Monday
Monday
A Backsliding People
Why then have these people turned away?
Jeremiah 8:5
Jeremiah begins his prophetic ministry with a sustained appeal for repentance. Though his message is directed primarily against Judah, he brackets “faithless Israel” (3:6) with “her unfaithful sister Judah” (v. 7). True, good King Josiah’s reform met with some response, but it was largely superficial. So God complains, “Judah did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense” (v. 10). The people still persisted in their sins. They worshiped foreign deities on the high places. They broke the Ten Commandments. They failed to care for the widow, the orphan, and the alien. They even engaged in the horrors of child sacrifice. But although Jeremiah exposed these evils, they refused to repent.
Now the prophet adds metaphor to metaphor in an attempt to prick Judah’s conscience. When people fall down, he asks, don’t they get up again? If they go astray, don’t they turn back to where they went wrong? Why then have God’s people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They have refused to come back, like a horse plunging headlong into battle (8:4–6).
Most telling of all his metaphors is the behavior of migratory birds: “Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the LORD” (v. 7).
Palestine is a corridor of bird migration. Jeremiah had evidently noticed that many birds fly south over the Middle East in order to winter in the warmer climate of Africa, but in the spring without fail they return. God’s people, however, had gone away, but they had not returned. White storks are an excellent example. It is estimated that nearly half a million of them use this migratory flyway. Jeremiah’s reference in the sixth century BC is perhaps the first reference to bird migration in the literature of the world.
Oh that we had as powerful an instinct to return to God as storks have to return to their breeding grounds in the spring!
For further reading: Jeremiah 8:4–7