The Anatomy of Divorce
Share
The Anatomy of Divorce
Jeremiah 2:1–3:5
Main Idea:The God who committed never to leave us is the same God who committed never to leave us in sin.
- We Forget What God Has Done for Us (2:5-8).
- We Find Our Satisfaction in Something Else (2:8-37).
- God Files for Divorce (3:8).
- God Will Not Leave Us Alone (3:1-5).
There is nothing like young love.
This is one of Jeremiah’s early sermons. In the introduction to the sermon, he describes young love in the most poetic way. The love is not between two people but between Judah and God. This metaphor is woven throughout Scripture. The idea is that God is the husband and his people collectively are his bride. This passage describes when the love was new, fresh and exciting.
They are no longer newlyweds, but God remembers when they were. Jeremiah 2:2-3 describes how they felt about each other. When they were newlyweds, the bride was devoted (v. 2). God remembers something specific. He remembers when they were in the wilderness. Things were not perfect. They had their moments. But on the whole God’s people remained faithful until Joshua led them out of the wilderness and into the promised land. Those were good days. In fact, God’s people were so committed to God that they made an oral covenant with him. Before entering the promised land, they told Joshua, “We will worship the Lord our God and obey him” (Josh 24:24). This was devotion. The generation that entered the promised land had seen Jericho fall; they had seen the tragedy of cheating on God; and still they saw his faithfulness when Ai fell. They had seen the sun stand still so that God could fight for them. No wonder they loved their groom so much.
As for God, he felt the same way. Look at verse 3. “Israel was holy to the Lord, the firstfruits of his harvest. All who ate it found themselves guilty; disaster came on them.” Whenever Israel would harvest grain, the first fruit was set apart for God. It was dedicated, consecrated. It was holy. It had no other purpose than for being set aside. It was special. It was so special that if someone came along and ate some of what was to be dedicated to the Lord, he was guilty.
So God says in effect, “All the world is mine; but you, my love, are special. You are the consecrated part of the world. In fact, if anyone touches you, disaster will come upon them.” God meant it because he could do it. These were no empty words. God is not posing. He really did wipe out the nations before his people; he really did make a way for them. He really did drive out anyone who came against them. What a husband! He was their husband, and his people were the devoted bride.
That’s why it’s so shocking that God brings up divorce. Look at 3:8: “I observed that it was because unfaithful Israel had committed adultery that I had sent her away and had given her a certificate of divorce.” God is sending her a decree of divorce, and the reason is simple: she was adulterous.
To say the least, this is an odd, even shocking, metaphor. We think of people leaving God; we hardly think of God leaving people. Yet the metaphor is as appropriate as it is shocking. God cannot be blamed for wanting out of a relationship when his bride, Israel, has been serially unfaithful to him. It is also quite predictable. When people part ways with God, it often follows a pattern. This passage shows us the anatomy of divorce.
We Forget What God Has Done for Us
Jeremiah 2:5-8
God said he remembered the way things used to be (v. 2). But Judah forgot. Look at verses 5-8. The leaders forgot. They stopped asking about the God who delivered them from the oppressive hand of Pharaoh. They forgot about the God who led an entire nation through a wilderness. They forgot about the fertile promised land to which God brought them. In fact, the rulers who were to have this in the forefront of their minds no longer knew God. The shepherds tasked with leading them to God were leading them to false gods.
How did this happen? National leaders did not lead in truth.
When Joshua defeated Jericho and Ai, he took the law and read it to the Israelites (Josh 8:34-35). Joshua was there when God gave this word to Moses, and he knew that God wanted to relate to his people through his covenant law. Yet the law of Moses was forgotten. Josiah, about seven hundred years after Joshua, rediscovered the law and read it to the people. Jeremiah is ministering during the time of Josiah’s reforms. He is trying to remind them of the way things were and exhort them not to forget God. If the Word of God is not prominent in people’s minds, they forget that God has decided to relate to people through his Word. This is why the indictment of verse 8 is so biting.
The priests quit asking, “Where is the Lord?”
The experts in the law no longer knew me,
and the rulers rebelled against me.
In other words, the leaders who were to lead people to seek God through his law no longer sought God. As the leaders go, so goes the faith. It is no wonder they got into trouble with idolatry. They had forgotten all that God had done for them.
Perhaps the best picture of the ministry of the word in the life of a believer is Psalm 119. Listen to the passionate words of verses 1-8:
How happy are those whose way is blameless,
who walk according to the Lord’s instruction!
Happy are those who keep his decrees
and seek him with all their heart.
They do nothing wrong;
they walk in his ways.
You have commanded that your precepts
be diligently kept.
If only my ways were committed
to keeping your statutes!
Then I would not be ashamed
when I think about all your commands.
I will praise you with an upright heart
when I learn your righteous judgments.
I will keep your statutes;
never abandon me.
That passage echoes Psalm 1:1-3:
How happy is the one who does not
walk in the advice of the wicked
or stand in the pathway with sinners
or sit in the company of mockers!
Instead, his delight is in the Lord’s instruction,
and he meditates on it day and night.
