Tag Archives: Worldviews

Day 128: The Curer of the Incurable

Jeremiah 30:12-17

For Yahweh says,
“Your hurt is incurable.
Your wound is grievous.
There is no one to plead your cause,
that you may be bound up.
You have no healing medicines.
All your lovers have forgotten you.
They don’t seek you.
For I have wounded you with the wound of an enemy,
with the chastisement of a cruel one,
for the greatness of your iniquity,
because your sins were increased.
Why do you cry over your injury?
Your pain is incurable.
For the greatness of your iniquity,
because your sins have increased,
I have done these things to you.
Therefore all those who devour you will be devoured.
All your adversaries, everyone of them, will go into captivity.
Those who plunder you will be plunder.
I will make all who prey on you become prey.
For I will restore health to you,
and I will heal you of your wounds,” says Yahweh;
“because they have called you an outcast,
saying, ‘It is Zion, whom no man seeks after.’ ”

This is one of those passages that would be confusing to a person who feels the need to prove the Bible without considering it as a worldview. Here God says that Israel’s “pain is incurable” and then He immediately tells them that He “will restore health” to them. Isn’t God being inconsistent? How can He say that something is incurable and then say that He will cure it? I think that doubts like this can only arise when we fail to assume God’s word to be true. When you doubt God’s word and then attempt to judge it, it leads to confusion like this.

When we assume God’s word to be true, we first assume that God isn’t being inconsistent and that we are making a mistake in our understanding of what He’s saying. How can something be incurable and still be cured by God? I think that the most natural and consistent interpretation is that God intended to cure what they could not cure on their own. From this perspective, it’s pretty clear that God was going to make sure that they fully understood that they were unable to do anything good for themselves. They were going suffer and have no ability to fix it without His involvement.

I can’t think of any more incurable thing than to die, can you? God is even able to cure that according to the Bible. It’s important for us to treat the Bible as it claims to be. It claims to be the words of God which define truth. That’s the nature of a worldview. It’s the set of beliefs we assume without evidence and we all have those. If you think you don’t, that very thought is an example one.

So here we read that things were to get so bad for Israel that it would take a miracle for God to bring them back together as a nation and that’s what God intended to do. He also intended to punish the great nations that brought them down which would also would have probably have seemed impossible. God is supernatural and cannot be stopped by the natural world that He created. No matter what seems possible to us, God’s word will always come true.

Day 77: Don’t Mourn With Them

Jeremiah 16:5-7

For Yahweh says, “Don’t enter into the house of mourning. Don’t go to lament. Don’t bemoan them, for I have taken away my peace from this people,” says Yahweh, “even loving kindness and tender mercies. Both great and small will die in this land. They will not be buried. Men won’t lament for them, cut themselves, or make themselves bald for them. Men won’t break bread for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead. Men won’t give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother.

Here we read that God was so serious about bringing shame on Israel that He told Jeremiah that he wasn’t allowed to be seen publicly mourning for any of them. God intended for them to feel the pain and not to be comforted in their sin. This is an important and difficult part of being a follower of God.

God has been impressing on me the importance of maintaining purity as a Church. The world around me is stressing that we follow a doctrine called: “inclusiveness.” It’s important for us as believers in Jesus to see this for what it really is. It’s an invitation to be impure. A bride that has been engaged is not to be inclusive of other men. Only the bridegroom matters now. God has called out the Church. That means we are exclusive not inclusive. Part of being exclusive is to separate from those who have chosen to live a life of sin against God. If we mourn with those who are being punished by God, we are saying that we agree that God is mistreating them. We are acting like one of them. We are not separating ourselves from their way of thinking and agreeing with God’s way of thinking.

The concept of worldviews is very strong in this part of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was just reprimanded by God for being influenced by the thinking of the world around him, and here we read that he is to maintain his separation by not participating in their mourning ceremonies. Jeremiah was a Jewish man just like those around him. It must have been hard to not participate in common customary events but it serves as an example to us today. Are we participating in worldly things that God does not approve of? It’s important for us to consider this carefully and separate ourselves to God and dedicate ourselves to His way of thinking.

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