Day 214, or August 2nd. Don't say you weren't warned.
Our thoughts today are rooted in Jeremiah chapter 6 verse 1.
Flee for safety, people of Benjamin! Flee from Jerusalem! Sound the trumpet in Tekoa!
Raise the signal over Beth-Hakkerem, for disaster looms out of the north, even terrible destruction.
And now the big picture surrounding this verse. About half of Jeremiah's writings consist
of twelve of his sermons, all to his fellow Israelites in Judah. They are all heavily
laced with condemnation and promises of judgment to come. However, it's like water off a
duck's back, because his audience is convinced that they are God's chosen people, and that
their God will understand and keep to his side of the covenant that he's made with
their forefathers. Jeremiah warns them to mend their ways, because enemy armies will
shortly be coming from the north, and Jerusalem will be destroyed.
And now our action step for today. Can you remember all the scaremongering at the turn
of the twentieth century about the Millennium Bug? Banking would collapse, the civil service
would lose all its records, personal computers would destroy all your private data before
closing down, and you would lose all your photographs and music files. It turned out
to be such an exaggeration that any small calamities which did take place were easily
excused in the light of what might have happened. Never a year goes by, it seems, without some
nightmare scenario. It's got to the stage that we tend to shrug them off, because they
never come to be. Well, Judah was like that. Despite lots of warnings from God through
his faithful prophet Jeremiah, the sun still came up each morning and set in the evening.
It seems the world is still full of sceptics who don't believe God will do what he says.
That is, if there is a God. You don't need to be a biblical scholar to know that our
God is a fair and equitable God who always keeps his word. He is a God of justice, and
we will all be answerable to him in the end.