Jeremiah 4:23-26 – The devastating effect of persistent sin.

In Genesis 1:2 the whole earth was described as formless and void. It was just one chaotic mass. Darkness engulfed the whole earth until God decreed light into being. According to Genesis 1:14, God only spoke the luminaries, the sun and the moon, into being on the 4^th day of creation. If God had not brought about the order in creation, the whole earth would have remained in its devastated state. Yet now in Jeremiah 4:23-26, Jeremiah saw Judah in that pre-creation condition. Like the earth, before God brought about creation, that is how Judah would become after God’s devastating judgment on her persistent sin.   

Jeremiah was probably describing the period of Judah’s exile in Babylon. Her land would become formless and void, barren and waste, and dark and silent. It would become a totally disorganized and uninhabitable wasteland. The mountain and the hill symbols of stability would be shaken and brought low. Judah would be devoid of both men on land and birds in the sky. In place of the one fruitful land, she would become a wilderness. All her cities would be pulled down in the fierce anger of the Lord.  

Lessons gleaned from these verses. Firstly, we learn that persistent sin will always bring a devastating effect on life. It can move us backward to our pre-conversion condition. It has a retrogressive effect. The earth after His creative activity was good. The sin of Judah and their unrepentance moved their good land into the state when it was like the earth before God brought beauty, organized, and make it habitable. Persistent sin will undo all the good that God had built in our lives and retrogressively bring us back to our degenerative condition. Secondly, persistent sin disintegrates everything that is in order in our lives. An organized life can be disrupted by persistent sin and made disorganized and spiritually disjointed. Persistent sin will finally leave us with a fruitless life. we will become like a useless wasteland and unproductive in life.  That’s the devastating effect of persistent sin.  So let us not harbor persistent sin but hasten to listen to the call of Peter in Acts 3:19, “Repent therefore and turn again, that your sin may be blotted out.”