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The Independence Podcast helps everyday people discover that true freedom isn’t found in self-reliance but in total dependence on Jesus Christ. Each episode blends honest conversation, biblical truth, and practical application to help listeners move beyond emotional devotion toward consistent, daily surrender. Whether you’re new in your faith or longing to grow deeper, you’ll find encouragement to trust God fully, live from His grace, and follow Christ with courage in a world that celebrates independence but neglects dependence on the One who truly sets us free.
Bryan Dunham (00:01)
Have you ever had someone walk away from you and you had no idea why? No conversation, no explanation, just distance? And the question that lingers is pretty simple. What did I do wrong? The question there assumes that there must have been a reason, a fault, a failure, a disconnect of some type. In Jeremiah chapter two, God asks his people,
a similar question. What fault did your ancestors find in me that they strayed so far from me? So let's jump into this question that God asked today on episode 26 of the Independence podcast, which is a place where we are actively attempting to learn how to live independence daily on God. am your host, Brian Dunham. And this week, we're once again going to
Do a little pause on the Bound for Freedom series, primarily because these verses, which is going to be Matthew chapter five, 31 and 32, I've been working really all week on preparing this message. And truthfully, it's been in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks because it's dealing with divorce. And this is a road I have walked. And as I'm going through this and the background on this, like these are, these are verses that I have read and struggled with.
for many, many years. And I still haven't come to some conclusions on some things here. And so just trying to ensure I've got a full biblical backbone behind what I share when it comes to these verses, because so many of us in our world today have been down this road of divorce, or our parents have, or someone in our family has, or a very close friend of ours. Like, it is so...
Common and it's unfortunate that it is so common But wanted to ensure that that particular episode is done not that all of the episodes aren't done with great care But this one ⁓ in particular because it impacts ⁓ So many of us and because I've walked the road and there's still some hard cold Sharp edges to that topic
for me and so just wanted to make sure I get that done right. So hopefully that will be next week and hopefully this week there'll be enough preparation time to deliver ⁓ that next week. So this week we are focused on one of the questions God asks and as many of you know this is my fallback in a situation like this where either ⁓ my calendar is too full to really put the proper prep time in or this is really the first one I think that's required. ⁓
multiple weeks to really prepare for. So in those moments, I still want to give you something this week. And I fall back on the questions God asks because my first book is about the questions that God asks, which again, curious nature of a God who knows everything, but still asks us questions. And in the book, Questions God Asks, that came out in December, I covered 10 of them and there are more than 600. So I've got plenty of material to work with here that I've already done a little bit of work on. So.
That makes it fairly easy to put together a podcast like this for you. So I hope that this one you really enjoy. All of them are good, like almost all 600. Some of them are repetitious, but I really hope that you get a lot out of this one here today. So this is Jeremiah chapter two and verse four, and I'm just going to read that. This is the English standard version. Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, and all the clans of the house of Israel.
Thus says the Lord, what wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me and went after worthlessness and became worthless? And to understand the weight of this question, we really need to understand a little bit of the background and where the question comes from. So Jeremiah as a prophet begins his ministry during the reign of King Josiah. And this is,
In the final decades of the kingdom of Judah before their destruction and exile into Babylon. So Judah was destroyed in 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar came down and laid siege to Jerusalem and culminated in the fall of Jerusalem, destruction of Solomon's temple, and the exile of many Jews to Babylon. ⁓ this event is really the defining
catastrophe, if you want to think about it that way, behind much of Jeremiah's ministry. So when you read Jeremiah, just know that's the backdrop. And so Israel and Judah, there had, the kingdoms were split, right? If you recall the history here, ⁓ Israel was a nation, Judah was a nation. ⁓ The kingdom of Israel was not still standing at this point. The northern kingdom of Israel had already been ⁓ taken captive much earlier, 722 BC.
when the Assyrians came in under Shalmaneser and ⁓ deported much of the population. So by Jeremiah's day, Israel had been gone for 100 plus years and Judah was the only remaining kingdom. And so Jeremiah is warning Judah not to repeat Israel's covenant failure. So this is why Jeremiah often uses Israel as he's ⁓
because he's using them as a cautionary tale. In fact, there's another place in Jeremiah where ⁓ God, through Jeremiah, explicitly talks about faithless Israel and unfaithful Judah. And Judah had the advantage of history. They had seen what had happened to her sister kingdom in Israel, yet they still persisted in the same sin. So Jeremiah's message ⁓ carries a little bit of added irony here. Judah was not ignorant.
