Jeremiah 4:23-26 - Homiletics

Chaos the result of sin.

I. SIN HAS A RETROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT . In his vision of the earth desolated by a Divine judgment on sin, Jeremiah sees a relapse to the primeval condition before the dawn of creation, and in his graphic description uses the very words of the narrative in Genesis. He describes the earth as "waste and wild." Every step in sin is a step downward, backward. It is backsliding. How rapid this is! One generation sees the fall back to the condition from which it had taken ages to build up the order of the world. One day's sin may undo the work of years in a soul's progress. One age of misrule may throw a nation back for centuries.

II. SIN HAS A DISINTEGRATING INFLUENCE . It breaks up the fair order of the world and tends to reduce it to chaos. Religion and morality are the chief securities for order, the strongest bands of social unity. Vice is a social solvent, destroying ties of trust and affection, undermining the foundations of industrial co-operation. It is corruption, and corruption means decomposition. This may be applied

III. SIN HAS A DESOLATING EFFECT . The earth is seen as not only wild; it is "waste," i . e . fruitless, solitary, desolate. The fruitful place becomes a wilderness, and the whole land desolate, the result of the retrogressive and disintegrating influences of sin is not to reduce the world to a state of elementary simplicity. It introduces confusion, turmoil, disaster, death. The loss of goodness involves the admission of evil passions, and the advent of these is followed by the irruption of misery with no prospect of peace but in death and destruction ( James 1:15 ).