What in the World Happened?
because they have forsaken Me and made this an alien place Jeremiah 19:4
Alien – You come home. You open the door, turn on the lights and suddenly realize that something isn’t right. Someone has been there. Things are out of place. The back door is open. Your valuables are missing. You’ve been robbed. If this has happened to you, then you know the sense of invasion, the dread of feeling that your privacy has been violated. If this has happened to you, then you have just the slightest inkling of what God must feel. His home, our earth, has been violated. It has been made an unrecognizable place.
That’s the meaning of this word, nakar. Normally used as a word for careful consideration and investigation (see Genesis 31:32), here it carries the sense of making a place strange to the inhabitants. But that’s only the beginning of the shock. The real impact comes when we discover who is responsible for making our home a shambles. It’s you and me. We have trashed God’s house. We have violated His sanctuary. And we did it with just the smallest of choices. We did it by forsaking Him.
This sense of invasion applies to both the internal and external world. God is the creator of all of it. It’s all His house. When I forsake Him in my inner spiritual life, I turn myself into an alien place. And when we as a people forsake Him in our corporate lives, we turn the entire world into an alien place. If you don’t believe this is true, just look around. Our world is no garden! It’s a trash heap. Millions are dying from neglect while a very few gorge themselves. Possession is the ruling mindset of the age. “I, me, mine” governs our every step. The commandments of God are dismissed, ignored or protested. Every man does what is right in his own eyes. And worst of all, the church is a sham. It is as much a part of the garbage pile as any exploiting multi-national. Bent on “big”, the church saddles its members with mountains of debt while it fails to equip the saints as change agents of culture. Seduced by power, the church hierarchy expects to be served instead of wrapping itself with a towel and handling dirty water. Jesus came to die in order to change the world. These days we seem to think the world will change by living a more prosperous life. True followers of the Way are strangers in a strange land. They know they don’t belong in this unrecognizable place. Sometimes they just can’t imagine being here at all!
Are you uncomfortable in this “home”? God certainly is! So what are you going to do about it?
