An armed invasion from the north constitutes a “hot wind” that will breathe down the Israelites’ necks. The people of Jerusalem and Judah exist in an atmosphere of constant threat, violence, and revenge. In their honest struggle to relate to Yahweh, they understandably wonder how God fits into this dismal picture. The prophet Jeremiah has plenty to say about that.
In the poignant poetry of the prophetic tradition, Jeremiah expresses this oncoming destruction as God’s judgment against the foolish, faithless people. In the language of their culture, God’s justice is understood in terms of reward and punishment. The prophet says in effect, “You brought this situation on yourselves through your sinful ways.” He lets the Israelites know that their lack of harmony with God’s purposes will lead to painful consequences.
Not surprisingly, they experience God through the filter of their own imagination and cultural understanding. In a world where kings routinely wielded power through vengeance and retribution, they assumed that the heavenly King operated the same way. We often follow a similar line of reasoning. We make a mess of things through our own willfulness and pay the price, wondering where God was in our story.
But there’s another side to the story. Through years of God’s revelation, especially through Jesus, we have come to a different experience of the divine nature. Certainly God wants to put things right, to be the harbinger of justice. Rather than the “furious God in the sky” that humans often depict, we understand that God metes out justice not through overt punishment but through grace that invites us to replace judgment with love.