By David ReayTuesday 20 Aug 2019LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 2 minutes
For my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug out cisterns for themselves,
cracked cisterns
that can hold no water. (NRSV)
Some of us may have been tempted to give up on God at certain times. Nothing seems to be working out. Our prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling. There appears to be no one home in the universe. Things go from bad to worse.
What might stop us from abandoning God is the presence of effective alternatives. If I give up belief in God because of the terrible things that happen to others or to me, what happens? The terrible things still happen. I have turned my back on any source of consolation in my distress. I have jumped from the frying pan of faith into the fire of unbelief.
God was sending this sort of message to his people in the times of Jeremiah. His people had not only given up on God but had fashioned their own sources of hope which didn’t provide the hope they sought. They had turned their backs on truth and embraced a lie. And history shows it didn’t work out well for them.
Such is the problem we have when we have problems with belief in the God of the Bible. We can agree that such belief can raise issues and such belief is not a passport to an easy life. But there is no alternative at hand. Bringing in some substitute God or giving up on him altogether, will not resolve anything. My sometimes perplexing faith is infinitely preferable to a cracked cistern.
Blessings
David