In the beginning God spoke and chaos became creation. Order came to matter.  In the first three days of creation the world took form and the seas, the skies, the stars, the land took shape and became recognizable categories. In the second 28 chaosthree days of creation God filled each category with life. In the seas he put fish, in the air birds, on the earth animals and ultimately a garden paradise and the creation of man and woman in His own image. God spoke and good things came. But man’s rebellion reversed God’s good intentions. Jeremiah 4:26 says, “I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the LORD…”

God brings order out of chaos, man’s rebellion always result in chaos out of order! In Jeremiah’s history his people had forgotten God and all He had done for them. Their ears could no longer hear and their eyes could no longer see. They had become dull to spiritual truth. Without God all returns to chaos. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:14 “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” Jeremiah preached to a dead nation. The truth was hidden from them because they did not believe. This is true to God’s word today as well. People do not hear the truth because they are spiritually dead and God’s truth can be perceived only through the spirit. That’s why we must be born again! We need God’s spirit to grasp God’s truth.

Hodge says, “Therefore, those who have not the Spirit cannot discern these things. If the effect of sin on the human soul is to make it blind to the truth, excellence, and beauty of divine things—if, as the apostle asserts, the natural or un-renewed man is in such a state that the things of the Spirit are foolishness to him, seeming absurd, insipid, and distasteful, then it follows that he can discern them only through the Spirit. His inner state must be changed by the influence of the Gospel. There must be congeniality between the perceiver and the thing perceived. Only the ‘pure in heart’ can see God. If our Gospel is hidden, says the apostle, it is hidden to those who are lost. The only hope of the un-renewed, therefore, is in doing as the blind did in the days of Christ. They must go to him for spiritual discernment; and those who go to him, he will in no wise cast out.[1]

[1] Charles Hodge, 1 Corinthians, Crossway Classic Commentaries (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1995), 58–59.