"In that day," declares the LORD, "the king and the officials will lose heart, the priests will be horrified, and the prophets will be appalled." – Jeremiah 4:9

Today's Scripture Reading (May 10, 2023): Jeremiah 4

False prophets come wearing many disguises, but maybe some of the trickiest are the ones who look the most like us. The most dangerous false prophets are not the ones who challenge us but who speak the things that we believe. The prophet has always been more likely to challenge our beliefs and get us to look at a situation in a new way. It has been the false prophet that agrees with us, something that we might want to remember as we listen to some of our favorite speakers. For those who want to be rich, the false prophet preaches a message of material wealth. For the one tired of this world, the false prophet tells us that Jesus is coming soon. And I know that it surprises many people that I would list these beliefs as false. But a real prophet would discard both of these messages to remind us that whatever we have belongs to God. He is the giver of every gift that we have received.

Further, we have been living in the last days for the past two thousand years. The biblical message is that we are to live every day and every moment as if this is the last day before Christ's return. Whether Jesus plans to return tomorrow or sometime in the twenty-second century should not change how we live our lives.

God's message to Jeremiah is aimed right at the false prophets of the day who insisted that God would never leave Judah. These prophets preached that God was partial to his people and would not allow some foreign country to defeat his children. These prophets preached that the people were safe under God's care, regardless of how the people lived.

God tells Jeremiah that when the day comes, there will be no bravery among the nation's rulers because they have not prepared themselves for this outcome. They had listened to the priest as they interpreted the law, stressing that God would never leave Israel. They had also listened to the prophets who had assured the nation that everything would be okay. On that day, it was Jeremiah, the one who those in power had called a false prophet, that would be proved right. And it was Jeremiah who had spent time in jail for insisting that Judah must repent of its sins whose prophecies would be confirmed as true.

In the same way, we need to be careful of anyone who preaches what it is that we want to hear. They might just be pied pipers comforting us that we are where God wants us to be. If the message is not challenging us to heal divisions and love more, especially those who are not like us, the message just might be coming from someplace other than God. And his people need to pause and listen closely to find the challenging voice of God.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 5