First of all, apologies if you have been following this series and wondered why it stopped at the 17th May. Had I given up on reading the Bible? No! It’s just that I was somewhere without internet access for a week. Now back online.
If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
18 May. Jeremiah chapters 14-17
At the start of this reading Jeremiah predicts a severe drought (14:1-6). Such things may seem natural to us who think we understand earth’s climate, and we may mock those who say “do the skies themselves send down showers? No, it is you, O Lord our God” (14:22) and who understood drought and flood alike to be God’s punishment for human misbehaviour. But in an age when the climate becomes increasingly unpredictable, and then when scientists as well as environmentalists link this to our over-consumption of earth’s resources, maybe the ancients were right: it is in living in harmony with God and his creation that we have the best chance of a favourable climate.
The drought may have inspired Jeremiah’s contrast in chapter 17 between the man who trusts in other men and lives in a salty desert, and the one who trusts in God and is like a tree by streams of water. The same image is used in the Psalms, and also reminds us of Jesus’ parable of the two men who built on the sand and the rock, and only the latter survived a flood. Both images, of drought and of flood, portray the idea that God is the source of the life in us. Drought and dryness in the Bible can be a metaphor for the spiritual dryness that makes life seem drab, difficult and unbearable, whereas the tree by the stream is an image of a life that can cope with all extremes – plenty and want, floods that threaten to overwhelm us and barrenness that threatens to drive us to despair – and still flourish.