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NASB | Jeremiah 4:1 "If you will return, O Israel," declares the LORD, "Then you should return to Me. And if you will put away your detested things from My presence, And will not waver, |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Jeremiah 4:1 "If you will return, O Israel," says the LORD, "If you will return to Me, And if you will put away your detestable things and remove your man-made gods from My sight, And not stray or waver, |
Subject: Return to the God of the Word |
Bible Note: "We have turned to a God that we can use rather than to a God we must obey; and we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whom we must surrender our rights to ourselves. He is a God for us, for our satisfaction -- not because we have learned to think of Him in this way through Christ but because we learned to think of Him in this way through the marketplace. In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well. And so we transform the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy. We imagine that He is benign, that He will acquiesce as we toy with His reality and co-opt Him in the promotion of our ventures and careers. Thus do we presume to restrain Him in a Weberian 'iron cage' of this-worldly preoccupation. Thus do we tighten our grip upon Him. And if this sunshine of His benign grace fails to warm us as we expect, if He fails to shower prosperity and success on us, we will find ourselves unable to believe in Him anymore. "What has been lost in all of this, of course, is God's angularity, the sharp edges that truth so often has and that He has preeminently. It is our fallenness fleshed out in our modernity that makes us God smooth, that imagines He will accommodate our instincts, shabby and self-centered as they so often are, because He is love. "In a psychologized culture such as ours, there is a deep affinity for what is relational but a disease with what is moral. This carries over into the church as an infatuation with the love of God and an embarrassment at His holiness. We who are modern find it infinitely easier to believe that God is like a Rogerian therapist who emphatically solicits our knowledge of ourselves and passes judgment on none of it than to think that He could have had any serious business to conduct with Moses. "This peculiarity of the modern disposition, this loss of substance and vigor, betrays our misunderstanding of God's immanence, His relatedness to creation. We imagine that the great purposes of life are psychological rather than moral. We imagine that the great purposes of life are realized in the improvement of our own private inner disposition. We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to His purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives. Modernity has secured the triumph of the therapeutic over the moral even in the church. "The fact is, of course, that the New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumer's satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. the faithful in Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed. The gospel offers no promises that contemporary believers will be spared of these experiences, that they will be able to settle down to the sanitized comfort of an inner life freed of stresses, pains, and ambiguities; it simply promises that through Christ, God will walk with us in all the dark places of life, that He has the power and the will to invest His promises with reality, and that even the shadows are made to serve His glory and our best interests. A therapeutic culture will be inclined to view such promises as something of a disappointment; those who understand that reality is at heart moral because God is centrally holy will be satisfied that this is all they need to know. "We will not be able to recover the vision and understanding of God's grandeur until we recover an understanding of ourselves as creatures who have been made to know such grandeur. This must begin with the recovery of the idea that as beings made in God's image, we are fundamentally moral beings, not consumers, that the satisfaction of our psychological needs pales in significance when compared with the enduring value of doing what is right. religious consumers want to have a spirituality for the same reason that they want to drive a stylish and expensive auto. Costly obedience is as foreign to them in matters spiritual as self-denial is in matters material. In a culture filled with such people, restoring weight to God is going to involve much more than getting some doctrinal truths straight; it's going to entail a complete reconstruction of the modern self-absorbed pastiche personality. The cost of accomplishing this may well be deep, sustained repentance. It is our modernity that must be undone. Only then will the full weight of the revealed truth of God rest once more on the soul. Only then will we recover our saltiness in the world Only then will God genuinely be known in His church." --David F. Wells, "God In The Wasteland" (1994) |
Down View Branch | ID# 237256 | ||
Questions and/or Subjects for Jer 4:1 | Author | ||
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DocTrinsograce | ||
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azurelaw | ||
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DocTrinsograce |