Jeremiah 42:5-6 - Homiletics

Implicit obedience.

The people swear to obey the voice of God before they know what injunctions it will lay upon them, They contemplate the possibility of receiving unpleasant commands; but they leave the decision in the hands of God, undertaking to follow it, whatever form it may take. Thus they bind themselves to implicit obedience. Let us consider the obligation and the limitation of implicit obedience.

I. THE OBLIGATION OF IMPLICIT OBEDIENCE . This requires us to obey the voice of God when it calls us to do anything within the range of right and possibility; i.e. anything which a wise and good God would ever command. It implies a possible conflict with our inclination, our opinion, or our worldly interest. Otherwise the obedience becomes a mere form. If we only obey when we like to do the thing required, we are not really obeying a higher will, but simply following out our own will in accidental coincidence with the will above us. True obedience only begins when it leads us to do what Our own wisdom or desire would not have prompted. It must, therefore, be prepared to run counter to these private tendencies. It must be the submission of our will and opinion to God's will and wisdom. Now, not only is this implicit obedience obligatory, but it is a certain fact that God will put it to the test. His higher will and larger wisdom must often conflict with our foolishness and self-will. Moreover, amid the trials of life, God will certainly sometimes require us to do what seems evil to us, i.e. what is painful and contrary to our wish. Therefore faith is essential to obedience. In so far as we can trust God, we shall be able to obey his darker counsels.

II. THE LIMITATION OF IMPLICIT OBEDIENCE . The highest obligation is to do right. If, therefore, we could be required by a supreme being to do what we knew was wrong, it would be our plain duty to disobey his will. The being who laid such a mandate upon us could not be God. He would be an almighty demon. Were such a monster to exist, it would be the duty of all creatures to resist him, though they became martyrs for their fidelity to righteousness. Our obligation to obey God rests on the fact that he is supremely good, and not merely on his infinite power and greatness. Let us suppose that we received a seemingly Divine mandate requiring what we felt to be wrong—what should we do? Three courses would then be open to us. We might believe that it emanated from a supreme being who was wicked, and should therefore be disobeyed; we might conclude that we were mistaken in supposing it to come from a supreme being—that we were suffering from a hallucination; or we might feel convinced that it was sent by the holy God, and that we were wrong in our impression of its unrighteous character. To Christians who believe in a perfectly good God, only the two latter alternatives could present themselves. But here the choice lies between the inward and the outward voice. If, then, the inward voice is clear and unmistakable, we are bound to give the preference to this. The outward voice claims to come from God; but so does the inward voice. If the two conflict, we must choose between them, and then we should feel that it is more likely we are suffering from a delusion in our external perceptions than that what we firmly believe in our conscience to be wrong is yet right. loyalty to God will lead us to obey God's voice in the conscience above all things. At all events, so long as we believe—though even erroneously—that a thing is wrong to us, it is wrong, and no prophet's or angel's words should lead us to perform it without first convincing us that it is right.