Paying For It
Your wealth and your treasures I will give as spoil, without price, for all your sins, Jeremiah 15:13
Spoil – The greatest impediment to godliness in the world today is affluence. Again and again we find a self-confident callousness and spiritual poverty among the nations blessed with abundance. We sin the sin of David by counting our army, as if military strength were protection against principalities and powers. We sin the sin of Solomon by mixing God’s blessing with idolatry. We sin the sin of Judas by demanding God’s intervention on our own timetable. We sin the sin of Lot by offering the innocent as substitute for the righteous. And all the time we sin the sin of Nebuchadnezzar. “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power” (Daniel 4:30). God is the paymaster of all the universe. He decides whom He will lift up and whom He will give as spoils. Our idolatry weighs upon us. We will not be spared.
Jeremiah uses the word baz, a Hebrew word meaning, “booty, plunder, and spoils.” The picture is quite clear. No self-protecting power is sufficient to prevent God’s judgment. God is the only active agent in the status of nations. Those who reject Him will pay the price.
Today we live in a religious culture of blessing theology. We act as though the holy God of judgment has become the celestial Santa Claus. We think in terms of our purposes and agendas for the world. What a mistake! The world exists for God’s purposes. He will orchestrate the fate of nations to serve His ends. No one and nothing escapes His hand. It is time, past time, for deep examination. If God can overturn great Babylon, if He can make the most powerful man in the world into a beast of the field, if He can lift worms to purple-robed glory, why do we act as though we are immune? Why are we not on our faces, repentant for our self-serving gluttony with His blessings? Did we think He will not demand an accounting just because He has removed our guilt?
Take a trip with me to the rest of the world; the world where millions upon millions of people live on less than we throw away. Go with me to visit children who cannot go to school for lack of $20 a month, who die from diarrhea because they do not have clean water, who are sold by parents into prostitution or begging. You have heard it all before, but you will not feel your own idolatry until you touch the hearts of the desperate. There is a reason why God refused to hide the widows, orphans and destitute from the rest of Israel. We need to see ourselves in their faces or we will see ourselves in judgment.
