God. None of them measured up; how could they when they are just parts of our imagination? Judah rejected the God that had brought them out of Egypt for the impotent gods of their neighbors. They spent their resources worshipping their neighbor's gods from the other side of the fence instead of spending what they had on the actual God that had been with them all along.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 3