Liberty

Jeremiah 35:17 “Therefore thus says the Lord: You have not obeyed me by proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother and to his neighbour; behold, I proclaim to you liberty to the sword, to pestilence and to famine, declares the Lord. I will make you a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.” 

I have been reading Jeremiah for a while now. It’s a lot to take. Mostly the book is tough on Jeremiah. He is castigated, thrown in jail, thrown in a pit, and warned that he is a terror to the people. The language of a verse like the one above is tough to take. It’s one of those, “God of the Old Testament” sounding verses that people can struggle with.  We need to remember that Jesus is the full revelation of God. Any time you come across a verse like this in the Old Testament, remember that God’s judgment is fully exercised on the cross. Jesus said that we are to love our enemies. The verse doesn’t disappear, however. God is the same yesterday, today and forever. We can see, in this verse, and throughout the prophetic writings that one of the things that is anathema to God is when the freedom of people is taken by other people. We are witnessing, in the United States, protest that may lead to societal change. The country of the United States was built largely on the backs of slaves. People were denied their God given liberty. It is 401 years since the first slaves were brought to America and we can see that liberty is different still for a person of colour than it is for a someone who is white. It is tough to consider that the history of slavery in the United States is intertwined with the history of Christianity in the United States. Slavetraders and slaveholders were largely people who declared Christian faith and often spoke as if they were superior, counting their faith as part of that superiority.  

As you see the news, the marches, the protests, remember that those fighting for the liberty of others are fighting for a cause that God told us was right.