He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams
that bears its fruit in its season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
The blessed person is the one who obeys God’s instruction! The opposite is also true: the one who forsakes God’s instruction is like the chaff the wind blows away. The history of God’s people depended on their responsiveness to God’s Word. When they believed God in faith, they prospered. When they rejected God’s word, they were punished.
The greatest concern in the church may not be that people reject God outright but rather that they neglect his Word. When we preachers refuse to fill our mouths with Scripture, we do not realize how vulnerable we make the people of God. Often a philosophy of preaching is driven by reaction. For example, if we are accused of being dry and irrelevant, we compensate by valuing engagement, relevance, or authenticity. Preaching should be all those things. Yet to suggest that we are helping people if we are not explaining Scripture to them is pretense at best. The Word is the source of life because in the Word we find Jesus, and in Jesus we find the Father (John 5:39; Col 1:15a; Heb 1:3).
It does not matter how strong your historical confession is. If the Word is neglected, the people are vulnerable. So, are you in a position where you hear the Word of God explained regularly?
Neglecting the Word is not the end of the church. It is the beginning of the end. It was for Israel. It was for the early churches of Galatia and Corinth. It was for the churches during the Middle Ages. No church should live in the pretense that their faith will be passed down for generations if it does not teach the Word.
The Word of God stirs the affections for God. If the Word is neglected, the affections are not stirred. This is the trajectory: where there is no communication, separation is soon to follow.
We Find Our Satisfaction in Something Else
Jeremiah 2:8-37
Once the memory was fuzzy, the heart longed for something else. Which comes first: a heart that drifts from its love or a heart that forgets what love is? It’s hard to say. However, if we forget how we have been loved by God, we will certainly look for something else to fill that void. This is exactly what happened to Judah. Forgetting God, they turned to idols. Look at the end of verse 8: “The prophets prophesied by Baal and followed useless idols.”
The leaders who forgot God led the people to displace God with other objects of their affection. The leaders were designed to be prophets—spiritual counselors who mediated reform, righted the people’s course, and were constantly reconciling the marriage. Instead, they facilitated the separation. Leaders who do not re-present God’s Word to God’s people are facilitators of ultimate separation between God and his people.
We are getting ahead of ourselves. What caused the separation ultimately was not forgetfulness but idolatry. Idolatry is to forgetfulness what heat is to the sun. The presence of one means the other will follow. No heart can exist in a wasteland of forgetfulness. So when forgetfulness is looming over us, our hearts easily warm to something else. We want something to worship. And when the Word is not revealing the true Son to us, we will find something to worship.
Judah turned to worship false gods and idols. Literally. This is shocking in light of all God, their great husband, had done for them. Forgetfulness makes the greatest love vulnerable. When the word was absent for so long, the people forgot all that God had done. How could they love a God they did not know? So the void of love was filled with an infatuation with other things.
Jeremiah uses several metaphors to paint the picture. Israel is like
- a slave (2:14);
- prey for other nations (2:15);
- a prostitute chasing other lovers (2:20);
- a choice vine that became a wild vine (2:21);
- a donkey in heat (2:24);
- a thief that is shamed when caught (2:26);
- a bride who forgets her wedding dress (2:32).
But perhaps the most telling metaphor is found in 2:13 where God says,
For my people have committed a double evil:
They have abandoned me,
the fountain of living water,
and dug cisterns for themselves—
cracked cisterns that cannot hold water.
This summarizes the whole problem. They have forgotten God, and they have gone after other things. They have abandoned God as the source of life-giving water, and they dug leaky cisterns. A good well could support much life for a long time. However, these broken cisterns were of no value.
Jesus used the metaphor to describe himself. In fact, Jeremiah 2:13 reads like John 4:13-14:
Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks from this water will get thirsty again. But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again. In fact, the water I will give him will become a well of water springing up in him for eternal life.”
Jesus was talking to a woman who was drinking from the cistern of lost love. She had been married several times and was living with a guy. All this “love,” but she was still thirsty. We know intuitively that sex, isolated as a recreational activity, cannot fill the need for love that only God can fill.
Jeremiah is not preaching to individuals but to a group. He is saying that these people have rejected God in order to be satisfied with something else. The pattern exists in all of us. If we do not remember all that God has done for us, that is, if we are not exposed to the Word of God, then we will find ourselves dissatisfied. We will want something to fill that void. Yet the question is not an individual one; it is a corporate one. The question we have to ask is about our faith, our people.
This is consistent with how the Bible describes our relationship to Christ. I am not the bride of Christ, but we, the church, are the bride of Christ (Eph 5; Rev 19). This is corporate. It was the effective, hardworking church at Ephesus that Jesus admonishes for losing their first love. Have we lost our first love? Is Jesus enough, or do we need something else to satisfy our thirst?
This pattern can be true of any church. If our leaders do not remind us of all that God has done for us and of how he alone can quench our thirst, we become thirsty for other things. We dig out cisterns that distract us from knowing God. The most dangerous aspect of a broken pot is that it is full for a moment. It is deceptive, giving the appearance of satisfaction. Leaky pots are momentarily full. The slower the leak is, the more real the deception.
