Jeremiah 10:23-25 – The Precipitous "Us" and "Them"
From Jeremiah 10…
23
O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself;
It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.
24
O Lord, correct me, but with justice;
Not in Your anger, lest You bring me to nothing.
25
Pour out Your fury on the Gentiles, who do not know You,
And on the families who do not call on Your name;
For they have eaten up Jacob,
Devoured him and consumed him,
And made his dwelling place desolate.
"I turned away with a smile on my face," narrates "You Love Me Anyway" by Sidewalk Prophets, realizing, "with this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace."
This sort of vanity pivot is perhaps evident at the end of Jeremiah 10. The prophet's confession in verses 23 and 24 is a thing of beauty and universal application. He recognizes human weakness for all of us, and confesses it directly to the Lord. He recognizes he has no standing before God in himself. Perhaps relieved of this burden, perhaps with some vague sense of the standing that will be his in Christ, he turns with a smile on his face.
How quickly he moves, though, from some realization that he is accepted into the "us" to turn his scorn on the "them" who are not so fortunate! He would, like Sidewalk Prophets, bury God's grace before contemplating the idea that others, outsiders, could be used as instruments of it in ways that are not comfortable for His people with a history with Him.Jeremiah 10:23-25 – The Precipitous "Us" and "Them"
From Jeremiah 10…
23
O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself;
It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.
24
O Lord, correct me, but with justice;
Not in Your anger, lest You bring me to nothing.
25
Pour out Your fury on the Gentiles, who do not know You,
And on the families who do not call on Your name;
For they have eaten up Jacob,
Devoured him and consumed him,
And made his dwelling place desolate.
"I turned away with a smile on my face," narrates "You Love Me Anyway" by Sidewalk Prophets, realizing, "with this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace."
This sort of vanity pivot is perhaps evident at the end of Jeremiah 10. The prophet's confession in verses 23 and 24 is a thing of beauty and universal application. He recognizes human weakness for all of us, and confesses it directly to the Lord. He recognizes he has no standing before God in himself. Perhaps relieved of this burden, perhaps with some vague sense of the standing that will be his in Christ, he turns with a smile on his face.
How quickly he moves, though, from some realization that he is accepted into the "us" to turn his scorn on the "them" who are not so fortunate! He would, like Sidewalk Prophets, bury God's grace before contemplating the idea that others, outsiders, could be used as instruments of it in ways that are not comfortable for His people with a history with Him.
Granted, there are exigencies to Jeremiah's moment which render this response understandable. This is a man invested in his people. Though he has understood from the beginning of God's calling that they won't respond as a whole, God's delivery the national judgment is near has to be rattling. It's on Jeremiah's heart that this, what might be seen in the flesh as a failure of his ministry, also impacts the prophet's family. It's on his heart, no doubt, that the people whom he represents and to whom he speaks have SOME history of faithfulness, whereas the conquerors God is going to use, in Jeremiah's mind, have none.
We sort, though, between Them and Us with a vehemence similar to Jeremiah 10:25 without such pressing factors. We are on the other side of the cross. We have heard the centurion, nominally with the conquerors, declared the supremacy of Christ. We are on the other side of Pentecost, and we know that the imparting of the Spirit by grace is not a matter of a particular cultural heritage. Our perspective is better, but our pique is still powerful. We have the same enemy who wishes to pull us away from Jeremiah 10:23-24 moments of transcendent surrender as quickly as possible.
Yet, ephemeral as these are, pressing as our efforts at self-justification are, our Lord is yet more persistent. What He has begun in us, He is faithful to complete. He will, Revelation says, gather His own from every tribe and tongue. However much we tend to put up paper barricades based on political and cultural lines here, He will continue to tear them down unto that day. He will continue to insist on foetastes of oneness in Him which we neither warrant nor, sometimes, want. He will continue to show off that this moment's conqueror can be conquered in Him for all time.
23
O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself;
It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.
24
O Lord, correct me, but with justice;
Not in Your anger, lest You bring me to nothing.
25
Pour out Your fury on the Gentiles, who do not know You,
And on the families who do not call on Your name;
For they have eaten up Jacob,
Devoured him and consumed him,
And made his dwelling place desolate.
"I turned away with a smile on my face," narrates "You Love Me Anyway" by Sidewalk Prophets, realizing, "with this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace."
