Jeremiah the Prophet and Current World Turmoil

I have been reading through the prophet Jeremiah and specifically the book of Lamentations. Its a thought provoking, convicting, and prayer enabling study as Jeremiah views, experiences, and warns about the judgment of God against his faithless people.

All of Israel's institutions had failed. Sin abounded causing the corruption of the offices of King, Priest, and Prophet. Jeremiah's hard task was to proclaim God's determination to judge his people and to enact the curses promised in Deuteronomy 28. The horrific nature of the events recorded is hard for modern believers to comprehend. How many people deny that God executes or even permits temporal judgments let alone believe that He decrees them? Yet such temporal judgments serve a redemptive purpose. Just as Israel was forced to see their sin and to long for a righteous redeemer so that in the fullness of time God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law; so we seeing such temporal judgments long for Christ, long for his promised return, and the regeneration of all things. Temporal judgments are warnings of the final just judgment to come. They say to us, "Flee to Christ!"

As I ponder over the news articles of the economic chaos in Greece, the US, and elsewhere as I read about wars, injustices, murders, and all sorts of social decay I think about Jeremiah. I don't think the US is Israel. I do think Church has lost its way and is largely bereft of blessing. Christendom has embraced secularism. It has abandoned Christian ethics and appeased the world by giving in to the adulterers, the homosexuals, the legalists, the religious syncretists, etc. There is little belief in the redemptive power of the gospel. As Michael Horton of White Horse Inn fame has written many the broad Church have a Christless Christianity.

If I can make the analogy that as the weakening of the power of the US results in the growing influence of oppressive governments and emboldening of its enemies so the sinfulness and weakening of the Church has resulted in the growing influence of false religions and the emboldening of the Church's enemies. There can be no truce between truth and falsehood. God's truth will ultimately prevail. We may see the Church undergo a period of temporal judgment that we haven't experienced in decades. May we weep like Jeremiah. "How the gold has become dim." "Turn us back to you, O LORD, and we will be restored."