Scripture Daily

Context No. 455 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 5:1-6: in context

1“Run back and forth through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in its wide places, if you can find a man, if there is anyone who does justly, who seeks truth, then I will pardon her. 2Though they say, ‘As the LORD lives,’ surely they swear falsely.” 3O LORD, don’t your eyes look on truth? You have stricken them, but they were not grieved. You have consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction. They have made their faces harder than a rock. They have refused to return. 4Then I said, “Surely these are poor. They are foolish; for they don’t know the LORD’s way, nor the law of their God. 5I will go to the great men and will speak to them, for they know the way of the LORD, and the law of their God.” But these with one accord have broken the yoke, and burst the bonds. 6Therefore a lion out of the forest will kill them. A wolf of the evenings will destroy them. A leopard will watch against their cities. Everyone who goes out there will be torn in pieces, because their transgressions are many and their backsliding has increased.

God gives Jeremiah a striking assignment: run up and down the streets of Jerusalem, search its squares, and see if you can find even one person who does justice and seeks truth. If you can find a single righteous person, God says, I will pardon the whole city. It echoes Abraham pleading for Sodom, and it reveals how much weight God places on even one faithful person; a whole corrupt city could be spared for the sake of one. But the search comes up empty. People swear oaths in God's name and swear them falsely; God has disciplined them and they were not grieved; they have made their faces harder than rock and refused to turn back.

Then Jeremiah does something very reasonable, and it gets corrected. He reasons to himself that surely the problem is confined to the poor and uneducated, the ones who simply do not know the LORD's way or the law of their God. So he says, I will go to the great men, the leaders, the educated, the ones who know the way of the LORD and the law of their God; surely they will be faithful. And he goes to them, and finds that they, with one accord, had broken the yoke and burst the bonds just as thoroughly. The people who should have known better, who had the knowledge, the position, the training in God's law, were not more faithful than the ignorant poor. If anything, they had rejected God's way with fuller knowledge of what they were rejecting. Knowing the way and walking in it turned out to be two entirely different things.

That correction is worth sitting with, because it is easy to assume that knowledge equals obedience, that the people who should know better, the educated, the leaders, the religiously informed, are therefore the faithful ones. Jeremiah assumed exactly that and was wrong. And it presses on me directly: if I am someone who knows God's way well, do I quietly assume that my knowledge means I am living it, when Jeremiah found that the ones who knew the way best had most deliberately broken the yoke? Have I mistaken knowing the truth for actually doing it?

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