A few years ago I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The possibility was too much sugar and carbohydrates over many years had overloaded the pancreas which makes the insulin to deal with sugar. Perhaps it was all that bread I filled up with in my youth? Perhaps it was the move from fresh milk to pasteurised when a boy. Some of you will remember how we used to hang the billy out on the fence and the dairyman would come along and fill it with milk he had stripped from his cows earlier that morning. Well, the government decided that was too unhealthy and so we had to buy pasteurised milk in a bottle. I remember the first time I tasted it I exclaimed “But Mum, this has no taste! – it’s just like water!”. A bit of experimentation followed and I found that a few drops of vanilla essence and a couple of spoons of sugar gave it some flavour and rendered it drinkable. So started a habit of sugar in milk. Well anyway I digress and who knows the exact reason for my diabetes.
Spiritual diet is important to a healthy spiritual life. A bit of pudding is okay, but we need porridge more. Man can’t live by sugar alone! Paul counseled Timothy (2 Tim. 4:2-4) to preach the word, in season and out of season. Why? “for”, he said, “the time will come when they will not endure sound teaching, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears, and they shall turn their ears from the truth and be turned to fables”. They will want sweets and not porridge. Again, in the same vein in 2 Tim. 1:13 Paul tells Timothy to preach healthy teaching.
Isaiah battled false prophets who outnumbered him many-fold in the days before the Babylonian conquest of Judah. The people wanted preachers to preach “smooth things” (Isa. 30:10) rather than the sober truth that was proving to be unpalatable. Sugar not porridge. So in v.9 they are described as “children that will not hear the word of the Lord”. They had got a taste for sugar and had a “sweet tooth”.
Amos was a “blue-collar” preacher of the truth. He came from a farming background and spoke plainly to the northern kingdom of Israel. He pulled no punches so that “they were not able to bear his words” (Amos 7:10) and he was promptly told to leave Bethel because it was the “city of a great king” (v.13) – it was too sophisticated and politically correct and so had no place for him and if he wanted to preach go back home and preach to the yokels there.
In Jeremiah’s day, he fought a constant battle against false prophets who gave the people a “sugar rush” by preaching “peace, peace, when there is no peace” (6:14). Even though God had determined to use the Babylonians to punish Judah, and Jeremiah counselled the people to submit, false prophets pedaled the line “the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord” (7:4), insinuating that God would not allow His temple to be touched and thus the inhabitants of Jerusalem were safe.
The New Testament is a veritable banquet, but it is not a smorgasbord. The appeal of a smorgasbord is the picking and choosing – “I like that”; “that’s nice”; “I’ll have some of that”; “Hey get them brussell sprouts out of here!”. All scripture is inspired of God and profitable…
There are a lot of sweets in the Bible – wonderful messages of grace, love and forgiveness. But there is more to it than that. For some, the Bible is John 3:16 and little more. There’s a lot of porridge in the Bible too. In John 6 we have the record of an instance when many disciples ceased to follow Jesus because of a ‘hard saying’. He told them that they would have to digest Him (eat His flesh and drink His blood) to have life. Now to follow someone who gave out free lunches was one thing but to follow someone who calls you to holiness is a bit much!. In fact, Jesus said in Luke 14:26ff that He had to come first in a person’s life – before mother, father, husband, wife and one’s own life. The rich young ruler who came to Jesus enquiring about eternal life left sorrowful when told he had to get rid of his idol – money. When Jesus spoke of marriage and divorce, recorded in Matt.19, the disciples were shocked and Jesus admitted not all will accept this teaching.
When Jeremiah lamented the destruction of Jerusalem in 586B.C., he spoke on behalf of God and laid the blame, at least in part, at the feet of the false prophets. In 2:14 we read The prophets have seen vain and foolish things for you: they have not discovered your iniquity to turn away your captivity. In other words they saw nonsense and couldn’t see what they needed to see. They were blind leaders of the blind. But lets turn it around. What sort of preacher do we like? What sort of sermons do we like? We like sweets. What sort of sermons do we need? We need porridge – lessons that convict and cajole us to pursue righteousness.