I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Jeremiah 16-18.

When people asked Jeremiah why God would do the things which Jeremiah prophesied against them, his answer was “because their ancestors had been unfaithful to God.”  However, that was not the whole of Jeremiah’s answer.  The rest of his answer was that they were even worse than their ancestors.  From time to time throughout the Old Testament we have examples of where people are asked to repent of sins committed by their ancestors, but in every such case, they must also repent of their own sins.  God only holds us to account for the sins of our ancestors when we continue those sins ourselves.  This reminds us that the biggest value in examining our ancestors sins is to determine if we are continuing in those sins.

My thoughts on this next bit are kind of muddled, so bear with me.  If we put our trust in our fellow man, we will be disappointed and will have no hope for the future.  But, if we instead put out trust in God, we will be like trees planted along a river bank, constantly renewed even in times of drought.  In either case, whether we put our trust in man or in God, we may get crushed.  However, if we have put our trust in God, He will have crushed us in order to build us back up better than we were.  Whereas when people crush us, they have no idea how we should truly be built back up and the results will be no better than what we were before.