Jeremiah 51:15-19. Jeremiah is reminding us that it is God who made the earth and everything in it; who stretched out the heavens by his understanding. He stirs up the waters by his voice, he makes lightnings for the rain. "Every man is stupid and without knowledge, every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols; for his images are false." The God of Jacob is not like these, he is the one who formed all things.

Language such as that used by Jeremiah here is often what certain atheists or non-believers, who say they "believe in science," cite as being foolish "creationism" type language. But they, like all men (according to Jeremiah), are in fact "stupid." It is easy to see something like "When he utters his voice there is a tumult of waters in the heavens" and say no, we know that God doesn't cause storms, we can explain exactly how they happen - so this is silly "old man in the sky" language. But it is not. The Bible is God communicating with man. We will never be able to understand his ways and his thoughts, so he talks to us in a language that we can understand at the time that he is talking to us. In Jeremiah's time, they did not know how storms formed, and God could not have explained it well enough to Jeremiah to have him explain it to the people, and then impress upon them that this was the system that God set up to order his creation.

The universe plays by the physical laws of nature that God put in place to accomplish his will. We learn more and more of these physical laws over time, through the scientific method, through testing, and also by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. The people of Jeremiah's time had no scientific shoulders to stand on to understand how this may have worked. So, instead, God tells Jeremiah that when he utters his voice a storm is called up. It is, actually, the same thing as what we now know - the scientific laws of nature are God's voice being uttered. Do we think he does not have control over these things,? Of course he does, this is all his creation, those are the laws he set up, and those are how he accomplishes his will and his miracles!  I think of the scene in the Ten Commandments when Pharaoh cites back to Moses all the reasonable explanations for the plagues Egypt has thus far endured, and they are reasonable explanations, they make scientific sense. That does not in any way mean that God did not call them into being by uttering his voice at the time that he wanted them to happen, and by using Moses to tell Pharaoh that it was going to happen.

All of this is why Jeremiah goes on to say that we are stupid - because we can never really understand how the creator of the universe works, and we so want to make him work in a way that we understand. Because of that, we often want to make him more human, more like us, more in line with what we understand a god should be like - so we create idols. Science has become an idol for some who blindly follow what they see as its "dictates" while closing their ears to any truth contradicting them. Any good scientist will tell you that no theory of science, no matter how well accepted and tested, is sacrosanct and if, at any point, evidence comes to light disproving that theory, the theory must give way to facts, to the new evidence, to the truth.

Our idols, including science, will never be God, and will always fall to the truth when it is revealed. The only lasting truth is God, which makes him the only one worth following and believing. Anything else that we believe ahead of him and his words is an idol that will fall.