Thursday, January 21, 2021
This is what
the Lord said to me: “Go and buy a clay jar. Then ask some of the leaders of the people and
of the priests to follow you. Go out through the Gate of
Broken Pots to the garbage dump in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, and give them this
message. Say to them, ‘Listen to this message from
the Lord, you kings of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem! This is what the Lord of Heaven’s
Armies, the God of Israel, says: I will
bring a terrible disaster on this place, and the ears of those who hear about
it will ring! “‘For Israel
has forsaken me and turned this valley into a place of wickedness. The people burn incense to foreign gods—idols
never before acknowledged by this generation, by their ancestors, or by the
kings of Judah. And they have filled
this place with the blood of innocent children. They have
built pagan shrines to Baal, and there they burn their sons as sacrifices to
Baal. I have never commanded such a
horrible deed; it never even crossed my mind to command such a thing! So
beware, for the time is coming, says the Lord, when this garbage dump will
no longer be called Topheth or the valley of Ben-Hinnom, but the Valley of
Slaughter. “‘For I will upset
the careful plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will allow the people to be slaughtered by
invading armies, and I will leave their dead bodies as food for the vultures
and wild animals. I will reduce Jerusalem to ruins,
making it a monument to their stupidity. All who pass by will be astonished and will
gasp at the destruction they see there. I will see to it
that your enemies lay siege to the city until all the food is gone. Then those trapped inside will eat their own
sons and daughters and friends. They
will be driven to utter despair.’ “As
these men watch you, Jeremiah, smash the jar you brought. Then
say to them, ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: As this jar lies shattered, so I will shatter
the people of Judah and Jerusalem beyond all hope of repair. They will bury the bodies here in Topheth, the
garbage dump, until there is no more room for them. This
is what I will do to this place and its people, says the Lord. I will cause this city to become defiled like
Topheth. Yes, all the houses in Jerusalem, including the
palace of Judah’s kings, will become like Topheth—all the houses where you
burned incense on the rooftops to your star gods, and where liquid offerings
were poured out to your idols.’” Then
Jeremiah returned from Topheth, the garbage dump where he had delivered this
message, and he stopped in front of the Temple of the Lord. He said to the people there, “This
is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: ‘I will bring disaster upon this city and its
surrounding towns as I promised, because you have stubbornly refused to listen
to me.’” Jeremiah 19:1-15
The state of Judah and Israel, along with its people, smelled like
Ben-Hinnom, the garbage dump outside Jerusalem.
Metaphorically, it was like the dumpster behind an abortion clinic…it
smelled of death, and nothing living could survive there long.
Jeremiah’s message, something of a children’s sermon object lesson,
was unmistakable; the broken pieces of a clay pot belonged on a rubble heap,
useless – its purpose forever shattered.
God was telling his people they’d done this to themselves, become a
shattered mess of what hopes and dreams they’d sinned-away by worshipping other
gods, and even resorting to the unthinkable practice of child-sacrifice. Disaster was about to be applied to the
fragile clay pot of an unsuspecting nation.
A message like this could not have had a pretty reaction. Indeed, Jeremiah’s future was probably sealed
by this sermon. It would be thirty years
later that Jerusalem would fall, but the memory of God’s enemies is long. The prophet’s message was fulfilled just a
few years later as Jerusalem fell in BC 586.
I have long seen this as a shroud of warning to our country, once a
beacon of life, now copying the practices of the garbage dump with opulence,
hedonism, and children sacrificed to the god of convenience.
Today is the first full day of a new administration in our
country. Some have said that the new
president’s most daunting challenge is to unify a divided
population. While that is an expected
and somewhat laudable idea, I disagree.
You cannot unify (in any lasting or genuine sense) people who have
antithetical values. For Christians,
guided by Holy Scripture, you cannot simply request that they accept darkness
as light. Opposites may attract, but
eventually they negate each other. When
cold decides to coexist with hot the result is nauseating lukewarm. Frankly, shades of gray (produced by the
marriage of light and darkness) may do well in a charcoal drawing, but as a
life principle, anything short of stepping into the light of God’s will is
well-short of the mark.
For You Today
I do not approve of anarchy or the kind of bloody insurrection we have
seen of late in Washington. But neither
can I keep from praying to God that we wake up to the smell of the garbage dump
of Hinnom and turn away from the culture of death.
[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
For other posts on this topic see Broken Pieces and Shattered Beyond All Hope of Repair
