Church Voices

Jeremiah 4.9

9 “In that day,” declares the LORD,
“the king and the officials will lose heart,
the priests will be horrified,
and the prophets will be appalled.”[emphasis mine]

What’s interesting about this is that the priests and prophets are supposed to be the guys on God’s side, the guys who know God, and in the case of the prophets, the guys that God speaks directly to, and yet they are going to be horrified and appalled by what God is going to do.

The biggest danger when reading these verses is to take the warnings of Jeremiah to a faithless Israel and apply them to a country today. God had a covenant with Israel, he called Israel His people. He does not have a covenant with a nation any longer. His covenant is with the church. Faithless Israel of Jeremiah’s time can’t be compared with a nation who’s politics we may think are anti-God, or anti-scripture, Jeremiah’s faithless Israel can only be compared to a church that has abandoned the gospel.

Not too long ago World Magazine ran an article on the massive closings of churches that are just ahead for the US. Many of the old line, denominations that have dominated the landscape in the past are very long in the tooth (and I will also toss in the more conservative congregations that have failed to take the gospel to their communities and even their own children), and as these congregations literally die off their churches will follow them into the grave. Western Europe, once the very definition of Christianity, has long ago found her churches dropping like flies.

I’m sure what priests and prophets were left were horrified.

Jeremiah predicts that God’s wrath on Jerusalem will take the form of a nation coming out of the north. I myself kind of doubt a Canadian army of holy avengers is going to descend on churches across the US. Instead churches that have abandoned the gospel will simply die on the vine, whimpering into obscurity.