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Day 214, or August 2nd. Don't say you weren't warned.

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Our thoughts today are rooted in Jeremiah chapter 6 verse 1.

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Flee for safety, people of Benjamin! Flee from Jerusalem! Sound the trumpet in Tekoa!

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Raise the signal over Beth-Hakkerem, for disaster looms out of the north, even terrible destruction.

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And now the big picture surrounding this verse. About half of Jeremiah's writings consist

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of twelve of his sermons, all to his fellow Israelites in Judah. They are all heavily

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laced with condemnation and promises of judgment to come. However, it's like water off a

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duck's back, because his audience is convinced that they are God's chosen people, and that

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their God will understand and keep to his side of the covenant that he's made with

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their forefathers. Jeremiah warns them to mend their ways, because enemy armies will

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shortly be coming from the north, and Jerusalem will be destroyed.

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And now our action step for today. Can you remember all the scaremongering at the turn

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of the twentieth century about the Millennium Bug? Banking would collapse, the civil service

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would lose all its records, personal computers would destroy all your private data before

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closing down, and you would lose all your photographs and music files. It turned out

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to be such an exaggeration that any small calamities which did take place were easily

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excused in the light of what might have happened. Never a year goes by, it seems, without some

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nightmare scenario. It's got to the stage that we tend to shrug them off, because they

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never come to be. Well, Judah was like that. Despite lots of warnings from God through

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his faithful prophet Jeremiah, the sun still came up each morning and set in the evening.

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It seems the world is still full of sceptics who don't believe God will do what he says.

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That is, if there is a God. You don't need to be a biblical scholar to know that our

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God is a fair and equitable God who always keeps his word. He is a God of justice, and

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we will all be answerable to him in the end.