THE CREATOR AND THE CREATED

LORD, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in time of distress, to you the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say, “Our ancestors possessed nothing but false gods, worthless idols that did them no good. Do people make their own gods? Yes, but they are not gods!” —Jeremiah 16:19, 20

As the time of Judah’s defeat and exile drew closer, Jeremiah continued to draw a strong contrast between the God who was his strength, fortress, and refuge and the gods that the surrounding nations had simply made up. He predicted that a time would come when these surrounding nations would come to God’s people and admit, “Our ancestors left us a foolish heritage, for they worshiped worthless idols” (Jeremiah 16:19, NLT).

Jeremiah wanted to make the absurdity of following other gods obvious. How did it make sense that intelligent human beings could invent something, whether a story or a physical idol, that was in any way worthy of their worship? Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible puts verse 20 like this: “Shall man make gods, though men themselves are not gods?” The conclusion is that the created should worship the Creator, not the other way around. Jeremiah insisted that even the pagan nations would come to recognize this contradiction.

How much worse was it, then, when the people whose ancestors had passed down to them the worship of the true Creator turned their impulse to worship toward these same false gods? Jeremiah affirmed his trust in the true God of Israel, not only in his words but also by continuing to warn of the destruction of the nation and ridicule the idols that were leading the people astray. It took courage to continue to assert that God would restore the people to their land in an act of redemption and restoration as significant as when He had led the people out of Egypt centuries earlier (see Jeremiah 16:14, 15).

It was possible only because Jeremiah had found his fortress in God.