Coming Up For Air

10 Thus says the Lord to this people: “Thus they have loved to wander; They have not restrained their feet. Therefore the Lord does not accept them; He will remember their iniquity now, And punish their sins.” Jeremiah 14:10, New King James Version "The imagination," diagnoses Richard Foster in Celebration of Discipline , "like all our faculties, has participated in the fall." The twofold indictment God drops in Jeremiah 14:10 concurs. It convicts His people, then and now, of wayward love which does not esteem Him as it should and instead covets and savors other things in the mind, the affection, and, yes, the imagination. The corruption of the imagination, though, has a downstream consequence to which Jeremiah 14:10 also speaks. We react to the confrontation in that verse, and, for instance, in the teachings of Jesus on adultery that we have already sinned in our minds and our hearts, and, perversely, we let that same infected imagination have a primary place in de...

7 O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, Do it for Your name’s sake; For our backslidings are many, We have sinned against You. 8 O the Hope of Israel, his Savior in time of trouble, Why should You be like a stranger in the land, And like a traveler who turns aside to tarry for a night? 9 Why should You be like a man astonished, Like a mighty one who cannot save? Yet You, O Lord, are in our midst, And we are called by Your name; Do not leave us! "When we pray, we are speaking to the One Whose eternal purpose and designs are unfolding as our present realities," James MacDonald drills down in Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling: Changing Lives with God's Changeless Truth . "In order to find hope in them, we must seek HIM and HIS perspective. This requires a keen understanding of the redemptive nature of our existence, which points to the glorious gospel of Christ.” In this, the prophet is nearer to the kingdom of God in Jeremiah 14:7-9. It isn't a social...

5 Yes, the deer also gave birth in the field, But left because there was no grass. 6 And the wild donkeys stood in the desolate heights; They sniffed at the wind like jackals; Their eyes failed because there was no grass.” My friend Chris wasn't moving like himself. He lowered himself gingerly into a chair beside me with a soft grunt. When I asked, he said it had been a rough week. Then he spoke my love language with an anecdote. He said when his daughter was two and was getting up from a chair, she affected the same grunting noise. He marveled how easy it is for us to pass on a burdened sense of our existence to those who follow behind us. If it catches our attention when those we influence carry through with the outward acknowledgments of sin's impact on a fallen world, how much more poignant and pressing is it when we see the actual suffering sin causes those without direct responsibility, as in Jeremiah 14:5-6? This is more than a pantomime after Adam, or after us. This is ...

1 The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the droughts. 2 “Judah mourns, And her gates languish; They mourn for the land, And the cry of Jerusalem has gone up. 3 Their nobles have sent their lads for water; They went to the cisterns and found no water. They returned with their vessels empty; They were ashamed and confounded And covered their heads. 4 Because the ground is parched, For there was no rain in the land, The plowmen were ashamed; They covered their heads. “This poor kind of  heroism: shame,” decrees Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free . “The trouble with shame is that it goes  down deep or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one throws it off as soon as he  himself is injured (as, of course, in total war, he is likely to be, in his  family, his property, his position, his person). If it does, if it goes down  deep enough, it is a form of suicide." Scripture, piercing the true state of men as well as cultures, tells us the same in Jeremiah...

23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Then may you also do good who are accustomed to do evil. 24 “Therefore I will scatter them like stubble That passes away by the wind of the wilderness. 25 This is your lot, The portion of your measures from Me,” says the Lord, “Because you have forgotten Me And trusted in falsehood. 26 Therefore I will uncover your skirts over your face, That your shame may appear. 27 I have seen your adulteries And your lustful neighings, The lewdness of your harlotry, Your abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe to you, O Jerusalem! Will you still not be made clean?” "There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said," as quoted by the New Yorker 's Adam Gopnik, who hopefully adds, "meaning that it is born ruined – that any social system is rotten already, yet it still keeps most people fed and placated." "Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less...

