From Jeremiah 8:4-7, we learned that the people of Judah chose foolishly to remain wilfully ignorant. The choice of being in that condition had invited needless calamitous trouble from God. As if that was not enough, Jeremiah 8:8-10 pointed out that they were not only ignorant but also arrogant, boastful, and proud. In verse 8, Jeremiah showed that they had mistakenly claimed that they were wise people and that they had the Law of the LORD on their side.
Because of their false notion, they seemed to have rejected the message that Jeremiah was proclaiming to them. So in verse 8, the prophet debunked that belief by asking rhetorically how wise they could be when they had deliberately chosen to reject the true prophetic words of God. Besides the law of the LORD, they trusted in were invalidated by “the lying pen of the scribes.” In other words, the scribes had altered and subtly nullified the written law.
Besides those leaders who claimed to be wise and rejected the word
of God had fallen into the hand of their adversaries and were caught in
dismay. So how wise could they be? Because of their failure to discern the truth
from the spurious, the disastrous consequence would be their portion. They would lose all their possession, and their wives
and field would be dispossessed and taken over to new owners. Every one of them
from prophets to priests was greedy and resorted to deceit. These mentioned spiritual
leaders had been unobjective in the counsel they offered.
Pride has a way to derail us. God’s word is clear that He resists
the proud but will give grace to the humble. When a person is proud, he or she tends
to be arrogant and will unreasonably insist that his/her own way is right, even when all facts point otherwise. That will make that person unsusceptible
to the truth. This was what happened to the Judean in Jeremiah’s time. But we must never be such people. We must accurately
divide the word of truth and cut a straight path for ourselves to always walk in
the ways of God.
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