Deception's Promise and Defeat

The Promise
Jeremiah 6:13-15

Jeremiah was given a difficult assignment.  He was called to preach destruction to a people who would never believe him.  He knew up front that his message would fail.  Other prophets would succeed with their false message.  But God told Jeremiah to preach the truth anyway.

We live in an age of acceptance.  Anything goes.  Morality, we're told, is relative; truth is too complicated to pin down, commitment is defined by the mood of the moment, and there are many different paths to "God."  Tolerance is a code word meaning, "Don't preach to me.  I've got not intention of changing."  The false prophets of our age have a clear, persistent message: "Peace, peace."  But there is no peace.

How we wish peace would come.  We pray to the Prince of Peace and ask Him to rule our lives.  He does, and He will.  But He will fulfill the message He preached long ago in Galilee and Judea: God will judge the human revolt, and Jesus is the only way to escape the judgment.  And that's not a popular message in an age of acceptance.  Nothing will bring out intolerance in the "tolerant" ones like a message of exclusive redemption.  But like Jeremiah, Christendom is faced with a choice: Preach the truth, even where it goes unheeded, or lie about the condition our race is in and the judgment that awaits it - all for the sake of "peace."

Deceptions abound in our world.  Most of the effective ones sound pleasant to our ears; otherwise, they would not deceive us.  God's Word sounds pleasant, too, but only to repentant ears.  To the pride of self-sufficiency - the drug of choice for the human ego - His Word is detested.  It is as thoroughly rejected as Jeremiah was.  But it is true.  Our generation has brought significant challenges to our faith.  Our beliefs are not for the faint of heart.  But as Isaiah promised, God's truth is the only water that quenches thirst and the only bread that is filling (Isa. 55:1-3).


The Defeat
Jeremiah 17:5-13

Not only can we be deceived by the false prophets of our age, we can also be deceived by our own hearts.  We often embrace lies if they are emotionally satisfying, never discerning the final result of believing them.  God's wisdom takes a backseat to our affections when our affections have not been rooted in Him.  The fact of the heart's treachery is a huge affront to our ego.  It's a tragic affront to our Father.

Such is the nature of human wisdom.  It is dark and deceptive, shifty and shallow, misdirected and myopic.  It rejects the present reality of eternity for the future hope of personal glory.  It builds on shifting sand.  And, according to God's Word in Jeremiah, it is beyond cure!

How tragic.  How scary.  How can the God of hope give us such a hopeless word?  How can the promise of salvation be so unpromising?  How can we continue to read the Bible after we've come across this desperate declaration?  How can we be redeemed?

The answer is glorious.  God promises later in Jeremiah to give His people a new heart (24:7).  So what if our hearts are beyond cure?  They are not beyond resurrection.  Our dead hearts are not reformed or healed; they are raised to new life.  They are replaced with ones that are real.  God says it even more precisely in Ezekiel: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (36:26).

Only God can understand our hearts, and His assessment is utterly depressing if we do not know the rest of His plan.  But He who discerns our deepest thoughts and most obscure deceptions (v. 10) offers us His pure and truthful Spirit to replace the corruption of our flesh.  These dreaded prophecies do not end with dread, and the wisdom of God does not end with death.  Those who embrace it find life - answers now, direction today, and character always.