18 Say to the king and to the queen mother, “Humble yourselves; Sit down, For your rule shall collapse, the crown of your glory.” 19 The cities of the South shall be shut up, And no one shall open them; Judah shall be carried away captive, all of it; It shall be wholly carried away captive. 20 Lift up your eyes and see Those who come from the north. Where is the flock that was given to you, Your beautiful sheep? 21 What will you say when He punishes you? For you have taught them To be chieftains, to be head over you. Will not pangs seize you, Like a woman in labor? 22 And if you say in your heart, “Why have these things come upon me?” For the greatness of your iniquity Your skirts have been uncovered, Your heels made bare. Peter Schjeldahl detailed in a New Yorker reflection his deep aversion to writing about himself, even when he had a grant to write a memoir. "I could never sustain an expedient I for more than a paragraph." When I jotted that down and thought, as I often d...

But if you will not hear it, My soul will weep in secret for your pride; My eyes will weep bitterly And run down with tears, Because the Lord’s flock has been taken captive. In TH White's The Sword and the Stone , the boy Wart, later Arthur, is an unwanted emissary dismissed by those he grows up around. Still, showing a discerning intercessor's heart, he pleads with Merlin that though Kay is tormenting him, Kay be allowed to join Wart on magical adventures. "He has to be proud," Wart explains to his teacher sympathetically, "because he's frightened." As God's messenger to a proud people, Jeremiah reveals in 13:17 much the same sympathetic heart. Jeremiah has been told from the beginning of his ministry to anticipate rejection. He has been told to set his face like flint and continue in the Lord's work despite the fact that his people will not hear. Yet, by a remarkable work of grace, the resolve on his face does not harden his heart toward those ...

15 Hear and give ear: Do not be proud, For the Lord has spoken. 16 Give glory to the Lord your God Before He causes darkness, And before your feet stumble On the dark mountains, And while you are looking for light, He turns it into the shadow of death And makes it dense darkness. "Were it not for the goodness of God," confesses Spurgeon in Morning and Evening , " the rider on the black horse would soon scatter famine over the land. Infinite mercy spares the food of men." Though the black horse has particular concern with the physical food of men, does not the same malevolence exude toward the spiritual food of men, only with more intensity? We regularly and rightly take up the heart of Jesus as expressed in Scripture and thank the Father for who can hear, and see, and dwell on the grace of the Gospel, and who cannot. He, indeed, keeps the heart's equivalent of the black horse from despoiling faith derived from Scripture as the only true food of ou...

12 “Therefore you shall speak to them this word: ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “Every bottle shall be filled with wine.” ’ “And they will say to you, ‘Do we not certainly know that every bottle will be filled with wine?’ 13 “Then you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land—even the kings who sit on David’s throne, the priests, the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem—with drunkenness! 14 And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together,” says the Lord. “I will not pity nor spare nor have mercy, but will destroy them.” ’ ” CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape insists on developing the habit of flippancy in humans. He calls it armor against sensitivity to God's movement. That Lewis is onto something is confirmed by biblical evidence of this condition long before Screwtape, as in Jeremiah 13:12-14. Even those who attend to the inspired Word from Jeremiah are trained in flippancy. P...

12 “Therefore you shall speak to them this word: ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “Every bottle shall be filled with wine.” ’ “And they will say to you, ‘Do we not certainly know that every bottle will be filled with wine?’ In Calvin and Hobbes: The Essential Treasury by Bill Watterson, Hobbes frightens Calvin with a story about men being controlled by machines. Then Calvin looks at his watch and jets off because his favorite shows on TV. The vintage is different in Jeremiah 13:12, but the principal forces are the same. God engages and convicts the human heart concerning its self-inflicted predicament with creative word pictures reconfiguring everyday elements. Convicted, the heart wriggles away by constructing the meaning to the message which requires the least repentant change. The winebibbers in Jeremiah's day are no better and no worse than those dulled at present by the expectation of constant entertainment. God's Gospel regularly penetrates our media haze with clear en...

8 Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 9 “Thus says the Lord: ‘In this manner I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. 10 This evil people, who refuse to hear My words, who follow the dictates of their hearts, and walk after other gods to serve them and worship them, shall be just like this sash which is profitable for nothing. 11 For as the sash clings to the waist of a man, so I have caused the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah to cling to Me,’ says the Lord, ‘that they may become My people, for renown, for praise, and for glory; but they would not hear.’ “The ultimate difference between God's wisdom and man's wisdom," reflects John Piper in Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God , "is how they relate to the glory of God's grace in Christ crucified. God's wisdom makes the glory of God's grace our supreme treasure. But man's wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, se...

