Jeremiah 9:4-6 – Deceit as a Gateway to Glory
4
“Everyone take heed to his neighbor,
And do not trust any brother;
For every brother will utterly supplant,
And every neighbor will walk with slanderers.
5
Everyone will deceive his neighbor,
And will not speak the truth;
They have taught their tongue to speak lies;
They weary themselves to commit iniquity.
6
Your dwelling place is in the midst of deceit;
Through deceit they refuse to know Me,” says the Lord.
In 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, author Tony Reineke admits one of the purposes of the constant accompaniment. "I want ANYTHING to break the silence that helps me feel the weight of my morality." Hawk Nelson In "What I'm Looking for" agrees. He sings, "I've always been afraid that if I stop, I'll know the demons that I face."
Of course, this tendency to expend energy on distraction rather than repentance is older than the iPhone or the particular busyness of its age. Jeremiah 9's chronicles the same effect and its ironic weariness. Old are the indications of the condition Jesus will pinpoint as He approaches and weeps for Jerusalem. We don't know what makes up our peace.
Lacking gadgetry, the distractions generated in Jeremiah's days were a cloud of lies. They separated brothers. They separated neighbors. Though Jesus will say that fallen man comes by lying naturally because Satan is the father of lies, Jeremiah 9:5 shows we don't stop there.
We have TAUGHT our tongues to speak lies. We have taken the lies Satan's spun in the garden of Eden and that we imbibed with our mother's milk and we have taught ourselves to believe them and to propound them with sincerity, passion, and force.
The fact is, Jeremiah and are talking about differently manifested symptoms of the same condition. Whether we seek and savor lies generated by the old-fashioned human tongue or we seek technological distraction from tunes or other media, we are insisting that man can live by bread alone rather than every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We would rather subsist on what man makes than what God speaks, because what God speaks might be convicting. It might rattle or uproot our sense of identity.
It might be hopeless. Jeremiah 9 has already said we lurch from one evil to another. We work these lies into our bloodstream, and we reinforce them with the company we keep. By rights, we ought to get further and further from Christ and His Truth in each generation. Yet we serve a delightfully subversive Savior.
Screwtape knows and hates this insistent relevance and intervention. CS Lewis's fictional demon sputters regretfully that the very vices, like lying, which his host worked so hard to sow end up undermining their efforts in playing directly into the hands of God's insistent goodness.
As men grow disenchanted with the societal impact of the vices to which Jeremiah 9 has already pointed, "This sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor."
That is, the very thinness and toxicity of the cloud with which we surround ourselves in order to avoid encountering Him, the very limits of our idols, end up pointing us directly to Him. We cannot escape Him. His confrontational glory, His balm of Gilead for weary bodies and souls, is at our elbow. Truth is evermore relevant than lies. The connectedness of Truth is evermore restful than perpetual distraction.
“Everyone take heed to his neighbor,
And do not trust any brother;
For every brother will utterly supplant,
And every neighbor will walk with slanderers.
5
Everyone will deceive his neighbor,
And will not speak the truth;
They have taught their tongue to speak lies;
They weary themselves to commit iniquity.
6
Your dwelling place is in the midst of deceit;
Through deceit they refuse to know Me,” says the Lord.
In 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You, author Tony Reineke admits one of the purposes of the constant accompaniment. "I want ANYTHING to break the silence that helps me feel the weight of my morality." Hawk Nelson In "What I'm Looking for" agrees. He sings, "I've always been afraid that if I stop, I'll know the demons that I face."
Of course, this tendency to expend energy on distraction rather than repentance is older than the iPhone or the particular busyness of its age. Jeremiah 9's chronicles the same effect and its ironic weariness. Old are the indications of the condition Jesus will pinpoint as He approaches and weeps for Jerusalem. We don't know what makes up our peace.
Lacking gadgetry, the distractions generated in Jeremiah's days were a cloud of lies. They separated brothers. They separated neighbors. Though Jesus will say that fallen man comes by lying naturally because Satan is the father of lies, Jeremiah 9:5 shows we don't stop there.
We have TAUGHT our tongues to speak lies. We have taken the lies Satan's spun in the garden of Eden and that we imbibed with our mother's milk and we have taught ourselves to believe them and to propound them with sincerity, passion, and force.
The fact is, Jeremiah and are talking about differently manifested symptoms of the same condition. Whether we seek and savor lies generated by the old-fashioned human tongue or we seek technological distraction from tunes or other media, we are insisting that man can live by bread alone rather than every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We would rather subsist on what man makes than what God speaks, because what God speaks might be convicting. It might rattle or uproot our sense of identity.
It might be hopeless. Jeremiah 9 has already said we lurch from one evil to another. We work these lies into our bloodstream, and we reinforce them with the company we keep. By rights, we ought to get further and further from Christ and His Truth in each generation. Yet we serve a delightfully subversive Savior.
Screwtape knows and hates this insistent relevance and intervention. CS Lewis's fictional demon sputters regretfully that the very vices, like lying, which his host worked so hard to sow end up undermining their efforts in playing directly into the hands of God's insistent goodness.
As men grow disenchanted with the societal impact of the vices to which Jeremiah 9 has already pointed, "This sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor."
That is, the very thinness and toxicity of the cloud with which we surround ourselves in order to avoid encountering Him, the very limits of our idols, end up pointing us directly to Him. We cannot escape Him. His confrontational glory, His balm of Gilead for weary bodies and souls, is at our elbow. Truth is evermore relevant than lies. The connectedness of Truth is evermore restful than perpetual distraction.
Our propensity for the preservation of sinful self is remarkable both practically and psychologically. In the Jars of Clay song Jealous Kind, the singer expounds on the insanity of these efforts extensively.
ReplyDeleteTry to jump away from rock that keeps on spreading
Look for solace in the shift of the sinking sand.
I’d rather feel the pain all too familiar
Than be broken by a lover I don’t understand.
The writer intuitively understands that we search for peace everywhere apart from it’s source and that is because shame is an adequate fig leaf behind which we can hide our “true” selves from God. The extent to which we go “in order to avoid encountering him” for the sake of our idolatry is staggering. The song goes on to consider the result of subjecting one’s self to God.
One hundred other lovers, more, one hundred other altars
If I should slow my pace and finally subject me to grace
And love that shames the wise, betrays the hearts deceit and lies
Breaks the back of foolish pride.
Lives and eternities remain precariously perched on the conditional “if” that this writer discusses. As God knows our hearts and lies (Ps. 139), we continue to contemplate whether we should slow our pace of life to be subsumed by his grace or whether we should continue to deceive ourselves. Of course, we don’t always think about it in these terms as we pontificate about the incredible uniqueness of our own lives, problems, and dilemmas. I pray that God would show me how I grieve him (Ps. 139:23-24) with the obstacles to conviction and repentance that obstruct my own peace in him for the sake of technological satisfaction of pleasure!