Jeremiah 16 “A Hard Lesson to Learn” 1/17/2024

Jeremiah is seeing the downfall of Judah…a downfall that did not happen overnight…this had been a long time in the making.
The downfall began where it does for us as Christians…it began by ignoring the word of God…
For believers, we call the time before the downfall, or some would say the time of backsliding…a downward spiral.
There are things that a believer stops doing regularly which leads up to their downfall…
For instance…they stop praying…the next thing they stop doing is reading…and then going to church…
They don’t stop any of those things immediately…they just stop doing them less and less frequently until they just stop doing them…
And by that time, they have fallen away…gradually over time…they have walked away from the Lord.
For the people of Judah perhaps their downward spiral began by not following Deuteronomy 6…
Where God tells them to be in the word and to teach it to their future generations.
Perhaps it began when they stopped celebrating God’s appointed feasts.
Perhaps it began when they lost the fear of God…or when they lost their desire to serve Him and obey Him.
Perhaps it began when they forgot the promises of God…promises to bless their obedience.
Whatever caused them to turn from God, by the time of Jeremiah they had drifted so far away from the One True God that they began to worship gods of their own making.