6 Now it came to pass after many days that the Lord said to me, “Arise, go to the Euphrates, and take from there the sash which I commanded you to hide there.” 7 Then I went to the Euphrates and dug, and I took the sash from the place where I had hidden it; and there was the sash, ruined. It was profitable for nothing. Dave Ramsey tells a story in his Financial Peace University of a car he really wanted as a younger man. He decided not to purchase it and instead put the money in savings. As it happened, he left the money that would have gone toward purchasing that car by itself. One day years later, he pulled up at a stoplight beside that much deteriorated model he had longed for. He went home and was able to compare the way in which the money he would have spent on it had compounded by comparison. Jeremiah 13:6-7, before it speaks to matters of national destiny and lost opportunities for the glory of God, offers a stoplight or a similar realization to that which occurred to Dave Rams...

 3 And the word of the Lord came to me the second time, saying, 4 “Take the sash that you acquired, which is around your waist, and arise, go to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a hole in the rock.” 5 So I went and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. "He who can sing songs in the night," identifies Spurgeon in a sermon by that title, "proves he has true love for Christ." Likewise he who leaves to the Lord the discretion of whether or not to display an act of obedience before men, as the prophet does in Jeremiah 13:3-8. Jeremiah is by habit now a performer. He has been speaking to the nations, engaging the attention of his people. Even if his words of correction have at times been unwelcome, he is accustomed to getting a human reaction. He can pray in the same spirit which Jim Elliott will pray later, asking to be a signpost, that men will turn one way or another upon beholding the Gospel in him. It is no small thing, then, to ask such a man ...

13 Thus the Lord said to me: “Go and get yourself a linen sash, and put it around your waist, but do not put it in water.” 2 So I got a sash according to the word of the Lord, and put it around my waist. "The prophets were accustomed not only to preach," relates Spurgeon as a prince in that art in his message "Everybody's Sermon," but to be themselves as signs and wonders to the people." We see this totality of people as message beautifully in the transition between the end of Jeremiah 12 and the beginning of Jeremiah 13. As Jeremiah 12 ends, the prophet is moving around some of theology's heaviest, most wondrous furniture. By God's grace, Jeremiah is being used to pronounce God's capacity to elect whom he will to salvation from among Abraham's genetic kindred – and from those who would conquer the same. He is positively, presciently Pauline in announcing that some of the conquerors will be granted faith and grafted in with his people while ...

16 And it shall be, if they will learn carefully the ways of My people, to swear by My name, ‘As the Lord lives,’ as they taught My people to swear by Baal, then they shall be established in the midst of My people. 17 But if they do not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy that nation,” says the Lord. "The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life," adjudicates Edward Gibbon coolly in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , "are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies." That capacity, that compunction, to judge ourselves by our peers in the way most advantageous to ourselves is why we need reflection upon minds like Gibbon's. Much more importantly, it's why we need reflection upon Scriptural Truth like Jeremiah 1...

Thus says the Lord : “Against all My evil neighbors who touch the inheritance which I have caused My people Israel to inherit—behold, I will pluck them out of their land and pluck out the house of Judah from among them. Then it shall be, after I have plucked them out, that I will return and have compassion on them and bring them back, everyone to his heritage and everyone to his land. Jeremiah 12:14-15, New King James Version Rich Mullins sings in "Step By Step," "Sometimes I think of Abraham, how one star he saw was lit for me. For he was a stranger in this land, and I am that no less than he." His is the tenacious, fibrous continuity of Jeremiah 12:14-15. Both know dislocation, Jeremiah's congregation for disobedience and Abraham by obedience. They both know what it is to be plucked, uprooted, to no longer steady a sense of one's equilibrium by a vocation plied in a particular place. Both rest, though, and the kind of divine forethought that Rich Mullins ...

