Stress Test Devotional May 11
May 11, 2024
DEUTERONOMY 7:9-10 | 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 10 and who repays in their own person those who reject him. He does not delay but repays in their own person those who reject him.
Part of the new covenant Jeremiah dreamed of was a new individualism. It strikes us, as modern Americans, that it is unfair to hold children responsible for their parent's misdeeds, and there is truth to this argument. Individual responsibility and possibility begin to shift the religious landscape during the exile. Shorn of corporate governance and corporate religious practice, without a king to embody the nation or a Temple for collective sacrifice, individual Israelites had to maintain their personal devotion.
The Reformation, in a similar way, equipped individual Christians with their own Bibles and shifted responsibility for religious understanding to individual men and women.
How responsible are you for your own religious life?
