Jer. 23-24
“Men willingly believe what they wish” (Julius Caesar). How true that is! God addresses this fact through His prophet in Jeremiah 23:16-17. Just because somebody says they are speaking for God, it does not mean that they are. And the ‘tell’ is that these people who spread their own lies as truth speak to human desires. Verse 17 says, “They say continually to those who despise the word of the LORD, ‘It shall be well with you’; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’” I see this behavior everywhere these days – people twisting the truth to suit their own desires. God says that He is against such people – rightly so, as they are clearly against Him. But if God is against them, they will not stand. And that’s truth.
So we need to be careful. The fact that lies speak to our human desires makes them very easy to fall for. We believe them because we want to believe them. God’s truth is often harder to swallow, but accepting it is the only path to true peace and freedom. For a start, we can do the opposite of what we see in verse 17. We can delight in God. We can seek Him and strive to please Him instead of chasing after our own desires. It takes a concerted effort to put God’s desires above our own, but it is then that we can truly say, “it shall be well with you” and “no disaster shall come upon you.”
Heb. 4
Everything in the Bible is tied together, all feeding into the same basic message in so many profound ways. The concept of God’s Sabbath rest is one great example. I don’t even begin to understand the depths of it, but the writer of Hebrews touches on it. God’s rest on the seventh day at the creation of the world, His people’s entrance into the Promised Land, the required Sabbath rests around God’s ordained feasts and festivals for His people, and the salvation of those who believe and belong to Him – they are all connected.
We enter God’s rest – His salvation – by believing His truth, accepting His grace, and surrendering our lives to Him. When we do so, we become like the people who entered the Promised Land. They were given cities and houses they did not build and reaped produce they did not plant or work for. Hebrews 4:10 says, “for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from His.” And so we are given a life that we did not work for or earn for ourselves. We will enter that rest in full when God’s plan has been worked out to completion.