When the blessing subsides and people are no longer being converted – let’s assume this has happened – and the churches became dry and cold and lacking blessing; the trouble is, says Jeremiah, the people don't say, ‘Where is the blessing that we used to know when souls were saved and the Spirit of God moved in our services, and there was great power? Where is it gone? What have we done to forfeit it? We want to go back to that.’ No, nowadays they say, ‘We need to borrow more music from the world. We need more bands and groups. We need more gimmicks, more innovations, more inventions of our own one.’ That is a parallel with the children of Israel. They said to themselves, ‘The heavens are closed, there is no rain, the crops are not growing’, and instead of saying, ‘Oh, but it used to be so different; the Lord used to bless this land, they said, ‘What we need is the gods of the nations around us. We need idols and charms and things like that.’ But we are doing the same today in so many of the churches.
We do it in our individual lives also. You feel low, but instead of asking, ‘Where is the Lord? I used to have such assurance. I used to have such blessing in my witness. I used to be at peace and know inner happiness. Instead of saying, I must go back to that, we say, ‘Turn on the television. Divert into something completely secular. Put on the music. Have the rhythm blaring into my earphones.’ We apply the reasoning of Jeremiah to ourselves: ‘Let us to go back to where we were, not try to replace the blessing of God with other things.’
Applying this to the unconverted, ‘No one asks the obvious questions: How did I get here? Do I have a Creator? Is there a purpose in life? Where is the Lord who has bought the human race into being? Why would he go to so much trouble to create man, and then abandon him to destruction and death?’ No, we spend all our energies these days on the theory of evolution. We look for an entirely naturalistic explanation for everything, one that avoids us needing to give any credit to God, or acknowledging his authority over us, or any debt we have to him. We leap at this sort of explanation. That is an act of worship. Every time an atheist takes to the platform to propound against God, evolutionary theory, that is an act of worship; that is an act of gross idolatry, so insulting to God, seeking after non-God explanations for everything.