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Jeremiah 9:13-15 "And the Lord says: 'Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, or walked in accord with it, but have stubbornly followed their own hearts and have gone after the Ba'als, as their fathers taught them. Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold I will feed this people with wormwood and give them poisonous water to drink."

 

There is a recent and much needed focus on how the food we eat and the water we drink is actually causing us to be less healthy, and even making us sick. Because of all the things added to our food and water, they have often become agents of harm rather than of nourishment and human flourishing. I am hopeful that with the MAHA movement, and some of the people currently in positions to do something about it, this may begin to be addressed. But as I came to learn of how much of our processed food, and the chemicals and concoctions we add to our water, and spray in our air, and inject into our bodies, are often doing more harm than good, I thought of passages like this one from Jeremiah.

 

When we are on the wrong track, turning away from God, as we currently are, we start to trust in men (we have to trust in something, after all, this life is too difficult and confusing not to take direction from someone!). Without God, we turn away from the good and healthy things God, as our Creator, knows are good for us, and we turn towards human intervention, manipulation, or reinvention of those things, and see them as better. In the case of our medicine and food, we have come to trust "the Science" in place of God, because we culturally do not really believe in God anymore, we think of our chosen "experts" as gods.

 

When this happens with anything, when we turn towards "Ba'als" in place of God, we suffer the consequences. It is not that God is poisoning the water or food, it is that we are, or the people we look to in place of Him are. Man is always corruptible, and without God will eventually corrupt everything. When we allow men who call themselves "the Science" to dictate how we are to care for ourselves and others, and we stop listening to how God told us to do those things, we will eventually all be eating the wormwood and drinking the poison water "the Science" has given us.

 

Society is suffering the consequences of going after the "Ba'als" of "Science" (we are also suffering from going after many other Ba'als, but those can be topics for other posts, maybe I'll do a "Ba'als" series!). In many cases, we turn to these Ba'als because it is what our fathers have taught us, but that's no excuse for not thinking with our own minds, loving with our own hearts, and turning to the true God. For the sake of our children, we need to start  acknowledging the problem, and questioning man's intervention in God's Creation, including in the food and water that sustains our lives.