Thoughts on Jeremiah 25 & Romans 1

Today’s reading: Jeremiah 25; Romans 1

We think freedom is found in rebellion, living our own way rather than submitting to the Lord’s, but the reality is that the truest freedom we can ever experience is to live within God’s design.

Whether we like it or not, God is both creator and judge over all creation. He does not ask us whether we like that He is in that position or not, it is simply the structure of reality as He has designed it, and that has serious consequences to the question of how we should live our lives.

First of all, as we see in Romans 1, because God is our designer, when we live in ways that oppose or violate our design, there are natural consequences we face for our choices. We did not design, invent, or create ourselves, and therefore are not at liberty to decide the design is wrong. The best example I have heard for this is a fish wanting to live out of water. A fish is designed to live and thrive underwater. If a fish decided though that that was clearly incorrect, and true freedom could only be found living on land, such a fish would quickly suffer the natural consequence of its choice for “freedom.” Obviously the fish would die quickly, unable to breathe above water, but even if it could survive longer, it would find itself ill suited to the environment, unable to hunt, easy prey for any predator, dried out by the air and sun, etc. In so many ways, a fish is objectively not suited for life on land, no matter how much the fish may believe that that would be the better life.

In a very similar fashion, God has created us to live in certain ways and within certain bounds. In Romans 1, Paul describes humanity as fish thinking they know freedom is found on land. He says, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools…” They turned from God to lesser things, and from His ways to lesser ways, thinking they were wise enough to know better than God. The result is a downward spiral of humanity as God gives them over more and more to the consequences of their “wisdom.” This downward spiral of morality and the degradation of human society was not the result of God actively judging humanity, but of God simply removing His hand of protection and allowing people to experience the full repercussions of their choice to “live on land.”

This is the first side of the “freedom” equation we see from our reading this morning, that to exercise our freedom to live opposed to God’s design is to choose a sort of internal self-destruction, but that is not the only consequence of this choice. The other side of this equation is that God is not only our designer, but also our judge.

Again, you are free to dislike or disbelieve this reality, but your dislike or disbelief will not stop you from standing before the Lord at the end of your life for judgement. In Jeremiah 25, today, we read about God judging the nations for how they were living and operating. Those nations were not God’s people, but there was still a point at which He determined that they had gone too far and would face His judgment as He declared it through Jeremiah. Those nations could object all they wanted, but their objections or disagreement with the punishment couldn’t do a single thing to stop the Lord from using Babylon as His arm of judgement against them.

Here is another silly/oversimplified example: Imagine you lived under a government that would severely punish anyone who wore a red shirt. You are free to disagree with that law, and you are free to think it is silly, worthless, or even damaging, but if you choose to wear a red shirt, you will face the consequences of your choice. You are free to make the choice to wear a red shirt, but you are not free, just because you don’t agree with the law, to decide that the consequences don’t apply to you. Despite all your disagreements, you will still be judged for your choice to violate the law.

In the same way, if God is truly the objective judge over all creation, then you are free to dislike or disagree with what He has said, but that doesn’t change the fact that you will ultimately be judged for violating it.

There is an incredibly prevalent lie today that we are free to do whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t harm another person (though even that is highly subjective in terms of how we define harm…), and that nobody, whether God, government, family, friends, or anybody else, should be able to tell us otherwise. But no matter how much we may want this to be true, God, as our designer gets to tell us how life works best, and as our judge, gets to tell us what the consequences are for violating His design.

So we don’t get to just decide God is wrong and live however we want without consequences, but I would be completely remiss to end this post without jumping ahead a bit in Romans to remind us that this same God, our designer and judge, also desires to be our father. He created humanity to be His family, and though, in our sin and rebellion, we have been cutoff, Jesus died on the cross to open the door for us to come back into the family by faith. No matter how long we have been living in rebellion, and no matter how far from His design we may have wandered, through Christ we can return, be adopted back into God’s family, and spend eternity with Him, because Jesus has taken the consequences of our rebellion on Himself.