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They Say “Peace, Peace” But There Is No Peace
They Say “Peace, Peace” But There Is No Peace
From the least even to the greatest / Everyone is greedy for gain / From the prophet even to the priest / Everyone practices deceit. / And they heal the brokenness of the daughter of My people superficially / Saying, “Peace, peace,”
But there is no peace (Jeremiah 8:10-11).
It’s no surprise that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, announced God’s righteous judgment against Israel. But the specific group warned in this passage ought to be a huge surprise— the priests and the prophets! Things had become so bad in Judah that the very ones God could usually count on to set the people straight were themselves complicit in sin. The nation had lost its moral compass because the leaders and teachers no longer spoke the truth of God’s word.
What, then, did they speak? Motivated by greed, they spoke pleasant but deceitful words, designed to make the hearers feel good, and thus ingratiate themselves. A preacher doesn’t win many sponsorships or friends by condemning sin and demanding repentance. And the prophets and priests of Jeremiah’s day weren’t willing to risk their cushy positions by speaking the truth.
Jeremiah says they “healed the brokenness of [God’s] people superficially.” That is, they stuck a band-aid over an obvious melanoma and called it a freckle. Imagine experiencing a terrible pain in your abdomen. You go to the doctor, and he says the pain is nothing serious, that it will soon pass. He tells you to take aspirin in the meantime. You feel a sense of relief. But deep down the pain grows, and you visit another doctor. He says you have acute appendicitis, and that you must prepare for immediate surgery to remove the inflamed organ before it bursts.
We all know which doctor’s diagnosis we’d prefer! We would be greatly tempted to ignore the unpleasant advice of the second and follow the easy advice of the first. But we’d also have a powerful suspicion that the first doctor is just telling us what we want to hear, or isn’t knowledgeable enough to make the correct diagnosis, while the second doctor, though he is carrying unwelcome news that requires painful surgery before improvement, is giving it to us straight.
Which doctor cares more for his patient? The one who tells the patient everything will be OK while he slowly dies of a treatable disease? Or the one who confronts the patient with bad news so that he can attack the problem and hopefully overcome it? Which doctor would you want to visit—the one who wants his patients to go home blissful, or the one who wants his patients to go home cured, if sporting a new scar?
God was upset with the priests and prophets because they had stopped telling the people what they needed to hear and had started telling the people what they wanted to hear. They said “peace,” and “oh, I don’t think that sin is such a big deal,” and “hey, everything will be fine,” but in fact God didn’t share that rosy view. There was no peace. God was wrathful.
God says something very similar through Ezekiel,
My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations ... because they have misled My people by saying “Peace!” when there is no peace. And when anyone builds a wall, behold, they plaster it over with whitewash; so tell those who plaster it over with whitewash that it will fall; a flooding rain will come... I will spend My wrath on the wall and on those who have plastered it over with whitewash...” (13:9-16).
John Taylor (Tyndale OT Comm., p.122) points out that this is not the usual word for “wall,” but a strange word used only here in the whole Bible, which means “a flimsy, inferior partition.” The false prophets see the hastily erected wall, and rather than admit the weakness of the wall, give it a thin coating of plaster declare it sound. But they have only dressed it up superficially, and the structure is corrupt. God will send a heavy rain, first to wash away the plaster and reveal the nature of the wall, and then to wash away the wall altogether, and then to wash away the false prophets.
Jeremiah and Ezekiel might just as well have been speaking about modern-day America, where professors, psychologists, politicians, talk show hosts, and even many preachers, have shirked the subject of sin, or have redefined it. Changing the moral code of God’s revealed word is abominable. Preachers will water down and sugarcoat the word of God; they will “tickle ears” (2 Timothy 4:3) for the sake of gain. Preachers will say that fornication is no big deal, that drunkenness is normal, that homosexuality is a cause of celebration, that divorce is perfectly fine. Preachers will put “being true to yourself” and pursuing happiness over being true to God’s word. Avoid such dangerous preaching. They say “peace, peace” but there is no peace.
–John Guzzetta
