Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we open with Jeremiah continuing the plea for Judah to repent.

Throughout this section, we see God repeating the theme that he doesn't just want them to change their actions or offer up empty sacrifices like vain apologies.

They faked repentance before and he didn't buy it then either.

He's after their hearts.

We see it in verse 4, where he's comparing this change of heart to the way he marked them with circumcision. He says,

remove the foreskin of your hearts. And in verse 14, he says,

O Jerusalem, wash your heart from evil. How long shall your wicked thoughts lodge within you?

And in verse 18, your ways and your deeds have brought this upon you. This is your doom,

and it is bitter. It has reached your very heart. Their sin yielded this consequence, and God's

problem with their sin goes far beyond their actions. It goes to their very heart, so his consequences do too. Then in verse 10,

Jeremiah seems to be accusing God of lying. It's a confusing time to be alive because up until this

point, all the so-called prophets of the land have been telling all the people of Judah,

hey, don't sweat it. Things are going to be fine.

They keep proclaiming peace and safety when things are actually speeding toward a cliff at a hundred miles an hour. And this is the first time Jeremiah is actually hearing the truth, and it's coming

directly from God himself. He seems to feel kind of disoriented by it all, but he eventually comes to realize that those

prophets weren't speaking the words of God. They were just saying what they thought the people

wanted to hear. I've had many a well-meaning prophecy spoken to me, and almost all of them have

been wrong. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that

God hadn't lied to me. Those people had good desires for me, but they were speaking out of

their own hopes and hearts, not his. That's just a fraction of what Jeremiah was probably

going through here. As Jeremiah is giving these warnings to the people, he's also getting

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