One of the things we depend on is that God is not fickle. He isn’t one way today and another way tomorrow. He doesn’t have one standard today and another tomorrow. He doesn’t have one standard for leaders and a different standard for followers.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
So we can ask. When a people go wrong—a whole community or even a nation of people—who does God blame?
There was a man named Jeremiah, and God came to him repeatedly with messages for all the people about what they were doing wrong. And I would assume that, since God doesn’t change, what he told him would still be applicable to us today. He sent Jeremiah down to a public place to tell the people how God felt about their lifestyles and what would come down on their heads because of them. This went on for years, and Jeremiah recorded all this in his memoirs—you probably have a copy of it right there in your house; it’s in the Bible. There was something of a dialogue between God and Jeremiah at times in all this. We learn what God thinks and feels, as well as Jeremiah’s completely understandable responses. We also learn the answer to the question: Who does God hold responsible?
Let’s begin today in chapter 23.