10 “Many rulers have destroyed My vineyard, They have trodden My portion underfoot; They have made My pleasant portion a desolate wilderness. 11 They have made it desolate; Desolate, it mourns to Me; The whole land is made desolate, Because no one takes it to heart. 12 The plunderers have come On all the desolate heights in the wilderness, For the sword of the Lord shall devour From one end of the land to the other end of the land; No flesh shall have peace. 13 They have sown wheat but reaped thorns; They have put themselves to pain but do not profit. But be ashamed of your harvest Because of the fierce anger of the Lord.” In a work titled Thoughts in Solitude , we don't expect to be rattled from our revelry. Nevertheless, Thomas Merton does so, confronting, “There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.” I note the same preoccupation in the s...

7 “I have forsaken My house, I have left My heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of My soul into the hand of her enemies. 8 My heritage is to Me like a lion in the forest; It cries out against Me; Therefore I have hated it. 9 My heritage is to Me like a speckled vulture; The vultures all around are against her. Come, assemble all the beasts of the field, Bring them to devour! "Believer, if your inheritance be a lowly one you should be satisfied with your earthly portion," probates Spurgeon in Morning and Evening . For you may rest assured that it is the fittest for you. Unerring wisdom ordained your lot, and selected for you the safest and best condition." In Jeremiah 12:7-9, the Lord lingers over an unexpected reason why. His prophet feels the outcast. A more emotional man than most, Jeremiah has been dealt a blow that not only his country, not only his hometown, but even his brothers in his own house are treacherous toward the faith he stands for. They seek, the L...

6 For even your brothers, the house of your father, Even they have dealt treacherously with you; Yes, they have called a multitude after you. Do not believe them, Even though they speak smooth words to you. Joan S. Meier, George Washington University Law School psychiatry professor, speaks in a New Yorker piece by Rachel Aviv to help family court judges tend to dismiss allegations of spousal abuse and rely on their own instincts. "There is an unwillingness to believe," Meier says, as if it's just preferable not to know this about our culture… The judges," asserts Meier, are very swayed by their own reactions to each person." If judges can make such assumptions from outside the threshold of a home, how much more a prophet looking for some human host for his dwindling hopes? Jeremiah has given his name to broadsides against a rotting culture. He has lambasted widespread adultery and deceit. As he has done so and has continued with the Lord, the circle of specific...

“If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, Then how can you contend with horses? And if in the land of peace, In which you trusted, they wearied you, Then how will you do in the floodplain of the Jordan? Jeremiah 12:5, New King James Version "We are too indulgent," warns Edmund Burke, "to our own proficiency." Thus, the Lord provides moments like Jeremiah 12:5. The timing of this warning from the Lord is interesting, for the faithful prophet has just experienced the catharsis of confession. Jeremiah has just laid aside all his expertise and experience at reading the culture and admitted the elemental to be most crucial, that God knows HIS heart. Does not pride creep even into the forms of confession which in the beginning are sincere? Do not, as Jerry Bridges admits, even our tears of repentance need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb? For, no sooner are we clean, no sooner had we understood the error of our ways than we begin to corrupt that s...

3 But You, O Lord, know me; You have seen me, And You have tested my heart toward You. Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, And prepare them for the day of slaughter. 4 How long will the land mourn, And the herbs of every field wither? The beasts and birds are consumed, For the wickedness of those who dwell there, Because they said, “He will not see our final end.” The New Yorker 's Robert Gottlier writes of Booth Tarkington's later fiction, "Human beings not only have roles to play, but have developing inner lives." Such as the fruit of Jeremiah's conversation with God that continues to unfold in the book's twelfth chapter. By God's grace, the prophet is deepening and widening his focus beyond the role he expected his people to be able to play, the role he protested they were more deserving of than the conquerors God is going to used to uproot them. He has been checked. He has been pruned. He has surrendered recognition in Jeremiah 12:3 that God kn...

