Jeremiah 11:21-23 – One Legacy Lives
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 Anathoth where he grew up. If he thought to blame the setting for life's pain and complications, he wouldn't be the first.
So it is that the Lord unmasks even Anathoth for the profit and for us. The small town is not safe. Yesterday offers no protection. As our spiritual perception matures and are desperate reliance on the Lord increases, we realize only He and not a different or former cultural niche is our hiding place. In a world where kill or be killed is more of a reality in the spirit than even crime's threats against the body might indicate, we run again and again to Him for eternal life.
Our Anathoth, in fact, constantly seeks to quench the prophetic fire God has placed within us. As we are made new in Him and proclaim that supreme identity and absolute reliance in faith, the person we used to be according to the flesh is offended, protests, and plots. He hisses, wondering what we have to complain about, and presenting a PowerPoint of whatever nostalgic memories make for respectable identity before men. He casts our insistence upon identifying with the new birth in Christ before any human demographic characteristics as radically ungrateful.
One will live and begat, and one will die with metaphorical children snuffed out. If our identity is in the new birth in Christ granted solely by grace, we will proclaim that unabashedly. From this proclamation, an impervious legacy will be granted by grace as God's Word accomplishes what He said that forth to accomplish. Thereby, the legacy of the flesh starves as we pass up opportunities to polish our reputation or indulge our gratification in Anathoth.
Or, like Abraham, we could see all that the Lord has done their lives according to His Word, sincerely rejoice in our Isaacs, and spread our seed amiss in our latter days, living out a belief that faith has had its turn in our lives. Would we, thereby, complicate the wives of the heirs we are granted in the Spirit? Would we indulge the old man and hamper the future victories of the progeny of the new? From the Anathoth in which the Lord began our journey to horizons we will never see in this body but that those we touch today will, may our identity and legacy be single-minded, entirely reliant upon Christ.
"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 Anathoth where he grew up. If he thought to blame the setting for life's pain and complications, he wouldn't be the first.
So it is that the Lord unmasks even Anathoth for the profit and for us. The small town is not safe. Yesterday offers no protection. As our spiritual perception matures and are desperate reliance on the Lord increases, we realize only He and not a different or former cultural niche is our hiding place. In a world where kill or be killed is more of a reality in the spirit than even crime's threats against the body might indicate, we run again and again to Him for eternal life.
Our Anathoth, in fact, constantly seeks to quench the prophetic fire God has placed within us. As we are made new in Him and proclaim that supreme identity and absolute reliance in faith, the person we used to be according to the flesh is offended, protests, and plots. He hisses, wondering what we have to complain about, and presenting a PowerPoint of whatever nostalgic memories make for respectable identity before men. He casts our insistence upon identifying with the new birth in Christ before any human demographic characteristics as radically ungrateful.
One will live and begat, and one will die with metaphorical children snuffed out. If our identity is in the new birth in Christ granted solely by grace, we will proclaim that unabashedly. From this proclamation, an impervious legacy will be granted by grace as God's Word accomplishes what He said that forth to accomplish. Thereby, the legacy of the flesh starves as we pass up opportunities to polish our reputation or indulge our gratification in Anathoth.
Or, like Abraham, we could see all that the Lord has done their lives according to His Word, sincerely rejoice in our Isaacs, and spread our seed amiss in our latter days, living out a belief that faith has had its turn in our lives. Would we, thereby, complicate the wives of the heirs we are granted in the Spirit? Would we indulge the old man and hamper the future victories of the progeny of the new? From the Anathoth in which the Lord began our journey to horizons we will never see in this body but that those we touch today will, may our identity and legacy be single-minded, entirely reliant upon Christ.
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