Do no wrong.....Jeremiah 22

I would not have wanted God to call me to do the work that he called Jeremiah to do.  It must have been an extraordinarily difficult life.  God gave Jeremiah a word to say to the rulers of his nation in his day and that word was that God was going to punish them, that their nation would be subjugated, that the people would suffer great defeat, great devastation and that many would be carried away from their homes and exiled to a foreign land.  Imagine what that would be like in America.  You start talking like that in public you are quickly known as a quack, a nutcase, someone who has gone off the deep end.  It is all right to express that you are a spiritual person, that you pray and go to church, but begin to say that God has given you a message and that message is that he is about to rain hard times on you because of your sinful ways and folks move away from you pretty quickly.

Could this happen to us today?  Could God remove his hand from us?  Do we believe God to be omnipotent?  Omnipresent?  Omniscient?  Do we believe that he is active in the affairs of man?  Do we believe that his commandments are true?  Not just on a personal level, but in national affairs as well?  If your answer is yes and it surely is if you consider yourself to be Christian then what are we to make of the current state of the world?  Is God pleased with what we have done?  With how we have responded to the poor and the powerless?  Who will he hold responsible for the genocides that have occurred in our lifetime?  Who will answer for Darfur?

Are the words of Jeremiah true for us in 2011 as they were for the Kings of Judah in his day?  "This is what the Lord says:  Do what is just and right.  Rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed.  Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place."  I suspect that God is still watching.  I suspect that those things that God condemned in that day are true as well for us.

How can we, as the Body of Christ, make our place of birth a place that cares for the least and the lost?  Or do we wait to see what God thinks about it on the day when we stand assembled with the sheep and the goats to see which way we counts us?