Delayed Obedience is...

Passage: Jeremiah 17:19-27

As a parent to young children, I regularly have to play the disciplinarian. Several times a day I tell my kids what they have to do. When they balk or refuse, I tell them the consequences that will ensue should they continue to disobey. When that happens, I’m faced with the choice: do I give them another chance, or do I follow through? I’m generally inclined to give them another chance. But when I do, they begin to expect it from me. The next time I ask them to do something, they’re even less likely to do it. On the other hand, when I do follow through, they’re surprised and outraged. “How could you?” they seem to say (with fewer words and more tears). Once in awhile, when the opportunity for obedience has passed, and the consequence is being meted out, one of my children will say, “Wait, I want to obey!” And I say, “I’m sorry, but you missed your chance. The point was for you to obey right away.” Which, of course, is sad for them and me. It hurts to see them desperately trying to go back and do what they were supposed to do in the first place when they realize, too late, that there are consequences. The point wasn’t for them to accomplish the specific task (hanging up a coat; putting on their shoes; eating their dinner). It was for them to obey.

This is a dynamic that plays out continually in the relationship between God and his people. In Jeremiah 17 God gives his people an order. He says, “Keep the Sabbath Day holy. Don’t pursue any labor or commerce on the seventh day. Set it aside for me. I told your parents and grandparents to do this, but they wouldn’t listen. If you obey this command, you won’t suffer the consequences they did.” Now keeping the Sabbath seems like an arbitrary command. Why this one? Why doesn’t God say, “Make sure you don’t murder”? Or steal? Or cheat on your wife? Why the Sabbath? It makes it seem as though the Sabbath command is more important than the others.

We know, based on the rest of the story, that Gods’ people don’t obey this command. Jeremiah watches his people disregard God’s word and suffer the consequences.
But generations later we see God’s people going back to this one command, after the fact, and say, “Maybe if we obey it now God will reverse the terrible judgment we’ve experienced.” Centuries after they’ve been exiled and returned to their homeland, the children of Israel are a poor nation living under foreign occupation. And they are obsessively trying to keep this one commandment: “Don’t work on the Sabbath.” So much so that when God himself shows up in the flesh, and begins to travel and teach and heal on the Sabbath, they condemn him. “Don’t you know?” they say. “It’s because of this very thing that God sent our ancestors off to Babylon. It’s because we didn’t keep the Sabbath that we’ve suffered so much. Don’t mess it up for us!” To which Jesus, God in the flesh, responds, “You’re still missing the point.”

There was nothing more important about the Sabbath command than any of the other nine. Through Jeremiah God was simply giving his people one command. One simple command in the hopes that they would obey. This was a test of their obedience, which in turn was a test of the relationship God wanted so badly to have with them. It didn’t matter, at the end of the day, what God told them to do. God just wanted them to obey. They didn’t. All these generations later, they look back on that chance they’d had, and try desperately to recapture it. But it’s too late.