Jeremiah 11:18-19 – Chess to Our Checkers
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 statecraft, thinks and expresses in terms of His eternal glory in ways we only begin to understand after Christ's Incarnation, crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Jeremiah stands down.
Meanwhile, God plays thousands of games of chess simultaneously, as compared to the one game of checkers of which we are aware. Just as we, and perhaps Jeremiah, begin to settle in to partake of the reverential wide angle of the ages, the Divine Director shows the place of the close up in His story. "By the way, Jeremiah," the Holy Spirit seems to say in the shift from Jeremiah 11:17 to the next two verses, "just as you are mentally downshifting your emphasis on your own role and sublimating to My sovereignty, there is this affirmation that one prophet matters to Me."
Where are we in this? Told to stand down, to let go of a particular burden, do we grasp it or pick it up again and again purely out of pride or habit? Ministers and intercessors of every stripe, have we begun to believe that the advance of God's Kingdom on the Earth depends on those of us who can't see it and who can't even keep one hair on one head from turning white? Or, if we don't perpetually engage in spiritual warfare because we have a misguided belief in our own efficacy, do we do so because we have no identity apart from the erstwhile role God has us play in His most adrenaline-inducing agenda?
Or, having become, we think, good at surrender, good at parroting notions of God's sovereignty, have we taken up fatalism in place of actual Calvinism? Have we, and emotional effect if not in formal profession, forgotten His concern for the individual because we have become more comfortable touting the huge, age-to-age pattern.
It's If so, He would dispel the gloom on our hearts and shadowing our aspect with the reality of Jeremiah 11:18-19. He does a better, more thorough job guarding that which concerns us individually than we did when we were sweating over it every hour of every day. With Skillet's "Stars" we confess with both barrels. If He can hold the stars in place, He can hold our heart the same. He can grant us the depth perception in the theology we ponder and proclaim which comes from having two eyes working together.
"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 statecraft, thinks and expresses in terms of His eternal glory in ways we only begin to understand after Christ's Incarnation, crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, Jeremiah stands down.
Meanwhile, God plays thousands of games of chess simultaneously, as compared to the one game of checkers of which we are aware. Just as we, and perhaps Jeremiah, begin to settle in to partake of the reverential wide angle of the ages, the Divine Director shows the place of the close up in His story. "By the way, Jeremiah," the Holy Spirit seems to say in the shift from Jeremiah 11:17 to the next two verses, "just as you are mentally downshifting your emphasis on your own role and sublimating to My sovereignty, there is this affirmation that one prophet matters to Me."
Where are we in this? Told to stand down, to let go of a particular burden, do we grasp it or pick it up again and again purely out of pride or habit? Ministers and intercessors of every stripe, have we begun to believe that the advance of God's Kingdom on the Earth depends on those of us who can't see it and who can't even keep one hair on one head from turning white? Or, if we don't perpetually engage in spiritual warfare because we have a misguided belief in our own efficacy, do we do so because we have no identity apart from the erstwhile role God has us play in His most adrenaline-inducing agenda?
Or, having become, we think, good at surrender, good at parroting notions of God's sovereignty, have we taken up fatalism in place of actual Calvinism? Have we, and emotional effect if not in formal profession, forgotten His concern for the individual because we have become more comfortable touting the huge, age-to-age pattern.
It's If so, He would dispel the gloom on our hearts and shadowing our aspect with the reality of Jeremiah 11:18-19. He does a better, more thorough job guarding that which concerns us individually than we did when we were sweating over it every hour of every day. With Skillet's "Stars" we confess with both barrels. If He can hold the stars in place, He can hold our heart the same. He can grant us the depth perception in the theology we ponder and proclaim which comes from having two eyes working together.
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