Bored?

How can you say, ‘I am not unclean,
        I have not gone after the Baals’?
    Look at your way in the valley;
        know what you have done—
    a restless young camel running here and there,
        a wild donkey used to the wilderness,
    in her heat sniffing the wind!
        Who can restrain her lust?
    None who seek her need weary themselves;
        in her month they will find her.
    Keep your feet from going unshod
        and your throat from thirst.
    But you said, ‘It is hopeless,
        for I have loved foreigners,
        and after them I will go.’
(Jeremiah 2:23-25 ESV)

What would make a people like Israel, with all of her privileges, become so debased as to be likened to a “wild donkey”?  Ray Ortlund has a theory:

Yahwish may seem boring and trite, its potential exhausted and its appeal passé, its scope confining and its tone severe, its priests predictably narrow and its prophets irritatingly strident; but fortunately (in asinine Judah’s view) the Baals are always there for relief, spicing up the wearying routine, titillating the senses, offering a more life-related and relevant message, reinvigorating the empty life and granting a reassuring sense of identification with the surrounding nations.  (Ray Ortlund, God’s Unfaithful Wife, 88)

In other words Israel got bored with God.  It occurs to me that this problem is not unique to Israel.  I have the same tendency to pursue the “spice of Baal worship” in my own life.  So as I reflect on this I ask myself (and you) a few questions?

What areas in my life am I “bored with God” and prone to attempt to spice up with “Baal”? 

Is the way that I proclaim the gospel more akin to a lusty donkey or a steady workhorse? 

Am I submitting to God and satisfied with His revealed Word or am I seeking something new and invigorating? 

What are some questions that you might ask…