Everything, all the time. Jeremiah 16.14-18
Lord of the Heart: Jeremiah 16, 17 (2)
Pray Psalm 90.8-11.
You have set our iniquities before You,
Our secret sins in the light of Your countenance.
For all our days have passed away in Your wrath;
We finish our years like a sigh.
The days of our lives are seventy years;
And if by reason of strength they are eighty years,
Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow;
For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Who knows the power of Your anger?
For as the fear of You, so is Your wrath.
Sing Psalm 90.8-11.
(Landas: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place)
You set our sins before Your face; our secret sins You know.
Our days decline in fury as we sigh to see them go.
And though we live for eighty years, yet hard and sad the time,
For soon it goes when Your great wrath consumes us in our prime.
Read and meditate on Jeremiah 16.14-18.
Prepare.
1. What promise did God hold out to His people in this passage?
2. But what must happen first?
Meditate.
Again, God held out hope for His people. Though He would send them into captivity in Babylon, He would not leave them there indefinitely. As He had delivered Israel from Egypt, so, when His judgment had run its course, He would bring them back from their captivity to their homeland again (vv. 14, 15). God is faithful to His covenant; He will not allow His Word to Israel to fail.
For the immediate future, however, judgment must come. God promised to repay His people “double for their iniquity and their sin” (v. 18). Not only had they defiled His land by their idolatrous practices; they had also filled with it dead bodies – those of their children, sacrificed to Molech, and the many abominable idols they had erected on rooftops and high places (v. 18).
God’s judgment would be thorough. His eyes are on every one of His people, and He sees all their sins. He would ferret them out from every hiding place to fulfill His wrath against them (vv. 16, 17). No one would escape the coming judgment of God.
Another approach to verses 16 and 17 sees the grace of God at work, hunting and fishing for His people, to return them from their captivity and restore them unto Him. It may well be that both these meanings – God as hunting down sin and God as capturing lost sinners – are at work here.
God’s eyes are always upon us. He sees everything we do. He guides us with His eyes by illuminating Scripture to us and showing us the way we should walk (Ps. 32.8). But He also sees our secret sins (Ps. 90.8); and if we persist in them, rather than repent, God knows how to hunt us down and fish us out until we turn from our wickedness and seek Him once again.
Reflect.
1. Does it matter that God sees us at all times? Explain.
2. How can you see that God “hunted” and “fished” to bring you to Himself?
3. Why is it important always to be renewed in God’s hope? How can we do that?
Why fishers? Why hunters? Because, from the abyss and from the depth of the sea of idolatrous superstition, the believers fished with the nets of faith. But why have the hunters been sent? Because those people were wandering through the mountains and the hills, that is, through the pride of humankind, through the worldly obstacles. Augustine (354-430), The Usefulness of Fasting 9
Keep Your eye on me, O Lord, and show me how I must live for You today as I…
Pray Psalm 90.1-7, 12-17.
Pray for the Lord’s cleansing, and that He will show you the work He has in store for you for today.
Sing Psalm 90.1-7, 12-17.
Psalm 90.1-7,12-17 (Landas: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place)
Lord, You have been our dwelling place from generations gone.
Before the mountains came to be, before the earth was born,
before the worlds, and long before men on the earth first trod,
from everlasting long ago, O God, You are our God!
You turn men back to dust and say, “Return from whence you came!”
A thousand years are in Your sight like yesterday the same.
You sweep away our lives with ease, like grass that sprouts and dies.
Your wrath consumes us and we live dismayed amid our sighs.
So teach us all our days to note that wisdom may be ours.
Return, O Lord, have pity on those servants who are Yours.
Each morning let Your love appear that we for joy may sing.
And make us glad for every day You us affliction bring.
Now let Your work to us appear; our children show Your might.
And let Your favor rest on us; show mercy in Your sight.
The work that You have given us, confirm, and to us show,
that we Your chosen path may walk and in Your precepts go.
T. M. Moore
Where do the prophets fit with the rest of Scripture? Our workbook, God’s Covenant, shows you how all the parts of the Bible fit together under one divine covenant. The lessons in this workbook will show you the unity of Scripture and the centrality of Jesus in all the Bible. Order your copy by clicking here.
Visit our website, www.ailbe.org, to discover the many new resources available to help you in your walk with and work for the Lord.
If you value Scriptorium as a free resource for your walk with the Lord, please consider supporting our work with your gifts and offerings. You can contribute to The Fellowship by clicking the Contribute button at the website or by sending your gift to The Fellowship of Ailbe, 360 Zephyr Road, Williston, VT 05495.
Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. All quotations from Church Fathers from Ancient Christian Commentary Series, General Editor Thomas C. Oden (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006). All psalms for singing are from The Ailbe Psalter (available by clicking here).
