Jeremiah 13

The Israelites were in a predicament. They were on the verge of being captured and carted off to captivity, and that was just their external problem. Their internal problems were far more dangerous. Lust, greed, and idolatry were eating out the very heart of the nation. Everywhere you turned, there was corruption and wickedness.

The really unfortunate thing, however, was that the Israelites were also rejecting the one and only cure for their condition. God, their God!, had single-handedly brought their ancestors out of Egypt and ushered them into the Promised Land. He had made generous promises to them—and had kept every single one of them.

If any nation had proof that their God was real, the Israelites did. But they kept running off to other gods. They kept seeking protection, prosperity, and happiness in all the wrong places, and the further they went from God, the harder their lives became. Soon, they were prime candidates for defeat at the hands of the Babylonians.

All this time, God had been trying to help them—sending messages through the prophets, begging them to return to Him. Instead, they went their own way. Finally, God exclaimed, “Can an Ethiopian change the color of his skin? Can a leopard take away its spots? Neither can you start doing good, for you have always done evil.” (vs 23)

Our biggest problems are never the external ones. They are always the internal ones. We all have a sin problem—we were born with it!—and there is no way out of it on our own. We can no more restore our sin-damaged hearts than the Ethiopian can turn his skin white or the leopard can turn his spots into stripes. We can plead with all our idols (as the Israelites did), but at the end of the day, we’ll still have our problem.

God is the only one who can change spots. Trying to “start doing good” when our hearts are in their unconverted condition is like asking a fish to leap out of the water and fly. When we allow God to enter our lives, He changes us from the inside out. That is the only way we’ll ever be healed from our sin problem.

Until then, it’s all idolatry.