Highway construction is big business in this country. I love it when a new stretch of highway makes it easier to get where I’m going, and sometimes, I’ll drive on a new road just to see where it goes, whether I’ll ever use it or not. Sometimes, new construction completely obliterates an old road. The Bible says to ask for the ancient paths. What does it mean for the church today?

Thus says the Lord:
“Stand by the roads, and look,
and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it,
and find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
¹⁷ I set watchmen over you, saying,
‘Pay attention to the sound of the trumpet!’
But they said, ‘We will not pay attention.’” – Jeremiah 6:16-17 ESV

Clearly the people of Jerusalem preferred new paths, even though God warned against them. The ancient paths, then, would be the requirements of the Mosaic covenant.

Even more ancient than that, God gave one commandment in Eden, which Adam promptly violated. He chose instead to obey the serpent’s commandment. The good way is no longer obvious to anyone without discerning the ancient paths.

The bad path Jerusalem preferred

Child offered to the Canaanite god Molech to be burned alive.

Psalm 2 describes the hostility of the world toward the things of God: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us’” (Psalm 2:2-3). So great is the world’s bondage to sin that God’s ways seem like a burden.

The people of Jerusalem, and especially their leaders, preferred the ways of the Canaanites, a social system Israel should have obliterated centuries earlier. Jeremiah’s contemporary Ezekiel graphically described those ways in Ezekiel 8:5-18.

Basically, the law called people to live in a way distinct from the people around them, especially. With occasional exceptions, Israel had always preferred to live like Canaanites. Canaanite religious observance included infant sacrifice, ritual prostitution (both heterosexual and homosexual), and bestiality. These rituals supposedly compelled the gods to make their crops and their women fertile. No one believed the gods had any particular regard for people.

In the Ezekiel passage, we see the elders of Israel worshiping idols in secret. What’s worse, the priests stood in the temple between the porch and the altar, the place they usually bless worshipers. With their back to the temple, they worshiped the sun, not even attempting to hide their apostasy.

The watchmen of Jeremiah 6:17 are Moses and the prophets, who constantly warned of the curse of the law, the consequences of walking in the newfangled Canaanite paths. The passage goes on to say that the judgment will come soon, and that God is not impressed with mere ritual observance of the ceremonial law, no matter how much money the priests spent to impress people.

The bad path and the modern church

Nowadays, sin seems like a good thing. / Corey Balazowich via Flickr

In 1973, a book titled Whatever Became of Sin appeared. It warned that in American society, the idea of sin was being replaced by such concepts as syndromes, disorders, and dysfunctions. People would be excused from any kind of accountability. After all, no one is responsible for having an illness.

Does that sound like the warning of a conservative Christian theologian trying to call societyback to repentance? Alas, no. The author, Karl Menninger, was a secular psychiatrist.

Whatever became of a church that warned against sin?

For more than a century, seminaries have been churning out pastors who do not believe in the inspiration of Scripture or anything supernatural. Mainline denominations greeted the sexual revolution of the 1960s with indifference.

Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal seminary professor, even wrote Situation Ethics: The New Morality (1966) to make the old immorality seem respectable.  He claimed that anything the Bible considers an abomination can be justified in certain situations according to what he called “love.”

Fast forward to today. Mainline churches not only condone but embrace divorce, sexual promiscuity, unmarried couples living together, unmarried women bearing children, abortion on demand, homosexuality, gay marriage, and fluidity of gender. What’s next? Infanticide? Adults having sex with children?

Recently, the United Methodist Church has disunited over such issues. I heard one Methodist district superintendent, who prefers the Canaanite path to the ancient path, claim, “We follow Jesus, not Moses.” To give the error a different metaphor, too much of the modern church follows the Sadducee error of subtracting from Scripture.

The ancient watchmen still sound the warning trumpet.

“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.  For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:7-8).

Which path will you walk?