Week 2 Reading

What an amazing God we have! How many times we wonder what His will is for our lives and how we can find out what that will is only to read the Bible and realize that God is speaking to us all the time, we just need to be willing to listen and obey. God spoke to His people over and over in the Old Testament but they refused to listen. It got so bad that they would imprison Jeremiah just to get him out of their sight. Why? because if they listened then they would have to repent and stop doing things the same way they had been all those years. They would have to give up being religious and start to pursue a relationship with God. That was too scary for them, after all, relationships can be messy and unpredictable and religion takes no thought, you just need to go through the motions.

For this week I would like you to either start reading Jeremiah (or listening to it). I listen to 5 chapters each day on http://www.biblegateway.com/ When something stands out, I then go to the written word and take a look at how the statement that stood out fits into the rest of the section of Scripture.

I am planning on doing the study by subject and not from beginning to end. One of the reasons for this is the book of Jeremiah is not in chronological order. The king had taken the original scroll and burned it (Jeremiah 36). Later Jeremiah had his scribe re-write the scroll and other prophecies where then added to it.

For this week I want you to do a word study. I use http://www.crosswalk.com/ and then go to the Bible Study tools and choose the Strong's Concordance to do this. The word I want you to look up is "word". The Strong's number is 01697 and it is used 183 times in Jeremiah. The root is 01696 and it is used 104 times in Jeremiah. On this site you can search for a word and then narrow the search to the book of the Bible you are interested in. It will pull up all the verses that contain the word searched for and then you can look at it in context

I have the verses in a Word Document...so if you have trouble finding it on Crosswalk send me an email and I will forward the doc to you. www.gailfaith04@yahoo.com

I was amazed when I did this study. "Word" is used more times in Jeremiah than in any other book of the Bible. We know from the New Testament that Jesus is called the Word of God, so I do not think this is just a coincidence that God makes such a big deal out of using Jeremiah to present His word to His people.

Take a look and from the first couple of chapters of Jeremiah pick out some verses that show how important the Word of God is and discuss here with all of us. Have fun digging!!!