This sort of vanity pivot is perhaps evident at the end of Jeremiah 10. The prophet's confession in verses 23 and 24 is a thing of beauty and universal application. He recognizes human weakness for all of us, and confesses it directly to the Lord. He recognizes he has no standing before God in himself. Perhaps relieved of this burden, perhaps with some vague sense of the standing that will be his in Christ, he turns with a smile on his face.
How quickly he moves, though, from some realization that he is accepted into the "us" to turn his scorn on the "them" who are not so fortunate! He would, like Sidewalk Prophets, bury God's grace before contemplating the idea that others, outsiders, could be used as instruments of it in ways that are not comfortable for His people with a history with Him.Jeremiah 10:23-25 – The Precipitous "Us" and "Them"
From Jeremiah 10…
23
O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself;
It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps.
24
O Lord, correct me, but with justice;
Not in Your anger, lest You bring me to nothing.
25
Pour out Your fury on the Gentiles, who do not know You,
And on the families who do not call on Your name;
For they have eaten up Jacob,
Devoured him and consumed him,
And made his dwelling place desolate.
"I turned away with a smile on my face," narrates "You Love Me Anyway" by Sidewalk Prophets, realizing, "with this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace."
This sort of vanity pivot is perhaps evident at the end of Jeremiah 10. The prophet's confession in verses 23 and 24 is a thing of beauty and universal application. He recognizes human weakness for all of us, and confesses it directly to the Lord. He recognizes he has no standing before God in himself. Perhaps relieved of this burden, perhaps with some vague sense of the standing that will be his in Christ, he turns with a smile on his face.
How quickly he moves, though, from some realization that he is accepted into the "us" to turn his scorn on the "them" who are not so fortunate! He would, like Sidewalk Prophets, bury God's grace before contemplating the idea that others, outsiders, could be used as instruments of it in ways that are not comfortable for His people with a history with Him.
Granted, there are exigencies to Jeremiah's moment which render this response understandable. This is a man invested in his people. Though he has understood from the beginning of God's calling that they won't respond as a whole, God's delivery the national judgment is near has to be rattling. It's on Jeremiah's heart that this, what might be seen in the flesh as a failure of his ministry, also impacts the prophet's family. It's on his heart, no doubt, that the people whom he represents and to whom he speaks have SOME history of faithfulness, whereas the conquerors God is going to use, in Jeremiah's mind, have none.
We sort, though, between Them and Us with a vehemence similar to Jeremiah 10:25 without such pressing factors. We are on the other side of the cross. We have heard the centurion, nominally with the conquerors, declared the supremacy of Christ. We are on the other side of Pentecost, and we know that the imparting of the Spirit by grace is not a matter of a particular cultural heritage. Our perspective is better, but our pique is still powerful. We have the same enemy who wishes to pull us away from Jeremiah 10:23-24 moments of transcendent surrender as quickly as possible.
Yet, ephemeral as these are, pressing as our efforts at self-justification are, our Lord is yet more persistent. What He has begun in us, He is faithful to complete. He will, Revelation says, gather His own from every tribe and tongue. However much we tend to put up paper barricades based on political and cultural lines here, He will continue to tear them down unto that day. He will continue to insist on foetastes of oneness in Him which we neither warrant nor, sometimes, want. He will continue to show off that this moment's conqueror can be conquered in Him for all time.
The paradigm of Us/Them is seemingly situated within our very DNA. Even in the garden, Adam sought to distance himself from the woman at an attempt to salvage his own self-righteousness. A more modern example of this is the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students were assigned roles as either prisoners or guards and devolved into all sorts of transgression alongside class lines.
ReplyDeleteThe danger in this basic trait of humanity is that we would miss the point of what God is doing. As you point out, God is gathering an innumerable expanse of human followers from every tribe, tongue, and nation. In eternity, We will be numbered among Them without distinction. Unity in Christ and oneness of the Spirit are the only remedies for such a discriminatory malady. I pray that God will not find us as faithless as Israel in her rejection and self-condemnation of the Gentile world, but will find us treating everyone as our neighbor for the sake of the gospel advance in the world, even if this means we must endure social discomfort and even ridicule as we broach the lines of Us/Them so tightly drawn around us.