Obedience

Do you want a lesson in obedience? If so, read on.

Jeremiah, the guy who got all kinds of instructions from God, was taught a very important lesson one day during the reign of King Josiah. He woke up one morning and God gave him some instructions: “Go get the Recabite family, bring them into the Temple, and offer them some wine.”

Sounds innocent enough, and being a person who generally obeyed God, Jeremiah proceeded to round up the various members of that family. He brought them into ‘the house of the Lord’, asked them to sit down, and offered them some wine (probably very fine wine if it was located at the Temple). What Jeremiah heard, probably surprised him a bit.

“Oh, we don’t touch wine,” they said, “in fact, not only do we not drink wine, we don’t build houses to live in—we live in tents. We also don’t plant or grow vines which would produce wine. We’re simple Nomads.” Jeremiah didn’t have to ask ‘why’, as they explained to him that one of their ancestors, Jonadab --aka Jehonadab, son of Recab, gave a command to his offspring that they should never drink wine, build or live in houses, nor plant seeds or grow vineyards. This command was to be followed by all generations following Jonadab. Recab, if you know your Bibles, was a murderer whom King David had put to death (in 2nd Samuel), so maybe Jonadab was somehow trying to make right with God for his father. Anyway, the command was given for all his descendants, and they had kept this command throughout those previous generations. Even when King Nebuchadnezzar from Babylon invaded the Israelites’ homeland, the Recabites moved to Jerusalem and continued to keep to the commands of Jonadab.

After they had told this story to Jeremiah, God pipes in again. “There, see? These people (descendants of a murderer) kept the commands of their forefather, now go, go tell the men of Judah and Jerusalem that this is an example of obedience. Will they not learn a lesson and obey my words? Best you go and tell them I am fairly upset!” (words in this quote are not necessarily quoted directly from God’s Word, but I took the liberty to paraphrase). God continued and told Jeremiah and Jonadab that Jonadab would always have a descendent who served Him.

What a message! God loves it when people follow commands, especially His. The command to not drink wine or grow grapes to make wine sounds kinda weird when one of the staples of live back then was wine, as safe drinking water was usually hard to obtain. Wine was safe. But wine also caused sinning, in the form of drunkenness, which lead, I am sure, to even more sins. So, when all of Jonadab’s descendents had kept this ‘simple yet hard’ command all those years, God was please.

The moral of this story (found in Jeremiah 35 btw) is that we should be obeying God’s commands, not matter how ‘simple’ (or hard) they may seem.