Jeremiah 12:3-4 – Resolving the Astigmatism of Assumptions
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 knows his heart and his identity better than he does. That Jeremiah heart holds loyalties to his wayward people. It should. Jesus weeps for Jerusalem. Paul says he would willingly switch places and endure Hell for his fellow Israelites.
This is intercession. Without specific identification with the people among whom God has placed us, it dissipates into vague and meaningless generalities. Praying for "everyone" and blithely for God's will in "everything" before we go on about our self-indulgent business, we often, in reality, pray for nobody and nothing.
But as Jeremiah knows and surrenders to the reality that God sees him as he is, conflicted, maturing loyalties and all, there also comes a reluctant peace. God might, Jeremiah concedes, have a bigger purpose than proving the supremacy of Jeremiah's genetic people and providing for the perpetual security of their land. God might, in Robert Gottlier's phrasing, be developing their inner lives beyond a particular role they have to them.
There is a beauty to Jeremiah's tender language of surrender. It isn't whiny. It isn't spiteful. It isn't begrudging. This isn't God's capricious reaction, and by His grace Jeremiah's reaction is also considered. Pull them, Lord, he worships. Sovereignly select my countrymen for Your sometimes painful purposes like You selected me. Prepare them, pleads the prophet, granted perspective.
Jeremiah is beginning to grasp that both for individuals and for covenant communities, there is a dying to sense of security in self that must take place before faith our overriding testimony. As his countrymen will experience separation from the land of Abraham's faith birthright with which they previously identified, so Abraham's wider heirs have excised much of what we previously thought were blessings encumbered with God's hand upon us.
John Bunyan puts it this way, "Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think... It is wounding work, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving... Where there is grafting there will always be a cutting, the graft must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back or there will be no sap from root to branch. And this, I say, must be done by a wound, by a cut.”
Absent major upheavals of personal or cultural circumstance like those with which Jeremiah and Bunyan identify, we can assume exemption as our souls cool and congeal. Yet, God enacts His uprooting, re-identification, and move to sweet surrender on big and small stages. Matt Chandler knows it, seeing humor and holiness in the sanctification process at work in his relationships. "It is in my internal and external struggles, when it feels like someone is river-dancing on my last nerve, that the fruit of the Spirit is developed."
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 knows his heart and his identity better than he does. That Jeremiah heart holds loyalties to his wayward people. It should. Jesus weeps for Jerusalem. Paul says he would willingly switch places and endure Hell for his fellow Israelites.
This is intercession. Without specific identification with the people among whom God has placed us, it dissipates into vague and meaningless generalities. Praying for "everyone" and blithely for God's will in "everything" before we go on about our self-indulgent business, we often, in reality, pray for nobody and nothing.
But as Jeremiah knows and surrenders to the reality that God sees him as he is, conflicted, maturing loyalties and all, there also comes a reluctant peace. God might, Jeremiah concedes, have a bigger purpose than proving the supremacy of Jeremiah's genetic people and providing for the perpetual security of their land. God might, in Robert Gottlier's phrasing, be developing their inner lives beyond a particular role they have to them.
There is a beauty to Jeremiah's tender language of surrender. It isn't whiny. It isn't spiteful. It isn't begrudging. This isn't God's capricious reaction, and by His grace Jeremiah's reaction is also considered. Pull them, Lord, he worships. Sovereignly select my countrymen for Your sometimes painful purposes like You selected me. Prepare them, pleads the prophet, granted perspective.
Jeremiah is beginning to grasp that both for individuals and for covenant communities, there is a dying to sense of security in self that must take place before faith our overriding testimony. As his countrymen will experience separation from the land of Abraham's faith birthright with which they previously identified, so Abraham's wider heirs have excised much of what we previously thought were blessings encumbered with God's hand upon us.
John Bunyan puts it this way, "Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think... It is wounding work, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving... Where there is grafting there will always be a cutting, the graft must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back or there will be no sap from root to branch. And this, I say, must be done by a wound, by a cut.”
Absent major upheavals of personal or cultural circumstance like those with which Jeremiah and Bunyan identify, we can assume exemption as our souls cool and congeal. Yet, God enacts His uprooting, re-identification, and move to sweet surrender on big and small stages. Matt Chandler knows it, seeing humor and holiness in the sanctification process at work in his relationships. "It is in my internal and external struggles, when it feels like someone is river-dancing on my last nerve, that the fruit of the Spirit is developed."
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