They were warned by history itself. Judah was not ignorant. They were warned by history itself and still they drifted. And that makes Jeremiah 2 and the question God asks even sharper. He's not speaking to a people without precedent. He's speaking to a nation that should have known better. And how many times have you and I fallen into that exact same trap? We run down a pathway that we thought would lead us to freedom.
that actually enslaved us to some sinful lifestyle pattern. And then we get freed from that by God. And at some point in the future, we run back to that thing. Even when we know the consequence, we somehow think that this time is going to be different. And it doesn't necessarily just have to be a sinful lifestyle pattern. This could be a relationship that you keep running back to.
Anything that we think is going to deliver one of the promises of what are what are called the four root idols which are power approval Comfort control. I always think of it as pack pa CC the four root idols power approval comfort control almost always the sinful things that we deal with the things that we lean into are in some ways a search for one of those four things
And now, going back to the story here in Judah, on the surface, what was actually happening here in Judah was this is a, was a kind of an active season of return. Josiah had removed many of the idols of Judah. He restored temple worship. He called the nation back to covenant faithfulness.
So outwardly on the surface, things look better. Religiously, the nation seemed to be improving, but Jeremiah exposes what was actually happening underneath. The reforms that they were doing apparently were just external, really, and not internal. People were participating in worship, but their hearts were still far from God. And that is what makes Jeremiah 2 so powerful and I think also has application for many of us today, much of my life.
Much of my adult life as I was pursuing, building my own kingdom and building my own wealth, like material success was the primary driver of much of my life. I had always been involved in church. I had been involved in leadership in church, but it really was more of an addition to my life and Jesus was not my king. And that's what Jesus actually calls for when it comes to us being a Christian is.
we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised us from the dead and we will be saved. that's Romans 10, nine, Sometimes I think we believe, well, if I confess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord, that that's acknowledging, okay, he's the creator God, like he is the King of the universe. ⁓ But that's not what that verse means. If I'm confessing that he is Lord.
that word Lord means he's the king of my life. Like I ⁓ am confessing that I am in full submission to him as essentially the one whom I obey. He is my owner and I relinquish my rights to self-direct my life and I lean into him. And so that is part of what it means to be a Christian. And too many times, of my life again was spill was much of my life was spent.
not making him the king of my life. And so therefore, though I was participating in all of the pieces and religious activity you would say makes a good Christian, on the inside he was not my Lord and he was not my king. And that's what's happening here in these verses in Jeremiah. And so God speaks as the faithful covenant Lord calling his people to account here.
As God so lovingly does, he doesn't jump onto the scene with an accusation. He just simply begins with a question. What fault did you find in me? In the Hebrew word that is translated as ⁓ fault or in the ESV, what wrong did you find in me is aval. And it means injustice. It means moral defect. So God's not asking, you know,
What bothered you about me? He's asking, what injustice did you discover in me? What moral failure did I commit? And the implied answer, of course, is none. There is no flaw, was no flaw in God, is no flaw in God. No unfaithfulness, no corruption, no failure, which means their departure cannot be blamed on Him. The problem was never with God. The problem was with their hearts, and the problem was with our hearts. Then God says that they strayed far from Him.
That phrase comes from the Hebrew word, rahak, and it means to remove oneself, to withdraw. So it's not, this isn't an accidental wandering. It is a deliberate distancing. Have you ever violated a relationship? Like you did something that you knew when you did it, it was like, oh, I just violated that relationship. It could be something really significant, adultery. could be,
lying, could be gossiping about someone or sharing some information that someone asked you not to share with another person. And the moment you were doing it, it's like, ah, I'm violating this relationship. Could be a friendship, marriage, maybe even a situation with your kids. What was your initial instinct in that moment? Was it to instantly move towards them in reconciliation and confess the thing that you did and said, I really want to make this right? Or was the initial instinct to run?
create distance, distract yourself with something, not think about it. Often we create distance because we know we violated the relationship and creating that distance allows us not to feel the guilt and the shame and the things that typically come along with the violation of a relationship. want, we don't want those things to surface. so reconciliation is much, much harder than simply pretending everything is fine. And
Here, Judah, according to these verses, is actively creating separation. And that matters because ⁓ sin is not at first about breaking rules. It's about this relational withdrawal. And when it comes to God at its core, sin is distancing ourselves from God. And why did Judah do it? Well, Jeremiah says here, they followed worthless idols and then they themselves became
worthless. So the word for worthless idols is havel. It literally means vapor, emptiness, futility. It's the same word that's used throughout Ecclesiastes, vanity of vanities or meaningless. Everything is meaningless. It's the same word. So they're not simply following false gods. These are empty substitutes, like vapor masquerading as a substance.
unable to carry the weight of worship, unable to ⁓ sustain someone as the primary focal point of their life. And then comes the consequence, they became worthless themselves. The Hebrew verb here, when it talks about becoming worthless, is that same root word as havel. In other words, they became like what they pursued. This is one of the deepest spiritual principles in scripture.