God sees dissatisfaction in his people. He files for divorce.
God Files for Divorce
Jeremiah 3:8
God’s people have been faithless for a long time. God wants out.
Would God ever divorce the church for the same reason? Imagine a local church that was worshiping idols. What would that look like? Imagine that its members only had a casual interest in God. The mention of his name stirred no passion. His presence evoked no excitement; they were never aroused by God. Although God had saved them, they had forgotten that. Things like being removed from death and hell, the victory that Christ would promise, and the love for Jesus were forgotten. The reason, as happened with Israel, is that the leaders of the church did not tell people what God said. They did not hold up the Word of God.
As a result, the church members’ affections were more stimulated by something else. They got really excited about work, family, vacations, money, and all the things God provided them but not really excited about God. The ironic thing is that they kept all the things about church. They kept coming. And, strangely, they loved the things of church. But to be honest, they loved the music, the friends, the facilities, and all the things about the church as much (or more!) than they loved the God of the church. Imagine that!
If you can imagine that, do you think God would want a divorce?
What if God would say, “Look, I really love you. There is nothing—and I mean nothing—that I would not do for you. I am bound by my character to love you perfectly.
“But it’s clear you don’t love me. And it’s not just about one thing. It’s about years and years of you chasing all these other things except knowing me and loving me. I think we want different things: I want you, and you want other lovers. You don’t love me. It’s obvious you never will.
“I want out. I want a divorce. I want to love you, and you want everything but me. Let’s go our separate ways.”
God wants a divorce, but even though he wants it, he won’t get it.
God Will Not Leave Us Alone
Jeremiah 3:1-5
Look at 3:1. Even if God wanted a divorce, there is an odd sense in which he cannot divorce. The reason is simple. The law demanded that if you divorce your wife, and she then marries another, you cannot remarry her later. In creating that law, God was trying to protect women from being property to be bartered or borrowed. God loves women, and his Word always protects them. So in an odd sense God cannot divorce Israel because (1) he made a covenant to always be with them, and (2) if he divorced them, he is bound by his own law and could not “remarry” them.
Divorce, then, is not an option for God. What will he do?
This is clear enough from these chapters. He does not want divorce ultimately. But he also does not want this stifled, unrequited love. So, what he will do is allow problems in their lives that will cause them to once again see their need for God. The problems are both at the hand of God and due to the natural consequences of their choices:
Your own evil will discipline you;
your own apostasies will reprimand you.
Recognize how evil and bitter it is
for you to abandon the Lord your God
and to have no fear of me.
This is the declaration of the Lord God of Armies. (2:19)
God knows that, given the right circumstances, they will think straight. Given the right circumstances, they will understand that their cisterns are broken and that they need to seek out ones that will actually hold water.
The judgment is punitive, yes, but like a father, God wants more than to punish them and to cause them suffering. When their only sustenance is God, they will see that he is all they needed to begin with.
They will return to him.
Conclusion
Perhaps you never thought about you and God parting ways. Ending it. Calling it quits. Even so, you did not think that in the Bible God would be the one that would initiate it.
This is because Jesus Christ has made an inseparable bond between us and the Father. In this new covenant arrangement we are actually in Christ. Christ is in the Father, so to be in Christ means that we can never be torn from the Father. The Son ensures our forever bond with the Father.
Jeremiah here is helpful because he reminds us of how deeply God hates sin. It is also a reminder that we are not immune to the same trajectory.
We can forget God. We can have our hearts turned toward other things. What is God’s response? He disciplines us. The discipline is not punitive—all of the punishment for sin has been taken on the cross. Rather the discipline is corrective. He is our Father, and no good father abandons discipline (Heb 12:3-11).
God is committed to sustaining the love relationship. He has committed never to divorce us. But think carefully about this: the same God that committed never to leave us is the same God who committed never to leave us in sin. God is always pursuing. Whether it’s Adam in the garden, Cain outside the garden, Israel in the desert, David before Nathan, the woman at the well, or the one lost sheep, he is always pursuing. He will never leave his people alone. He will never leave his people in sin. The worst form of judgment, therefore, is God leaving someone in their sin (Rom 1:24).
We are different from the nation of Israel, but we are not above them. We can become forgetful. If we forget God, we will look to fill the wasteland of forgetfulness, and we will worship something less than God. When we do, we invite the corrective discipline of a gracious Father. He loves us too much to leave us.
Reflect and Discuss
- What kind of metaphorical relationship does Jeremiah use to describe the love between Judah and God?
- When people part ways with God, it often follows a pattern. What is the trajectory of this pattern in 2:5-8?
- What are the similarities and differences between Jeremiah 2 and Psalm 1?
- Why is neglecting the Word as dangerous as the rejection of it?
- What are ways that, today, we forget what God has done for us?
- Where did Judah look to find her satisfaction (2:8)?
- What is the relationship between idolatry and forgetfulness in this passage?
- What are the negative metaphors Jeremiah uses to describe Judah in chapter 2?
- Ultimately, God did not divorce Judah. What does this passage teach us about God’s commitment to his bride and the consequences when she left him?
- How does a “wasteland of forgetfulness” lead to idolatry?