Jeremiah 11:1-5 – The Regal Reboot
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, 2 “Hear the words of this covenant, and speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem; 3 and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “Cursed is the man who does not obey the words of this covenant 4 which I commanded your fathers in the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and do according to all that I command you; so shall you be My people, and I will be your God,’ 5 that I may establish the oath which I have sworn to your fathers, to give them ‘a land flowing with milk and honey,’ as it is this day.” ’ ”Jeremiah 11:1-5, New King James Version
Spurgeon differentiates the nature of Christ's counsel from that of a lawyer who pinpoints clause after clause. "You must go through a great many consultations before he will come the point," Spurgeon says in "His Name: Counsellor," and all the while your poor heart is boiling over because you feel such an interest in the main point."
"But he is as cool as possible; you think you are asking counsel of a block of marble. No doubt his advice will come out all right at last, and it is pretty certain it will be good for you; but it is not hearty. He does not enter into the sympathies of the matter with you."
If we look in the sort of reboot in Jeremiah 11:1-5, we see some of the same wonder in Divine counsel. As the previous chapter ends, Jeremiah's heart has been boiling over, just as has the client Spurgeon asks us to imagine ourselves. Calamity is coming, in spite of his inspired pleading with his people, and he is somewhere close to disconsolate. He models for us coming to the Lord in such a discomfited state, bringing his heart as it is before the Lord rather than prioritizing pretense. Jeremiah brings despair, confession, and even something like pride, all within a few lines. His heart is boiling over.
Then, we turn the page. We change the chapter, and the tone. The Lord speaks, again. Human counsel, as Spurgeon says, might parse the problem and the phrasing with which it is presented. In such analytical, phrase-by-phrase aloofness, the best human advocate might leave us feeling forlorn.
Not the Lord, in response to Jeremiah or Jeremiah's easily unsettled spiritual heirs. Christ our Counsel is not lost in the details, or in correcting them. Knowing His human flock as a group and as individuals, He graciously reverts to casting forth the big picture, again. This is the Gospel. You haven't graduated from it. You haven't sinned your way out of its reach.
If we have been called like Jeremiah to some degree of spiritual influence, there is grace in the forbearing order to speak what we know of the Godhead again. The first audience we remind, then, is ourselves. Our own ringing cadences, by God's grace, most effectively reach into the crevices of doubt and distraction in our own souls.
We begin to be convinced even in these readouts of doubt that our hope is in Christ rather than a particular human response to our ministry effort. Our efficacy equals HIS efficacy, which is beyond reproach, whatever the metrics of the moment show. The case is His to present, His to present His righteousness perpetually, and His to present His own faultless at the end of days.
We, then, called to speak in turn like Jeremiah, are a little less lost in the details and our intense emotional responses to them. Having experienced some of His compassionate equipoise, we won't be a block of marble Spurgeon sees before the frantic suitor, but we won't be in complete turmoil, either.
By God's ongoing grace, we will be able to listen in the moment with compassion and prayerful advocacy. We will be able to, as God does before Jeremiah, lay out the bad news of the impact of sin's curse before those who might have lost track of the source in its myriad effects. We will be able to connect the day's events to the steady narrative of God's glory, and we will be able to guide at least the thoughts of our hearers to the other side of upheaval.
Having been counseled, by God's grace, He will render us competent to counsel. Having had our minds and hearts renewed, He will then use us by the message we present to reframe the day's events for others.
Spurgeon differentiates the nature of Christ's counsel from that of a lawyer who pinpoints clause after clause. "You must go through a great many consultations before he will come the point," Spurgeon says in "His Name: Counsellor," and all the while your poor heart is boiling over because you feel such an interest in the main point."
"But he is as cool as possible; you think you are asking counsel of a block of marble. No doubt his advice will come out all right at last, and it is pretty certain it will be good for you; but it is not hearty. He does not enter into the sympathies of the matter with you."
If we look in the sort of reboot in Jeremiah 11:1-5, we see some of the same wonder in Divine counsel. As the previous chapter ends, Jeremiah's heart has been boiling over, just as has the client Spurgeon asks us to imagine ourselves. Calamity is coming, in spite of his inspired pleading with his people, and he is somewhere close to disconsolate. He models for us coming to the Lord in such a discomfited state, bringing his heart as it is before the Lord rather than prioritizing pretense. Jeremiah brings despair, confession, and even something like pride, all within a few lines. His heart is boiling over.
Then, we turn the page. We change the chapter, and the tone. The Lord speaks, again. Human counsel, as Spurgeon says, might parse the problem and the phrasing with which it is presented. In such analytical, phrase-by-phrase aloofness, the best human advocate might leave us feeling forlorn.
Not the Lord, in response to Jeremiah or Jeremiah's easily unsettled spiritual heirs. Christ our Counsel is not lost in the details, or in correcting them. Knowing His human flock as a group and as individuals, He graciously reverts to casting forth the big picture, again. This is the Gospel. You haven't graduated from it. You haven't sinned your way out of its reach.
If we have been called like Jeremiah to some degree of spiritual influence, there is grace in the forbearing order to speak what we know of the Godhead again. The first audience we remind, then, is ourselves. Our own ringing cadences, by God's grace, most effectively reach into the crevices of doubt and distraction in our own souls.
We begin to be convinced even in these readouts of doubt that our hope is in Christ rather than a particular human response to our ministry effort. Our efficacy equals HIS efficacy, which is beyond reproach, whatever the metrics of the moment show. The case is His to present, His to present His righteousness perpetually, and His to present His own faultless at the end of days.
We, then, called to speak in turn like Jeremiah, are a little less lost in the details and our intense emotional responses to them. Having experienced some of His compassionate equipoise, we won't be a block of marble Spurgeon sees before the frantic suitor, but we won't be in complete turmoil, either.
By God's ongoing grace, we will be able to listen in the moment with compassion and prayerful advocacy. We will be able to, as God does before Jeremiah, lay out the bad news of the impact of sin's curse before those who might have lost track of the source in its myriad effects. We will be able to connect the day's events to the steady narrative of God's glory, and we will be able to guide at least the thoughts of our hearers to the other side of upheaval.
Having been counseled, by God's grace, He will render us competent to counsel. Having had our minds and hearts renewed, He will then use us by the message we present to reframe the day's events for others.
"This is the Gospel. You haven't graduated from it."
ReplyDeleteAnd yet we are always searching, trying to find the next bit of secret, hidden knowledge. We are Gnostic in our constitution believing that this will unlock for us peace and freedom. Yet, God calls us back to the gospel and gives us the grace to be able to hear/believe/apply it. Instead of moving on from the gospel to that which we might call 'meat' as is so often the tendency, we must only draw closer to the cross of Christ, in order to bask in the glory of his sacrifice and our unworthiness. Only then can we move on to 'meat', which is not a deeper doctrine but is marked by maturity and is "for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil" (Heb. 5:14). This discernment, the application of the truth of the gospel constantly into real life situations and calamity, is the method of maturity by which God will sanctify us. By this he does indeed equip us to "listen in the moment with compassion" to those around us who are suffering, as we are "able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (2 Cor. 1:3).