I wrote about Backsliding last November – backsliding, a common term in some of our churches back in the day – but it occurs only a few times in scripture. One is in one of our recent readings:
Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? They hold fast to deceit; they refuse to return. (Jeremiah 8.5, ESV)
Jeremiah has accused the people of backsliding before:
Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God and have no awe of me,” declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty. (Jeremiah 2.19, NIV)
“Return, faithless people; I will cure you of backsliding.” “Yes, we will come to you, for you are the Lord our God. (Jeremiah 3.22, NIV)
I just reviewed my blog on backsliding as well as the one on Professor Ehrman and Charles Templeton who rejected God’s Word. It seems there a lot of ways to reject the word:
“How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie. The wise men shall be put to shame; they shall be dismayed and taken; behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD, so what wisdom is in them? (Jeremiah 8.8, 9, ESV)
We can pretend to be people of the word and reject it at the same time! And the result was punishment at the hands of foreign armies.
Sad verses:
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” For the wound of the daughter of my people is my heart wounded; I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored? (Jeremiah 8.20 – 22, ESV)
Sounds like the POWs who didn’t make it out of Viet Nam. The highest ranking POW from the Viet Nam war, Admiral Stockdale, when asked, “Who didn’t make it?” said it was the optimists who didn’t survive prison camp. “We’ll be out by Christmas!” But Christmas came, and “we are not saved.”
Why were the Jews not saved? Jeremiah 9 continues the thought:
Who is the man so wise that he can understand this? To whom has the mouth of the LORD spoken, that he may declare it? Why is the land ruined and laid waste like a wilderness, so that no one passes through?
And the LORD says: “Because they have forsaken my law that I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice or walked in accord with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Baals, as their fathers taught them. Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will feed this people with bitter food, and give them poisonous water to drink. I will scatter them among the nations whom neither they nor their fathers have known, and I will send the sword after them, until I have consumed them.” (Jeremiah 9.12 – 16, ESV)
Why is the land ruined? Because “they have forsaken my law…”
Then this well-known verse:
Thus says the LORD: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.” (Jeremiah 9.23, 24, ESV)
It is no secret what God delights in: “steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.” That’s why Micah could say,
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8, ESV)
“He has told you…”
And it’s never been about mere ritual:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will punish all those who are circumcised merely in the flesh— Egypt, Judah, Edom, the sons of Ammon, Moab, and all who dwell in the desert…for all these nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart.” (Jeremiah 9.25, 26, ESV)
The nations are uncircumcised , BUT Israel is uncircumcised, too. Uncircumcised in heart.
For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. (Romans 2.28, 29, ESV)