Read Ruth 1, Jeremiah 36 and Jeremiah 45.
This devotional is about Jeremiah 36 & 45.
Many years ago, I was writing an academic paper that I was scheduled to present to a conference of scholars on preaching. I was more than 70% finished with the paper when the hard drive on my computer died, taking all my work with it. If you’ve ever had that happen to you, you know how disheartening it is to lose all your work and have to start over.
Fortunately, I had backed up my hard drive the night before so I didn’t actually lose all my work; I only lost one day’s work, namely, the pages I had written the day the hard drive died. It was frustrating, and created some stress because the deadline was approaching, but it wasn’t as disheartening as starting over from scratch would be.
Here in Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah dictated a sermon to be delivered at the temple (vv. 1-4). Then, because Jeremiah was no longer allowed in the temple, he sent Baruch, the man who wrote down the message Jeremiah dictated, to read the scroll aloud in the temple (vv. 5-8). This message started a season of repentance in Judah (vv. 9-10). Then, some of Judah’s government officials were told about the message and they wanted Baruch to read it to them, too (vv. 11-18). Finally, these government officials decided that the king needed to hear these words (vv. 20-21).
Baruch and Jeremiah were told to hide, so the king, Jehoiakim, had one of his guys read the scroll (v. 22). He was not nearly as impressed (v. 24) by the Lord’s words as the others were; instead, he cut off pieces of the scroll as it was read and burned Jeremiah’s entire message one piece at a time (v. 23). Like having a hard drive crash or having your forthcoming book manuscript burned up in a house fire, Jeremiah had to do the work of dictating the message all over again (vv. 27-30).
Few people would have the audacity to cut pages out of God’s word and burn them. This is doubly true for Christians; most of us don’t even know what to do with our warn our Bibles because we would never throw them in the trash can.
But, when we ignore sections of God’s word or reinterpret parts of it that are distasteful to us, we are doing something similar to what Jehoiakim did when he burned Jeremiah’s scroll. We are reading a heavily-edited copy of the Word, but, rather than edit or destroy the physical copy of scripture, the editing is done in our minds or through our choices of what to read and what not to read.
This is one reason, by the way, that I do verse-by-verse, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, book by book expository preaching. Preaching the next passage in the Bible prevents me from ignoring the harder passages to interpret or avoiding the passages that might be painful or controversial.
Reading through the Old Testament like we are also helps us to get exposure to all of God’s Word, not just the parts that we find comforting. But we can still do our own editing of God’s word by applying and obeying some parts of it while living in disobedience to other parts.
Are there any areas in your life where you are ignoring or avoiding God’s word?