The past does affect the future. Habits learned yesterday will guide what one does tomorrow. When one is accustomed to doing wrong it becomes impossible to do right. Just as we cannot change the color of our skin and leopards cannot move their spots from one place to another, so we continue to do evil forgetting God and trust in the lies of the world around us. Hence, we walk in darkness and our ways are wicked, when we replace God’s standard of living to some prescribed lifestyle of the world.
This is the message sent to king Jehoiakim, and his queen by Jeremiah. Indeed, their sorrows would be great indeed. Do they ask, from where comes these sorrows and why the nation is so distressed and why things so heavily laid upon us? Jeremiah prophesies that to let them know, it is for the nation’s obstinacy in sin. He uses a figurative language, as we cannot alter the natural colour of the skin; and so it is morally impossible to reclaim and reform these people. Sin is the blackness or darkness of the soul. It is the discolouring of it the soul. We were shapen in it, so that we cannot get clear of it by any power of our own. However, God in His grace is able to change that which is impossible to human. Neither natural depravity nor strong habits of sin, form an obstacle to the working of God in creating the new Spirit. Now it is up to Jerusalem to decide, whether she is determined not be made clean.
It is the reality that no system of government can force morality on its citizens. Cultural renewal requires more than the passage of a set of laws demanding morality. It requires that people, as both individuals and collective, who want to be moral.
In the words of two individuals, the columnist Cal Thomas and the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, strike at the heart of the matter. Thomas writes, “When a building’s foundation is in disrepair, it must be replaced. This will take a change of heart and mind that requires different behavior and lifestyle choices. No politician can legislate that.” Sadat wrote in his autobiography, “He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.” The most vital key to ultimately creating a truly reformed culture is the change that will have to occur within the “very fabric” of people’s thoughts.
The scripture points to that time. In due course, when an entirely new governmental foundation is laid, God will write His laws and ways, not in the form of legislative documents but in the willing hearts and minds of people, morally transforming society and delivering it from all its cultural ills (Jeremiah 31:31–33).While activists and legislators strive to reform a culture through the politics of democracy and self-determination, God’s plan is to write His moral precepts in human hearts.
So, are we then in hopeless, once we’ve decided to go against God and learned to live according to the desires of our own hearts and become accustomed to doing evil? In Ezekiel, God promises to put a new spirit and a new heart, a new heart of flesh to replace the heart of stone that we develop when we continuously rebel against God. In verse 27 of Jeremiah chapter 13 offers us a choice. Our wickedness and our running after the “false gods” in our lives are contrasted with the opportunity to have God cleanse us. We are dirty, filthy, with abominations filling us when we walk after our own desires. We can choose to be cleansed by God. God will wash us from our sins and we could be morally transformed community. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin and the leopard cannot change his spots, but we will be changed through the power and glory of God to give up our desires to do wrong. We can be pure in heart that desire to follow God. We can give up the evil as we are accustomed to doing and through God in forming new habits, where we will be accustomed to do good. We choose to follow God, and God changes us to children with hearts receptive to love God.
Let this be our prayer this day, that you desire to be changed in heart of stone to a heart of flesh to love God..!
[Thomas Manoj Samuel, who lead this meditation, is a doctoral student in Communication]
