The Glory of Futility?

Jeremiah 2:11 – 13 is one of those passages in the Word that I have read and studied many times.  During my fourth time through it this year, in a video conference this morning, I saw something I had missed all the previous times.

First verses 11 and 13 are examples of Hebrew parallelism.  The Hebrew writer Jeremiah would use parallelism to emphasize a point.  Look at the parallels

• verse 11 – My people have changed their glory
• verse 13 – They have forsaken me the fountain of living waters
• verse 11 – For that which does not profit
• verse 13 – to hew broken cisterns that hold no water

There are a lot of observations we could make here but I want to focus on two (I was going to say one but I can’t help it).  The first is first half of verse 11.  God was the glory of Judah.  The people deserted their glory, their God.

God is our glory, not our job, not our family, not our land, not our walled cities, not what we have accomplished with our lives, only God.  Everything else in which we put value does not profit nor does it hold water.

Second, there is a contrast that I missed, fountain over and against a broken cistern.  To make the point more forcefully I am going to do a three way comparison, a fountain, a cistern, and a broken cistern,

Fountain	Cistern	Broken Cistern
Source	Storage	Cannot Store
Gives	Receives	Passes Through
Flowing	Stagnant	Empty
Constantly Replenished	Must be Refilled	Cannot be Filled
Fresh	Stale	Dirty

When we base our lives on anything other than our glory, God, we are busily engaged in attempting to store water in a colander.  That pursuit does not raise to the level of futile.  There is no glory in anything other than the Lord.  Kind of echoes John 15:5 and Matthew 6:33 don’t you think?