The land of the Israelites was overcome by the Chaldeans and the man who they put in charge to oversee those left behind was assassinated. So the remnant of Israel fled in fear of punishment. They asked Jeremiah to seek the Lord's direction and swore to obey it if he would seek and share it. After ten days, God gave Jeremiah direction for the people. And so Jeremiah spoke it- they were to stay where they were and were strictly told not to go to Egypt, where things seemed more comfortable at the time.
But they didn't like this direction and instead of listening they replied, "You are speaking a lie! The Lord our God has not sent you to say, 'You must not go to Egypt to live a life there for a while!'"
Isn't it just like us to immediately dismiss the things we hear when they don't agree with our own desires? We don't stop and weigh the things said by those who love the Lord, even as fellow believers, because we subconsciously think that God agrees with us. We determine our own views to be truth without being willing to have those views challenged.
"When Jeremiah had finished speaking to all the people all the words of the Lord their God-- all these words the Lord had sent him to give them-- then Azariah son of Hoshaiah, Johanan son of Kareah, and all the other arrogant men responded to Jeremiah..."
We put up walls of offense and yet our anger reveals the pride within us. You see, pride allows us to justify disobedience. I didn't call it that- God did. Scripture went on to say, " So I sent you all my servants the prophets time and time again, saying, 'Don't do this detestable things that I hate.' But they did not listen or pay attention; they did not turn from their evil or stop burning incense to other gods." Notice that He didn't chalk their responses into mere "learning their own way" It's disobedience no matter how we slice it when we aren't willing to hear God in whatever way He chooses to speak.
Change is hard; changing our views is probably the hardest type of change to make. But the only ways we're to have our minds renewed is to humble ourselves to drop the shield we place over what we already think. It's dangerous to ignore the words spoken to us by fellow believers, knowing God speaks to us through each other. Everything spoken must be weighed in prayer and seeking of God's truth on the matter- not our own.
To simply dismiss everything that doesn't immediately agree with us is dangerous. And we aren't just impacting ourselves.
"Why are you doing such harm to yourselves? You are cutting off man and woman, child and infant, from Judah, leaving yourselves without a remnant. You are provoking me to anger by the work of your hands."
I don't believe we can learn to hear God personally until we humble ourselves to hear from others, weigh it before deciding it to be truth or lie. I had to be humbled enough to hear even the things I didn't want to hear, perhaps even from people I didn't want to hear them from. My own "opinion" in the grand scheme of things doesn't matter; only God's truth does. But sometimes our biggest obstacles are those things we believe and our decision to guard them too closely.
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