And after I have plucked them up, I will again have compassion on them, and I will bring them again to their heritage and to their land, every one of them.
Jeremiah is continuing his pretty dire portrayal of God’s coming actions because of the actions of Israel and Judah. Young men will die by the sword, their children die by famine. If they pray or implore God for help, God will not listen. God will bring disaster on the people so they cannot escape. It goes on and on.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, after God’s done all this, God will have compassion on them. All is good, as long as the people follow God. But if any nation does not, God will ‘complete uproot it and destroy it’.
Has any one ever heard about the old adage of how to train a dog by rubbing their nose in any mistakes they’ve made? This has been entirely debunked. You can’t force good behavior. You can’t scare someone into good behavior. Well, maybe you can for a while, but it’s out of a sense of fear rather than a sense of doing the right thing. And that creates resentment.
This is what I think of when I’m reading Jeremiah’s prophesies about God. God is a wrathful, retribution-seeking God, worthy of fear and obedience – in that order.
I have two thoughts for this. One, Jeremiah got his messages mixed up or had a different understanding of God. In this possibility, God wasn’t really so judgy, but that’s just how it came out in Jeremiah’s understanding or retelling. I do believe humanity’s understanding of God can and has changed over time. Previous understandings weren’t wrong as much as they were unevolved. I know my understanding of God has changed over my lifetime. I think that says more about my understanding of God, rather than God’s changing. This reminds me of Twain’s quote about his dad. “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
The other possibility, which I’m leaning towards, is that God through Jesus did change. With Jesus’ intimate and personal knowledge of humanity, God had a new intimate and personal knowledge of humanity. Maybe through Christ, God did change and God developed a new human-informed sense of justice and love and mercy. I’m probably treading near heresy here, so I won’t go further.
This morning, I’m thinking about the God as Jeremiah described compared to God I understand through Jesus. I definitely have a preference.
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