Jeremiah 23:10
For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and their course is evil, and their force is not right. For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and their course is evil, and their force is not right.
The verse belongs to the warnings to the Jews, and those warnings also apply to the present day. It describes Judah as morally corrupt, where adultery and false swearing have brought grief on the land, even its fruitful places are dried up, and the people's way is evil and their power is misused rather than rightly exercised. The prophets, priests, and people had plenty of ability and energy, but they were adulterous, corrupt and profane. The prophets spoke without being sent by God, falsely reassuring the people with a message of peace that no evil would come while they followed their own desires and violated God's law.
Force in the verse is not called wrong for lack of strength or activity, but because of its direction and result: it is right when it accomplishes a good and desirable purpose and wrong when it drives toward harm. The chief problem is therefore not lack of human ability or energy but its misuse for evil rather than for God's service. The same kind of force can be useful or destructive depending on its direction and result, as seen in machinery, a train, and a ship, and human physical and mental powers are channels through which a person's active life is expressed. The evil course and misdirected force describe fallen human nature: people have turned from the good course God intended, and their God-given powers once suited to righteousness are now used for evil.
The same force that advances wickedness can become useful for good when turned to God's service, for conversion redirects existing faculties rather than creating new ones, as illustrated by Paul. Restoration requires that the tendencies of every faculty be restrained, redirected toward good, and trained to follow that course. Might used in an evil course is not right, setting God's principle that right is might against the earthly principle that might is right. Evil might produces quicker results but they are never permanent, while God's right works slowly in a way impatient people who want present results are unwilling to wait for, yet in the end God's right proves to be everlasting might.
The worldwide proclamation of peace by decree is false because the course of those behind it is evil and their power is not right, since war still sits enthroned in unregenerate human hearts. When Satan's deception is complete and the song of peace is heard throughout the world, Armageddon breaks upon the world. Swearing is singled out as the cause of mourning in the land and drying of the pleasant places and pastures, bringing famine, though why this sin is named above other great sins and why it is so heinous to God is not told. The prophet foresaw in this a future time of terrible apostasy when a land is given up to swearing.
Though spoken in Jeremiah's time, the verse states a fixed principle in God's moral government that holds just as certain for the future for any nation of the same character, because God weighs nations in balances of justice and regards iniquity the same today as then. When profane swearing becomes common in streets and hamlets, in business and travel, in saloons and homes, among old and young, it becomes the mark of a people and brings mourning and scourge on the land. Even with prospect of abundant harvest this growing evil, unless guarded against, becomes a cause of national scourge, and those who sin as Sodom and Gomorrah did must answer a like account in the day of judgment with even less toleration. Words of the mouth reveal character, and character is what God weighs in the judgment.
A heart that produces curses and oaths already holds other dark and horrible evils that only lack time and opportunity to develop and become known. A person who rails in blasphemy even at the lowest living creature warns that life and character are unsafe in his hands, and a person who takes his Maker's name carelessly, vainly, or rudely shows a debased mind capable of any meanness. Governing power is gone when a person does not fear God who made heaven and earth and is like a ship without a rudder when animal propensities govern him. Fearing God gives the first conception of duty, while not fearing God makes a fool, and whether swearing comes from fashion or ignorance it places the swearer in a dangerous condition. When teachers such as prophets, priests, and pastors are silent and do not cry out and expose this bold and defiant sin of blasphemy, they become guilty of the same crime, and God will visit with famine a nation so given up to such bold sin.
Swearing makes the land mourn and leaves those who take God's name in vain guilty before God. To continue in this dreadful sin after warning is inconsiderate and heedless: it stings people's own souls, poisons their associates, dishonors God, calls down the judgments of Heaven, and its hard way ends in ruin.