Jeremiah 11:6-8 – Stepping into the Stream of Testimony
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 God's reclamation of His own. Anthropomorphizing for our benefit, He Who never sleeps or needs sleep frames at the end of Jeremiah 11:7 that He made a practice of getting up early and exhorting.
It is in, God reveals, His character to insist on His glory as revealed, at long last, through His own. It is He alone Who is in a position to call us Beloved even when our behavior isn't any more lovely than the world's.
It is He Who is in a position to lay claims on that behavior, all at once or more often one idolatrous tendency at a time, as He unfailingly seeks to distinguish us from the unbelieving world around us. Were God other than the Self-renewing God He is, the effort, the lack of visible results, and the recidivism even when we occasionally exhibit traits toward His likeness would tire even One Who gets up early and does not need sleep.
Nevertheless, with all that effort through the ages as the various idolatries come in turn, He isn't hoarse. He exhorts. He makes himself heard over the din of the idolater's perpetual hammer. Just as He doesn't weary in His call and His clamor, God does not accommodate His expectations to what is normal as the cultures go by.
He has intermingled His character and His covenant, righteousness as detailed in His Word. There is accountability there which will testify to the nations at least as much as His people's intermittent obedience. Resist Him, and we will still be a testimony. We will be a watchword to the nations who see what happens when people don't respond to God's particular goodness in faith.
This is the Jeremiah 11:7-8 root system which supports and nourishes the prophetic perseverance He expects of Jeremiah, and of us. If we are among those who have, by grace, begun to realize our identity as beloved in His eyes, the declaration of that fact before the culture in which He has placed us is incumbent.
Our status as His elect by grace loosens the claim that any particular place has on us, and the extent to which we will see its habit as the only normal. God's claim is to move Jeremiah from town to town and street to street, and it bequeaths to us a certain peripatetic restlessness.
The all-encompassing nature of this calling won't let us settle in Jeremiah 10:25 grudges for very long. God is as likely, Jeremiah will find out, to claim people from cultures strange to us, hostile to us, as He is to claim our nearest neighbors who speak in the biblical vernacular.
That Jeremiah will find rest and rescue by the hands of the very foreigners on whom he called down God's curses is evidence of God's efficacy at eroding our prejudices at the same time as He shows His intimate care for the needs which most closely concern us.
He claims from Our Group. He claims from Their Group. From the very beginning as people sorted and re-sorted according to circumstances or common, convenient narrative, God has been about making a people who were not a people.
He has granted an identity Cain in his defensive braggadocio never could. He has exhorted more loudly than Pharaoh's bluster. His party from Pentecost to Revelation invites, insists on the claim to His own stubbornly, sovereignly beloved from every tribe and tongue.
"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 God's reclamation of His own. Anthropomorphizing for our benefit, He Who never sleeps or needs sleep frames at the end of Jeremiah 11:7 that He made a practice of getting up early and exhorting.
It is in, God reveals, His character to insist on His glory as revealed, at long last, through His own. It is He alone Who is in a position to call us Beloved even when our behavior isn't any more lovely than the world's.
It is He Who is in a position to lay claims on that behavior, all at once or more often one idolatrous tendency at a time, as He unfailingly seeks to distinguish us from the unbelieving world around us. Were God other than the Self-renewing God He is, the effort, the lack of visible results, and the recidivism even when we occasionally exhibit traits toward His likeness would tire even One Who gets up early and does not need sleep.
Nevertheless, with all that effort through the ages as the various idolatries come in turn, He isn't hoarse. He exhorts. He makes himself heard over the din of the idolater's perpetual hammer. Just as He doesn't weary in His call and His clamor, God does not accommodate His expectations to what is normal as the cultures go by.
He has intermingled His character and His covenant, righteousness as detailed in His Word. There is accountability there which will testify to the nations at least as much as His people's intermittent obedience. Resist Him, and we will still be a testimony. We will be a watchword to the nations who see what happens when people don't respond to God's particular goodness in faith.
This is the Jeremiah 11:7-8 root system which supports and nourishes the prophetic perseverance He expects of Jeremiah, and of us. If we are among those who have, by grace, begun to realize our identity as beloved in His eyes, the declaration of that fact before the culture in which He has placed us is incumbent.
Our status as His elect by grace loosens the claim that any particular place has on us, and the extent to which we will see its habit as the only normal. God's claim is to move Jeremiah from town to town and street to street, and it bequeaths to us a certain peripatetic restlessness.
The all-encompassing nature of this calling won't let us settle in Jeremiah 10:25 grudges for very long. God is as likely, Jeremiah will find out, to claim people from cultures strange to us, hostile to us, as He is to claim our nearest neighbors who speak in the biblical vernacular.
That Jeremiah will find rest and rescue by the hands of the very foreigners on whom he called down God's curses is evidence of God's efficacy at eroding our prejudices at the same time as He shows His intimate care for the needs which most closely concern us.
He claims from Our Group. He claims from Their Group. From the very beginning as people sorted and re-sorted according to circumstances or common, convenient narrative, God has been about making a people who were not a people.
He has granted an identity Cain in his defensive braggadocio never could. He has exhorted more loudly than Pharaoh's bluster. His party from Pentecost to Revelation invites, insists on the claim to His own stubbornly, sovereignly beloved from every tribe and tongue.
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