You and I have an instinctive need to worship. We need something, something to occupy the center of our lives. And even to the degree that we'll often put ourselves at the center, but something must go there because like almost everything we see in nature, everything has a center around which the rest revolves. And for your life, it's the same way I've done an entire podcast episode on this. I think it's titled, Reordering Your Orbit.
But it's the idea that all of us have a center in our life and our life revolves around that center. And if that thing that's at the center can't bear the weight of your entire life revolving around it, it eventually will break down and crash and will leave you saying things like, I feel like my life's falling apart. That is quite literally what's happening because the thing you put at the center can't support everything else orbiting around it. And when it breaks, everything starts shooting off in all these wild directions.
⁓ so I would encourage you go back and listen to that episode if you haven't, or maybe give it a re-listen if it's been a little while, because it really is a core principle to our lives. And so something has to go at the center. And then this verse tells us we become like that thing. Like we're shaped by whatever is at the center. We're shaped by what we worship. So if you chase emptiness, emptiness shapes you. If you pursue falsehood, distortion follows. Like give your heart to hollow things and your soul becomes hollow too.
And that was Israel's tragedy ⁓ historically. And when we look here, Judah is heading down that same path according to Jeremiah. and if we're honest, some of us are heading that way even right now. And we may not bow to carved statues, but we still chase idols. I talked about it before.
success, comfort, approval, control, security, pleasure, again, all back to the root. Four core root, idols, power, approval, comfort, control. We pursue things that promise fullness, but they deliver vapor. I often use the analogy of cotton candy. Like cotton candy is, it looks like it's full and thick and you can't wait to eat it. But once you put it in your mouth, it just disappears. It vanishes. It does not deliver on the promise that the image of it is.
And this happens with us when we pursue things that ⁓ lack substance. They look great, but once we consume them, it's like, that's it. And so typically we often will have the instinctive reaction to think, well, I just need more. The problem was I didn't get enough of it. So I need more of that thing, whatever that cotton candy thing is for you. Or we need different. We go down the path of more enough to realize, okay, more of this thing's not actually going to help me.
I just need something different. So we take something else and place that at the center. ⁓ But all the while, if that's not God, it can't actually ever bear the weight of the thing at the center has to bear. And so when we pursue things that promise fullness, but deliver this vapor, this futility, this nothingness, our hearts drift. And ⁓ it's not in.
dramatic rebellion. It's in these subtle substitutions, a little less dependence on God, a little more trust in myself, a little less hunger for truth, a little more appetite for control. And then one day we realize we've created distance. And so God asks, what fault did you find in me? In other words, when did I stop being enough for you? And that question exposes the irrationality.
of sin. We don't leave God because he's lacking. We leave because we wrongly believe that something else can satisfy us more. And that's the lie beneath every rebellion. As it was in the garden when the serpent is tempting Eve, he says to Eve, God knows that when you eat the fruit of it, you're going to become like him. It's like God's holding out on you.
There's more life to experience. And if you try to follow his rules all the time, you're not going to get out of life everything that you can get. And wow, how many of us fall under that same lie, under that same delusion that if I live in the way in which God tells me he's trying to restrict my life, he's trying to tell me either things I can't do, and it's limiting somehow my experience of life. And so sin's not
It's misplaced trust. It's believing that life can be found apart from the one who is life itself. And yet, God still asks the question, not because he's lacking knowledge, but because we lack awareness. God's questions are diagnostic. He's leading his people to see where they've gone, what they've done.
And notice that this is always how God approaches us in loving invitation, not an accusation so much as just an inquiry because divine questions are often calls to return. If God is still asking, then God is still reaching, still confronting, still inviting of all the things that you have done and I have done, God is still, even still after all that.
moving towards us in love. Who is like this? Who will, regardless of what you have done, still consistently and relentlessly pursue and move toward you? Who is like this? It's why David says in the Psalms, who is like our God? No one, no one. So the question comes to us today, what,
have you been pursuing? What empty thing have you trusted in to give us what only God can give you? What distance have we created and what has it shaped us into? Because the fault was never ever with him. The flaw was never in his character, the distance began in us, but grace is this, the God we drift from is the God who is still on the move.
calling us back. So if your heart feels far from him today, hear his voice. What fault did you find in me? And if the answer is none, then perhaps it's a good time to come home because the one you left has never changed and he is still the only one who can satisfy your soul. If you have found this episode helpful, please follow the show.
share with a friend and until next week, grace and peace to you, my friends.