Has Truth Perished?

Not long before the southern Kingdom of Judah was delivered into Babylonian captivity under the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah the prophet reminded the people, that they were to obey God who had delivered them from the oppressor in former days, so that all would be well with them. However, we read that like their ancestry, “they did not obey or incline their ear, but followed the counsels and the dictates of their own evil hearts, and went backwards and not forward.” (Jeremiah 7:21-24).

Because of their exceeding disobedience to the Lord and to the words of His messengers, they were rejected by God and thus sent into seventy years of Babylonian exile (Jeremiah 25:10-14). As a result of their disobedience, the Lord instructed Jeremiah to inform them that “truth is perished and is cut off from their mouth” (Jeremiah 7:28). They had become a “generation of His wrath” (Jeremiah 7:29).

Israel forgot the good law which Moses delivered to them so long ago (Jeremiah 2:26-32; Hosea 4:6; Hosea 8:11,14) and disregarded the powerful words of Isaiah in Isaiah 44:6-19.

As the wooden images that they had fashioned into “idols” were nothing more than mere wood and not “gods” at all, we too must be careful not to fashion for ourselves “gods” out of material things, i.e. food, family, fun, finances, friends, or feelings. These things, like the pieces of wood in Jeremiah’s day, are not in and of themselves bad but if we allow them to take preeminence in our lives, we will today become even as they were then!

As Christians, are we allowing God's truth to be superseded by secular, godless ideologies and philosophies of men? The founding framers of our country's constitution didn't allow such, and neither should we. Beloved, let us never allow the truth of God’s word to “perish” from among us and adhere to the teaching of Matthew 6:24-33.

—Mike Riley, Gospel Snippets