We have been continuing our series in Jeremiah on Sunday mornings. This week, we reached Jeremiah 34-35 and encountered an odd little group called the Rechabites. Their primary concerns appeared to be not drinking wine, not dwelling in towns and living in tents. They were a strange separatist group who seem like the Amish, Bedouin and Temperance Movement all rolled into one! Their lifestyle was based on the 300-year-old command from their ancestor Jonadab that they staunchly kept up to the time of Jeremiah.

God tells Jeremiah to call the Rechabites into the temple, gather the whole community together and offer them some wine to drink. The event was set up to maximise social pressure. The whole clan is gathered, they’re in the holiest place in Jerusalem, they’re shown hospitality that is socially rude to reject, and they’re called there by a recognised prophet. The pressure to drink was huge!

The point of this whole thing was not to try and tempt the Rechabites into breaking with their lifestyle nor to shame them as a bunch of weirdos. Equally, the point wasn’t to say their lifestyle was something Judah should emulate – their lifestyle is neither commended nor rejected. The point, stated pretty clearly at the end of the chapter, was to shame Judah. The Rechabites had one ancestor who made a command three-hundred-years earlier which they staunchly kept. Judah, by contrast, had multiple prophets repeating God’s Word to them time and time again and yet they consistently disobeyed. God was telling Jeremiah to let the Rechabites show up the people of God. The Rechabites were acting as an example of what faith and true belief will do and contrasting it with the kind of faith in Judah, which was severely wanting.

All too often, God’s people today fail to learn lessons from the world. We very often fail to reckon with the reality of common grace. We similarly misunderstand that total depravity does not mean everyone is as bad as they might ever be, or cannot do ostensibly good and right things, but that sin corrupts everything and no part of a person is unaffected. Understanding common grace and what radical corruption means that we can accept there is good in the world and there are lessons we, as the church, can learn from the world.

Take this now famous lesson on the necessity and urgency of evangelism from the Atheist magician, Penn Jillette:

I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward—and atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say just leave me alone and keep your religion to yourself—how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.

That is a clearer understanding on the urgency and necessity of evangelism than you might get from many churches. It is a lesson we can learn from an unbeliever.

Think about Muslims who pray five times a day. It might be easy to write that off as meaningless outward ritualism. We might easily wave it away as valueless being as they are working so hard to please a non-existent god who cannot and will not hear them. But might there be a lesson here – much like the Rechabites – that they are more fervent in their prayer than we are in ours? Let’s put it this way, as we belittle the five times a day prayer of a Muslim as valueless, do you pray more than five times a day? Do we ever stop to ask if they are more faithful to their false god than we are to the Living God? It is a lesson in faithfulness we can learn from the world.

Or what about churches that talk a lot about community? Most churches (in my honest opinion) don’t understand the meaning of the word. We think a meeting on Sunday and another one midweek, that we might even call a community group, amounts to solid community. But go down to your local council estate, better yet, live there for a few years and then tell me whether churches understand community. Estate people would not recognise what we call community as any such thing. Or hang around in a majority Muslim area for a few years and see how they understand community. Ask them if what we do looks like community to them. The church – dare I say, particularly the British church – can learn real lessons from the world here.

Those are just a few among loads of examples. And none of them are to say anything about the philosophers, historians and sociologists who manage to grasp something of the truth of human nature and why people operate as they do. It is to say nothing of the mathematicians, scientists and engineers who understand the reality of how the world works and bring out applications that benefit us. It is to say nothing about the doctors, nurses, pharmacologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and others who can heal sick bodies, broken minds and treat real illnesses for our good. You can think of all manner of other such examples. Common grace, and a proper understanding of total depravity – even just looking at examples in scripture like the Rechabites – mean we can and often should learn from the world.

Christians sometimes hunker down and shy away from the world. But the world is not universally awful. There are things the world does, that the church should do, and they do it better than we do. That doesn’t make everything the world says right. It doesn’t mean everything they think we should think. But it does mean there is good in the world, it is often better than the church, there are lessons we can learn from unbelievers and there are great benefits we can have from the world.

God did not create a bad world. Sin corrupted the complete and total goodness of it. But that doesn’t mean good no longer exists in it at all. There is much good in the world and there is much to be gained in understanding from it. The goodness of God’s design hasn’t been totally destroyed by sin; even a damaged painting has a lot of beauty in it and even a cracked mirror can reflect an image. They aren’t perfect, they are broken, they aren’t everything they should be, but the original design still works to some degree and isn’t utterly ruined. The world, corrupted by sin, is much like that. Broken, but not completely. Corrupted, but not utterly. Sin impacts every part of the world, but it isn’t as utterly sinful as it could be because of common grace and we do well to see the effects of God’s grace in the world, of which there is ample evidence.