Jeremiah knew of the stern warnings that God issues to those of His elect who continue in sin and rebellion against God. He lived to see the end result of ignoring those warnings. If Jeremiah were alive on earth today he would tell us to pay attention to the words of the Apostle Paul. He would not claim that God loves us so much Paul could not possibly be speaking to God's own people!

Another unscriptural myth:

The concept that the Christian must never suffer. Christ did all the suffering for us. This idea is so obviously unscriptural that it is amazing intelligent believers would accept it as truth. But it is a part of the understanding that to be a Christian requires only that we make the right profession of belief. Once we do that we are saved by grace and no other action is necessary.

Jeremiah indeed would wonder at the notion that God's people are not supposed to suffer. Jeremiah suffered at the hands of his own people because he continually rebuked them for their ungodliness.

Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me. (Jeremiah 15:10)

Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail? (Jeremiah 15:18)

Suffering plays an important role in the development of God's rulers. If we suffer we will rule, Paul stresses.

The Apostle Peter claims that suffering is part of the process of making us holy.

Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; That he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God. (I Peter 4:1,2)

To attain the first resurrection from the dead we must share the sufferings of Christ.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; (Philippians 3:10)

It is through our suffering that the resurrection life of Christ is brought to other people.

Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. (II Corinthians 4:10)

Tribulation creates patience in us and teaches us obedience to God. Christ Himself learned obedience through the things He suffered. Paul learned that God's power is perfected as we are weak.

The teaching that Christians are not to suffer but are to be raptured to Heaven before they face Antichrist or the great tribulation is unscriptural. God's way, according to the Scriptures, is to enable us to go through the fire without being burned—like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

To be continued.