Slippery Slopes
and spiritual banana peels
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 2:1-3
Yesterday we began looking into Jeremiah chapter two with a focus on verse 13. There the Lord says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” If your recall, yesterday I briefly wrote on the idea of evil. Picking up from there, today I want to explore the question of what God meant by saying His people had committed two evils.
First, it doesn’t mean that they had committed only two evils. We only have to look at Old Testament history to realize it can’t mean that. God’s people were guilty of a multitude of sins and iniquities. What the Lord is saying is that these two evils are the headwaters of Israel’s sea of sin. To use the theological term, the root sin here is apostasy. They had forsaken God. That act of apostasy became the first step down the slippery slope of a multitude of sins, and that slide would end in a lake of fiery wrath at the bottom of that hill.
Paul described this kind of spiritual slippery slope in Romans 1:18-32. The world slams itself into the rocky bottom when it is given over to “all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice…full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness…” and so on. But the first step onto the slope was not honoring God or giving thanks to him. So, when a person or nation hits rock bottom and looks up and asks, “how did we get here?” the answer is you forsook the Lord, and it was all downhill from there.
What we must not miss in this is the slide downward ensues because the only thing ever keeping us from going down is the grip of God. In Paul’s description, he repeatedly uses the phrase, “God gave them over.” Man says, “let me go,” and God obliges. Man is unable to ascend, let alone maintain his station at the top of the moral and spiritual hill, without being held there by the hand of God. Once God gives them over, over they go.
Back to Jeremiah chapter two…The reason God points out these two evils is that they are the origin of everything else bad that followed. When one forsakes God, spiritual devolution follows like darkness follows sunset.
And who is this God they have forsaken? Tomorrow we will pursue the answer to that question.
Timely and needed exposition!