Jeremiah's statements about pagan gods sometimes resemble vivid anti-pagan polemic, propaganda slogans directed against an opponent dangerous because of his influence on people's minds. In one sense, that is exactly what they are: Jeremiah had to preach in an age...
Jeremiah's statements about pagan gods sometimes resemble vivid anti-pagan polemic, propaganda slogans directed against an opponent dangerous because of his influence on people's minds. In one sense, that is exactly what they are: Jeremiah had to preach in an age when almost nothing remained in Judah of its former religious traditionalism, when Yahwism and paganism were often regarded as equally permissible worldviews, and people sometimes chose something eclectic, worshiping both Yahweh and pagan gods at the same time.
Intellectual and religious frivolity is a characteristic feature of post-traditionalism, and the prophet had to confront it in full measure. But Jeremiah was moved by more than a desire to awaken seriousness about spiritual questions in his contemporaries. He also understood something else. He saw the abyss separating paganism from Yahwism as a revealed religion.
The prophet understood that the religious need in a human being cannot be eradicated, and that humanity, even in its fallen state, has always made and will always make gods for itself to worship. Jeremiah knows of the existence of what would much later be called natural religiosity.
Yet he understands something else as well: no gods fashioned by people in their own image and likeness, no human religiosity, will bring a person one iota closer to God. This is not because the gods made by human beings are wholly evil or deceitful, but because with these gods a person surrounds himself and his own little world, the world he himself has created. It is a world separated from God's great world by a wall of human self-will, which refuses to yield the central place in this little world to anything or anyone.
In such a little world, a person may feel warm and comfortable in the company of gods he himself has made. But if this little world collapses—and sooner or later such a collapse is inevitable—those gods will be no more useful than a scarecrow when real enemies attack the garden in which it stands. In such a situation, only the true, living, and real God can help.
For Him to help, however, He must be admitted into that little human world, where a person is seldom ready to admit outsiders, and He must be allowed to become its center. Then God will be able to help, because the little human world will become part of God's great world, a world that lives by God's laws.
