Lets continue looking at Isaiah 29 v 13,'And so the Lord says,''These people say they are mine. They honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote'.Consider,'but their hearts are far from me',one has said if we feel that sense of distance with God ,we can be assured that God has not moved.Let us put it in a modern setting, they were just going to church,they must have thought that was all that was expected of them.Of course its not if that all it is, its legalism, when we attend our local fellowship it has or it should have, the ministry of the word of God .That word should touch our hearts,and create in us a desire for our God. The problem with the people we are considering is they were not getting the word of God, they were getting as Barry Webb puts it, 'false religion',he writes,' False religion is the very worst kind of pride because it attempts to make God our servant instead of recognizing that we are his'.Let us move to the time of Jeremiah ,the weeping prophet, were we see nothing had changed ,in 5 v 31,we read,' The prophets give false prophecies, and the priests rule with an iron hand. Worse yet, my people like it that way!Our dear Lord was faced with the same thing CP Mark 7 v7.The result would be as foretold in v 14 of Isa 29,I quote Barry Webb,' God's judgement would reduce proud Jerusalem to the most abject weakness and helplessness'.
'There is no substitute for the word of God'
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