Those of us who are Christians and strive to live nonviolently are often quick to look to Jesus’ as our example of who God is and how we should live, but we are much more hesitant to delve into the Old Testament. Why? Simply because the Old Testament is anything but nonviolent. I am currently taking a class on the book of Jeremiah, which is full of accounts of how the wrath of God will rain down on the people of Israel for their misdeeds. The idea of an angry God that will destroy a disobedient people is uncomfortable for many of us who would prefer to think of God’s love and tenderness and acceptance of all people.

However, this is not the reality of how the author of Jeremiah and many other Old Testament books understood God, and I think it is important for us to listen to these prophetic words. In Jeremiah, God does not punish without reason. There are two main factors which bring on God’s judgment in Jeremiah: worship of other gods and injustice to toward the poor and marginalized. God’s people continually neglect their responsibility to care for those in need:

they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no limits in deeds of wickedness;
they do not judge with justice
the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
(Jeremiah 5:28)

God makes clear His expectations for the conduct of the Israelites in terms of doing justice, and what the consequences are if they fail:

O house of David! Thus says the Lord:
Execute justice in the morning,
and deliver from the hand of the oppressor
anyone who has been robbed,
or else my wrath will go forth like fire,
and burn, with no one to quench it,
because of your evil doings. (Jeremiah 21:12)

According to Jeremiah, worship of other gods and neglect of justice had horrendous consequences; God used the Babylonian empire as His tool to punish the Israelites by having them defeated and sent into exile.

We could tame the texts of Jeremiah by saying they are based on a very different understanding of God than we Christians hold today, and that these images of suffering and destruction at the hand of God all come out of an out-of-date, 3 thousand year old context. But I contend that these texts are extremely relative to us because they reveal that our neglect of justice as the people of God today does not go without consequences.

It is easy for those of us who are middle to upper-middle class Americans to believe that the injustice in our society needs to change, but that we can continue to live in the midst of that injustice with relative comfort. We want to do what is right, but ultimately we don’t sense that our position of privilege is being challenged, and therefore we rarely step outside of our comfort zones to combat injustice. The words of Jeremiah are a harsh wake-up call for us; God proclaims that there is a consequence when His people are negligent in bringing justice for the oppressed, and that consequence is violence. We can see it happening around us right now. In the streets of our cities, the poor and marginalized join gangs, turf wars errupt, and homicide has become a commonplace event. In Iraq, those who live in the midst of poverty and destruction are taking up arms to bring themselves some bit of power in the midst of the chaos our country has created. Our borders are becoming war zones as our government puts up walls and razor wire to keep those who are desperate for jobs out of our country.

All of these are forewarnings of a much graver consequence which could easily come: the violent fall of those of us who do hold power to those who are oppressed when the crushing injustice that we have proliferated finally builds enough pressure to create an explosion of resistance. People can only be pushed down so far before they rebel. Our security is not sure, and it is all the less sure as long as a few of us are benefiting at the expense of the poor and oppressed. Those of us who are comfortable now may feel the full repercussions of our complacence. God has warned His people in the past; He is warning us now. If we don’t right our ways, we may suffer consequences that are more terrible than those the Israelites suffered when they were defeated and exiled so long ago.