Jeremiah was young, only about 20 years old, when God gave him a prophetic calling. He entered into that calling like many of us do in our youth, not really knowing what the years ahead would hold. All he knew is that he had a relationship with God. He had surrendered his life to the Lord. He was saying, “Not my will, but your will be done.” He was going to serve in the role of a prophet.
Today is very different, at least from what I can tell. I know there are true prophets still, but a lot of the prophets I see today are all about “Lights, camera, action!” They have jokes; they can prophecy, and things don’t come to pass. Not even a notable percentage of their prophecies come to pass, and they just make light of it and move on.
By contrast, Jeremiah had a soberness in his message. He had a reality to him because God’s truth weighed so heavily upon him. Jeremiah had to bear under the knowledge that God was setting the nation on a course of either choosing God or rejecting God.
The Lord tells Jeremiah, “For my people have committed two evils: They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns—broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13, NKJV). God looked at the whole of society, and he boiled down all of society’s issues to two evils. First, they had forsaken God, the fountain of living waters; and second, they had made broken cisterns that could hold no water, basically trying to replace God’s presence with their own resources.
How much we need to hear this today. There are so many voices with social media and the internet. We’ve got global news 24/7. It’s always at our fingertips. You can be overwhelmed by looking at all the facts and all the features of our society and trying to figure out what’s going wrong. God narrows it down for Jeremiah, and he is narrowing it down for us today.
God is saying to us today that there are two evils in this world: We have forsaken God, and we have put ourselves in place of God, trying to sustain ourselves. We must reject these two lies if we want to set our nation on a course of choosing God.