How can I pardon you?
Your children have forsaken me,
and have sworn by those who are no gods.
When I fed them to the full,
they committed adultery
and trooped to the houses of prostitutes.
They were well-fed lusty stallions,
each neighing for his neighbor’s wife.
Shall I not punish them for these things?
says the LORD;
and shall I not bring retribution
on a nation such as this?
Go up through her vine-rows and destroy,
but do not make a full end;
strip away her branches,
for they are not the LORD’s.
For the house of Israel and the house of Judah
have been utterly faithless to me,
says the LORD.
They have spoken falsely of the LORD,
and have said, “He will do nothing.
No evil will come upon us,
and we shall not see sword or famine.”
The prophets are nothing but wind,
for the word is not in them.
Thus shall it be done to them! (Jeremiah 5:7-13)

Denial is a common human choice. Like the man falling from a high building, it is easy for him to fool himself into thinking that since nothing bad has happened during the first several seconds of his plunge, then perhaps that means that nothing bad will ever happen. In the case of Israel, not only did the people delude themselves into believing that God’s mercy and forbearance meant that they could just keep on behaving abominably, they had so-called prophets who encouraged them to continue living in their deluded state.

The delusion that God would do nothing, that he would not act to punish them, went hand in hand with their worship of false gods who they continued to worship, even though they never did anything to bless them. If Baal and Asherah did not bring blessings then why should they believe that Yahweh could bring them punishment? Life went on as it always had. Every day, the sun came up and the sun went down; the years passed, the seasons came at their appointed times, the crops yielded their harvests the same as always. People behaved well and people behaved badly and the rain fell on both of them just the same.
The people came to pay as little attention to Yahweh and his true prophets as they did to their other gods and their false prophets. Both were equally meaningless in their minds. But God, unlike the idols, was real. At the right moment, he intended to act. God does not ignore his people.

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