God’s love is amazing. We seem to be programmed, as people made in His image, to have innate love for those closest to us: Our mother and father, our spouse, our children. Yet even these strong bonds of love fall short of God’s love. While the sinful world may try to destroy and change the defini...

It is really interesting to take a step back from the inflated language of the media and social media and try to look clearly at the modern nation of Israel and her history. There is so much history! One thing is certain though, we must be careful to take our cues from Scripture. Let’s remember t...

Today in our reading, we hear about the false gods of Babylon. Based on worldly success alone, the Babylonian gods would have seemed very powerful. Isaiah doesn’t buy it though. He prophesies that the so-called gods will ultimately be conquered and go into captivity just like the many nations Bab...

The longer I live, the more I am finding out that Jesus Christ is the answer to all our problems. All other answers fail. Sin is a deep, dark hole that none of us can escape from. It affects us and infects us. Isaiah 50 tells of the ways that Jesus Christ has worked to free us from the ravages of...

We all have an internal longing for fairness and justice, it is a built-in feature from our Heavenly Father. The distressing thing is that actual justice seems to be out of our reach, and too often life is far from fair. How do we handle this, as Christians? We take our cues from the Scriptures.
...

The Hebrew term for watchmen is šāmar. It literally means to keep, to guard, to observe and give heed, and it is used many times in the book of Ezekiel. To be a watchman was a very important position as they were the ones who kept an eye out to alert the people of the city about news or danger. G...

There are consequences for the decisions we make. Most of us acknowledge this truth, even though we tend to not want the outcome of those choices. We will often not think about the consequences of our actions so that we can justify doing them in the first place! Our reading
today has me thinking ...

The name Jeremiah is pronounced in Hebrew as YIR-MEY-AHU. It is a word that means God founds, exalts, loosens or throws. Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet because much of his writing is music in the form of lamenting. Jeremiah was only a boy about thirteen years of age when he was called i...

Jeremiah began his ministry in the time of King Josiah—a king who conducted one of the greatest revivals of God’s law in history. But it did not last long. The people did not faithfully grab and hold onto the reality of God’s provision. The Law was still simply a set of laws, not God’s perfect wo...

What does it mean when we say we are ‘being destroyed’? Is our economy wrecked? Is our community at odds with one another? Is our house struggling to make ends meet? Is the population declining? What does it really mean to ‘be destroyed’? The answer to that question comes in Jeremiah 13, in which...

One of the things God did in the time of Jehoahaz, the son of Josiah, living around 606 BC, was to remove His blessing of peace from Judah. This set the pace for a cultural decline into turmoil. This is something we must learn: the peace of God does not come because we are good people. God favour...

In 606 BC, King Jehoahaz the son of Josiah, was ruling. Jehoahaz was not like his father, who had been the last great revivalist the kingdom of Judah would see. Josiah had sought the LORD while king in his teens, then in his 20’s the priests presented him with the book of the Law of God, it was a...

In 603 BC, Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah was ruling in his 4th year and Jeremiah the prophet was bringing a message of warning from God. Jeremiah identifies the timing like this, “From the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, even to this day, this is the twenty-...

It is approximately 593 BC when Jeremiah records his work in Jeremiah 28. It is at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah and there are many false prophets who are speaking to the king and people. Interestingly, this is not unlike our present day: There are many words
being given in...

When we talk about the commands of God, what does that mean? The word command means to direct or give an authoritative order, rule, task or prerogative. In other words, it is not a suggestion but a directive––it is not a may but a must. Therefore, when God issues a command, it is most certainly n...

Christians serve Jesus Christ, who is fully God and fully man, and the firstborn of eternal life in human flesh. Right now, we serve the Lord Jesus in a world that is fully submerged in sin—the opposite of God—God is sinless, while we are sinful as human beings. Sin entered the heart of
man when ...

The date was about 586 BC. God had destroyed Jerusalem, so there was a time of peace that came for Jeremiah. He had suffered under his own people because he had prophesied many times that the king of Babylon would succeed. Now the king of Babylon had put a man named Gedaliah in place as governor ...

The men who came back to Judah after the short-lived time of peace which Gedaliah had presided over, chose to kill Gedaliah and run off to Egypt. In the process, they denounced Jeremiah who had prophesied against this whole rebellion, and the men took him with them to Tahpanhes, Egypt. Here again...

The land of Gaza is mentioned in the Bible many times. Historically, it belonged to the Philistines, a Canaanite culture who fought against the nation of Israel. While King David was able to diminish their presence and power in the region, much later Jeremiah would still prophesy against
the Phil...

The city of Jerusalem was one of the proudest places in antiquity. There is no question that its stately status was a result of kings like David and his son Solomon. Now the city was a filthy mess, burned down by the rollicking Babylonians. It is to this change in status that Jeremiah breaks down...

When the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians, it was over. If we had been present during that time, this song of lament would be very potent. Jerusalem and Judah had failed to fulfill the covenant of the LORD, and as a result God brought destruction upon them. The book of Lamentati...

Ezekiel was a priest turned prophet who was taken captive during the exile of Judah and Jerusalem. He was carried off to Babylon before the final destruction of Jerusalem in which Nebuchadnezzar burned down everything including the Temple structure. God allowed this destruction because of the sin...

Sin is not simple, and it is not something that can easily be understood. It is complicated and messy, and our sin has unforeseen consequences not only on ourselves but often others as well. It is good for us then to stay away from it! Paul the apostle told the church at Corinth, “Flee sexual imm...