A Ramble about a Whoring Wife

I've been reading through Jeremiah lately. I started reading it for a couple of reasons. The first is that a lot of the readings in the lectionary for the last few weeks have been from Jeremiah, and the second is that the version of Jeremiah that's in my Bible is from the Septuagint, and is a little different from the ones I've read before. There's nothing new in it, it's just arranged differently in the Septuagint than it is in the Hebrew.



There's something that's really been sticking out to me this time around through Jeremiah. God is angry with Judah. I know this should be a "duh," but it really stuck out to me how angry He was. He was flat out pissed off (forgive my crudeness but there really are few good terms in English that express how angry He was). He was so pissed off that He told Jeremiah several times, "don't bother praying for these people. I won't hear any prayers to deliver them." He reinforced it by saying something to the effect of "It wouldn't matter if Moses or Samuel pleaded for them."



What made Him so angry? They kept worshiping idols and then they would turn around and say "what? We didn't do anything wrong. Why are You mad at us?" The illustration He uses is that of a wife who blatantly prostitutes herself with every man who comes her way, and then wonders why her husband is upset. In God's eyes, they broke their marriage contract with Him not just once or even twice, but brazenly like a whore who can't get enough. It was because of this that God "divorced" Israel and Judah and used Assyria and Babylon to cart them off of His land. He still loved them. He had plans to restore them once they had learned their lesson. But for the moment, He was pissed off by them.



The thing which keeps going through my mind is that the New Covenant is also like a marriage contract between God and the Church. It seems like most people believe that there are no terms to this contract. But Jesus actually did give terms to it. He said "remain in Me, and I in you." And He said, "If anyone doesn't remain in Me, he is cast out, withers, and is thrown into a fire." He also said, "A New commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you." And also, "remain in My love." The terms of the New Covenant, the new marriage contract between God and His Church can be summed up in these few statements which He said at the Last Supper.



God doesn't change. This is a fundamental fact of His Existence. He is love, but He is also a jealous husband. He is patient and forgiving. He also doesn't put up with His bride disrespecting and defiling the marriage bed. St. Paul warned about provoking God by drinking the cup of idols as well as drinking the cup of Christ.



The commands to love are all too often ignored in practice by Christians today. All too often we are told that the command to remain in Him is something deep that most Christians won't understand. All too often, the terms of the marriage contract which we made with our Lord are violated with impunity, and like the whoring wife we come home to Him expecting Him to overlook our infidelity and pretend nothing's wrong. We look Him in the eye with a straight face and say "but you still love and forgive me, right?" And then the next day we go out and do it again.



God does love us, passionately. It kills Him every time we go out and it drives a wedge into our marriage between us and Him. Struggling with something He understands and is willing to help us through it. Flaunting our enjoyment of it in front of Him is another matter altogether. It hurts our relationship with Him. It hurts Him. And because of this, it hurts us whether we know it or not.



Knowing that it causes all this damage, do we really expect Him to stand by and do nothing about it? This is the same God that brought the superpowers of the world to nuke (metaphorically speaking) Israel and Judah for their infidelity. Do we really think He'll stand by forever with us?



Another troubling correlation between us and the events in Jeremiah is that there are so-called "prophets" today who have risen up and told us that everything's cool. God wants to make us rich and make us be happy! He wants to give us a whole bunch of "stuff!" Even when Jesus said very clearly that you can't serve both God and wealth (mammon).



God is love. God gets angry because He loves, not because He doesn't. The person who can hurt you the most is the one who is closest to your heart, and we are closest to His. He gets angry to cause positive change, not because He wants to cause harm.



As I've been reading Jeremiah, I often get the sense these days that God is angry with His bride once again. I get the sense too, like in Jeremiah's day, that we may be past the point of no return on this. "Don't even bother praying about it." Truth is, it makes me sick to think about what that means.