1 Righteous are You, O Lord, when I plead with You; Yet let me talk with You about Your judgments. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why are those happy who deal so treacherously? 2 You have planted them, yes, they have taken root; They grow, yes, they bear fruit. You are near in their mouth But far from their mind. "Lord," confesses Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus , "how poorly I pray! Either I pray vaguely and halfheartedly or I pray heatedly, accusingly telling you exactly what you HAVE to do. Teach me to pray with discipline and passion and yet also contentment with your love and will. Then through my prayers you will do much good in the world and in my heart." Such a design on God's part may well connect the chapters of Jeremiah's life and Jeremiah's book as we go from chapter 11 to 12. Jeremiah has shown himself to be an admirably habitual intercessor. He responds to the signs of the times and to God's stirrings with prayer on behalf of his ...

21 “Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the men of Anathoth who seek your life, saying, ‘Do not prophesy in the name of the Lord, lest you die by our hand’— 22 therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Behold, I will punish them. The young men shall die by the sword, their sons and their daughters shall die by famine; 23 and there shall be no remnant of them, for I will bring catastrophe on the men of Anathoth, even the year of their punishment.’ ” "Human life," writes the calm, tweedy CS Lewis, "is always lived on the edge of the precipice." The end of Jeremiah 11 certainly presses that reality upon us. The weeping prophet's psychology is not so different from ours. In a present of great stress and disappointment, his mind can imbue the blissful unawareness and immaturity of childhood with nostalgia. Perhaps having been told and having been used to tell others that the country's culture is rotting at its core, his heart is tempted to take recourse in Anat...

18 Now the Lord gave me knowledge of it, and I know it; for You showed me their doings. 19 But I was like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter; and I did not know that they had devised schemes against me, saying, “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit, and let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be remembered no more.” "Many a rock might be escaped," declares Spurgeon in Morning and Evening , "if we would let our Father take the helm; many a shoal or quicksand we might well avoid, if we would leave to His sovereign will to choose and to command." We see that principle in Jeremiah 11:18-19. Jeremiah, a canonized prophet, a prince of spiritual discernment, has been sovereignly relieved without prejudice in the previous verses. God has told him to no longer pray for his people, perhaps because God had better plans for the rocks toward which the nation was headed than another intercession to avert them could accomplish. As God moves statecra...

14 “So do not pray for this people, or lift up a cry or prayer for them; for I will not hear them in the time that they cry out to Me because of their trouble. 15 “What has My beloved to do in My house, Having done lewd deeds with many? And the holy flesh has passed from you. When you do evil, then you rejoice. 16 The Lord called your name, Green Olive Tree, Lovely and of Good Fruit. With the noise of a great tumult He has kindled fire on it, And its branches are broken. 17 “For the Lord of hosts, who planted you, has pronounced doom against you for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of Judah, which they have done against themselves to provoke Me to anger in offering incense to Baal.” "Many people seem to embrace the good news without embracing God," divides John Piper in 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die . He explains, "There is no sure evidence that we have a new heart just because we want to escape hell. That’s a perfectly natural desire, not a supernatural o...

From Jeremiah 11… 9 And the Lord said to me, “A conspiracy has been found among the men of Judah and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 10 They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers who refused to hear My words, and they have gone after other gods to serve them; the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken My covenant which I made with their fathers.” 11 Therefore thus says the Lord: “Behold, I will surely bring calamity on them which they will not be able to escape; and though they cry out to Me, I will not listen to them. 12 Then the cities of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry out to the gods to whom they offer incense, but they will not save them at all in the time of their trouble. 13 For according to the number of your cities were your gods, O Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem you have set up altars to that shameful thing, altars to burn incense to Baal. "The thing that you complain of in God,...

6 Then the Lord said to me, “Proclaim all these words in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem, saying: ‘Hear the words of this covenant and do them. 7 For I earnestly exhorted your fathers in the day I brought them up out of the land of Egypt, until this day, rising early and exhorting, saying, “Obey My voice.” 8 Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but everyone followed the dictates of his evil heart; therefore I will bring upon them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do, but which they have not done.’ ”  Jeremiah 11:6-8, New King James Version "The great spiritual battle begins—and never ends—with the reclaiming of our chosenness," withstands Henri A. Nouween in Life of the Beloved .  "Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God’s loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by our God who is all ears for us." Jeremiah 11:6-8 likewise captures the long-standing, persevering nature of Go...