Daily Readings for Monday, 28 July 2014

Daily Readings for Monday, 28 July 2014
Jeremiah 13:People Who Do Only What They Want to Do
13 1-2 God told me, “Go and buy yourself some linen shorts. Put them on and keep them on. Don’t even take them off to wash them.” So I bought the shorts as God directed and put them on.
3-5 Then God told me, “Take the shorts that you bought and go straight to Perath and hide them there in a crack in the rock.” So I did what God told me and hid them at Perath.
6-7 Next, after quite a long time, God told me, “Go back to Perath and get the linen shorts I told you to hide there.” So I went back to Perath and dug them out of the place where I had hidden them. The shorts by then had rotted and were worthless.
8-11 God explained, “This is the way I am going to ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem—a wicked bunch of people who won’t obey me, who do only what they want to do, who chase after all kinds of no-gods and worship them. They’re going to turn out as rotten as these old shorts. Just as shorts clothe and protect, so I kept the whole family of Israel under my care”—God’s Decree—“so that everyone could see they were my people, a people I could show off to the world and be proud of. But they refused to do a thing I said.
(Psalms)Deuteronomy 32:15-18 Jeshurun put on weight and bucked;
        you got fat, became obese, a tub of lard.
    He abandoned the God who made him,
        he mocked the Rock of his salvation.
    They made him jealous with their foreign newfangled gods,
        and with obscenities they vexed him no end.
    They sacrificed to no-god demons,
        gods they knew nothing about,
    The latest in gods, fresh from the market,
        gods your ancestors would never call “gods.”
    You walked out on the Rock who gave you your life,
        forgot the birth-God who brought you into the world.
19-25 God saw it and turned on his heel,
        angered and hurt by his sons and daughters.
    He said, “From now on I’m looking the other way.
        Wait and see what happens to them.
    Oh, they’re a turned-around, upside-down generation!
        Who knows what they’ll do from one moment to the next?
    They’ve goaded me with their no-gods,
        infuriated me with their hot-air gods;
    I’m going to goad them with a no-people,
        with a hollow nation incense them.
    My anger started a fire,
        a wildfire burning deep down in Sheol,
    Then shooting up and devouring the Earth and its crops,
        setting all the mountains, from bottom to top, on fire.
    I’ll pile catastrophes on them,
        I’ll shoot my arrows at them:
    Starvation, blistering heat, killing disease;
        I’ll send snarling wild animals to attack from the forest
        and venomous creatures to strike from the dust.
    Killing in the streets,
        terror in the houses,
    Young men and virgins alike struck down,
        and yes, breast-feeding babies and gray-haired old men.”
Matthew 13:31-32 Another story. “God’s kingdom is like a pine nut that a farmer plants. It is quite small as seeds go, but in the course of years it grows into a huge pine tree, and eagles build nests in it.”
33 Another story. “God’s kingdom is like yeast that a woman works into the dough for dozens of loaves of barley bread—and waits while the dough rises.”
34-35 All Jesus did that day was tell stories—a long storytelling afternoon. His storytelling fulfilled the prophecy:
I will open my mouth and tell stories;
I will bring out into the open

    things hidden since the world’s first day.
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