Notes for19 September 2023

Jeremiah had to live in a period, full of contradictions. On one hand, it was a time of religious ascent and religious reforms. Josiah who ruled shortly before the captivity made many for the propaganda and the strengthening of the yahvisme in Judea, as the State religion. Outwardly it could turn out that the number of believers in the society increased tremendously. But it turned out rather often that these new yahvistes planned not at all to abandon the heathen domestic cults sweet to their heart. The yahvisme for them was, above all, an official State religion, and they looked on Yahweh as on God - the protector of their country, but not as the God of their hearts and their lives. In the heart and in the life of many of those who called and (maybe, sincerely) considered themselves yahvistes reigned other gods and other values, values of the world, which after the Assyrian wars changed in a irreversible way. What had to do the prophet in such a spiritual situation? To condemn Josiah’s reform, to rebuke the religious formalism and the double faith, and in reality the paganism?

Jeremiah rebuked the religious formalism and the real paganism indefatigably, he reminded again and again to people going to the Temple, that they cannot be half yahviste, that such a half yahvisme is worse than a sincere paganism, though the fact that an opened heathen, at least, does not fool himself at the expense of his spiritual life and his religiosity. But the prophet understood perfectly that the refusal of the reforms is not also a solution, that the sincere paganism if is better than the masked paganism, it is only in this measure, which the obvious sin is better than the hidden sin. Where to find thus the solution, if neither the overt connivance of paganism, nor the fight against it with the strengths and the means of State do not bring results? Well then was revealed to Jeremiah that for the overcoming of paganism, is needed a cardinal renovation of God's relationship with His people and with every concrete person.

The Torah has to become not simply a text engraved on a stone, it must be written in the heart of everyone. The heart in the Bible is the spiritual center of the human personality, and if the Torah is written in the heart of a person, it will mean that the person will follow it not under pressure, even if internal, where he decides himself, willingly, inciting himself to observe the commandments, but naturally and organically, because the Torah becomes then the spiritual core of his personality and the spiritual pivot of his life. And then in the life of man there will already remain no places for any denial and any heathen god. His heart will then be occupied by the Only One, Who can give a person the plenitude of life.