“Some WON'T Learn” – FBC Morning Light (8/6/2024)

What a good Tuesday morning to you. I hope your week got off to a good start yesterday, and today

I hope your morning is going well. I trust you're watching this in the morning. If not, well, nevertheless.

I hope you're following along in our Bible reading plan. We've been chronologically reading through the

Scriptures this year, and we're in Jeremiah today, chapters 3 through 5. I want to zero in on just a few verses in chapter 3, because as I read them,

I was reminded of a experience, comparable experience, both in driver's ed class in high school, and then just before going home for Christmas break in college.

Let me explain. When I was in college, the night before, we were all supposed to go home for Christmas break.

I went to a college in the southeast, and we traveled, and kids were from all over the country, and next morning they'd be getting up and heading out to their homes, scattered all over the place, and this is in December, so, you know, it could be some treacherous driving.

So, what the administration did was they called everybody together for an assembly, as a mandatory assembly, in the big auditorium, and they showed these movies produced by the

Ohio Highway Patrol, and it was the same kind of movies I remembered seeing a few years earlier in driver's ed class in my sophomore year of high school.

They were terrifying. They were awful. They were, I can still see some of the images of the crash scenes that the

Highway Patrol produced, and so they'd show us these horrible images of terrible accidents, and they'd tell us what caused the accidents.

This person was a drunk driver. This person fell asleep at the wheel. This person was driving too fast, and caused this accident, and so on and so forth.

They'd give the cause of accident, and then they'd say, you know, three people were killed in this accident, and this person was paralyzed for the rest of their life, and on and on.

I mean, just trying to scare the pudding out of you, or maybe I should say, trying to scare the caution into you.

I can understand that. It makes some pretty good sense, doesn't it? You want to see what can happen if you're not alert at the wheel.

You want to see what can happen if you're such a fool as to drive drunk, and so on and so forth.

So, you can see those kinds of things, and be forewarned. That was the point, but it seems that, nevertheless, there are still kids that would get behind the wheel of the car the next day, and they'd gun it.

It's a 12 -hour ride, it's a 12 -hour drive to get home, and they're gonna make it in 10. What does that tell you?

And unfortunately, too many times we'd come back after Christmas break, and we'd hear about some students that were in a pretty serious accident on the way home.

Well, much to be learned from that, isn't there? Well, the reason I bring that up is because in Jeremiah chapter 3, you have the same kind of a setting, but with God's people, the tribes of Israel to the north and the divided kingdom, remember,

Israel to the north and Judah to the south. And the Lord says this in Jeremiah 3, verse 6, he says the

Lord said to me in those days, in the days of Josiah the king, have you seen what backsliding Israel has done?

She has gone up on every high mountain and under every green tree, and there played the harlot. Now, what the Lord's talking about by playing the harlot is the practice of idolatry, turning their back on the

Lord and practicing idolatry. And I, the Lord said, after she had done all these things, return to me, repent, return to me.

But she did not return. And then he says this, and her treacherous sister

Judah saw it. So Judah saw what Israel did in their idolatry, and what they didn't do in their failure to repent and return to the

Lord. Then in verse 8 it says, then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding

Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce.

Now there, the Lord is giving a picture, an image, if you will, of what he did when he allowed the

Assyrians to come and capture Israel, take over Israel, take a whole bunch of people into captivity, and completely displace the ten tribes of Israel.

The Lord uses that imagery of giving her a certificate of divorce and putting her away.

And he says at the end of verse 8, yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also.

So Judah was behaving like some of those smart -aleck, arrogant, proud young people who see the scary videos of these horrible accidents and say, ah, they're just trying to scare us,

I don't have to listen to that stuff, I'm not gonna get in any kind of an accident, you know, nah,

I'm too good for that, this isn't gonna happen to me. Now, maybe we're not so bold and brazen as Judah or the foolish college kid who thinks he can still go a hundred miles an hour down the interstate and not suffer any consequences for it.

But have we not been guilty of, you know, looking around and seeing the chastening and the punishment that God has brought upon those who have taken their fist at him, have backslidden and refused to repent, have we learned anything from that?

Has their failure and the consequences of their sin, has that taught us anything?

It should. And that's, I think, the point that I want to get across today, that we don't have to learn by suffering for our own sins and mistakes and failures.

If we will but learn from the failures and the consequences of those failures of others, then how much wiser will we be?

Oh, may the Lord give us such wisdom. Our Father and our God, I pray that we wouldn't be foolish, arrogant people who think that nothing could happen to us.

We're fine, we're good, we can do what we want to do and we'll get away with it, no problem. The Lord delivers from such folly, we pray, we ask it in Jesus' name.