Jeremiah 12:6 – Faith's Threshold
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 specificity has constricted.
Even his hometown, Gord said at the end of Jeremiah 11, even in Anathoth, people are conspiring to kill the prophet. He can't count, then, on the culture which shaped him. He would only be human, then, to shrink his circle of trust, to tell himself, well, if my neighbors can't be trusted, then at least my family can. Blood, he might have told himself in similar sentiments, is thicker than water.
We know he is retreating only incrementally from trusting in humans because the Lord told him in Jeremiah 12:5 that this next news was going to be especially devastating, that dealing with it was going to be like running with the horses as compared to running with the footman in trying to convince the wider culture to change course. This is personal. This is profoundly painful. Sin's hunger to, as Jesus will put it, steal, kill, and destroy, has crossed the threshold of Jeremiah's home place.
It is likewise present, latent or florid, it our closest relationships. The place we retreat to when we are wearied of contending with strangers, sin crouches at the door even there. The place, home, where Robert Frost says when you have to go there, they have to take you in, even when it is quiet there, as it will be according to Jeremiah 12:6, the enemy is still at work.
It is a deep and disturbing work of faith, then, to see even our families of origin, even our marriages as the Bible sees them, as battlegrounds rather than sacrosanct sanctuaries. As we begin to, as we begin to recognize as Jesus did with Peter that Satan can use even the words of those closest to us, we will treasure God's Word all the more. As we recognize that people God has positioned us to care most about can be caught up in the enemy's schemes, even against God's work in us, we won't be placated with assumptions that all is well if we don't see obvious problems.
We will, instead, develop expectations more in line with what God is teaching the prophet in Jeremiah 12:6, more in line with John Eldridge's Love and War, that the relationships which can yield the biggest blessing, the brightest testimony, are going to be the bitterest battleground. We don't, then, take our armor off when we crossed the threshold of home. We don't, then, cease to measure our speech and to seek the Lord as its source. Instead, we recognize with Paul's 360° calling on the Church's earliest leaders that what happens in the home can stifle, or amplify, our wider testimony.
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 specificity has constricted.
Even his hometown, Gord said at the end of Jeremiah 11, even in Anathoth, people are conspiring to kill the prophet. He can't count, then, on the culture which shaped him. He would only be human, then, to shrink his circle of trust, to tell himself, well, if my neighbors can't be trusted, then at least my family can. Blood, he might have told himself in similar sentiments, is thicker than water.
We know he is retreating only incrementally from trusting in humans because the Lord told him in Jeremiah 12:5 that this next news was going to be especially devastating, that dealing with it was going to be like running with the horses as compared to running with the footman in trying to convince the wider culture to change course. This is personal. This is profoundly painful. Sin's hunger to, as Jesus will put it, steal, kill, and destroy, has crossed the threshold of Jeremiah's home place.
It is likewise present, latent or florid, it our closest relationships. The place we retreat to when we are wearied of contending with strangers, sin crouches at the door even there. The place, home, where Robert Frost says when you have to go there, they have to take you in, even when it is quiet there, as it will be according to Jeremiah 12:6, the enemy is still at work.
It is a deep and disturbing work of faith, then, to see even our families of origin, even our marriages as the Bible sees them, as battlegrounds rather than sacrosanct sanctuaries. As we begin to, as we begin to recognize as Jesus did with Peter that Satan can use even the words of those closest to us, we will treasure God's Word all the more. As we recognize that people God has positioned us to care most about can be caught up in the enemy's schemes, even against God's work in us, we won't be placated with assumptions that all is well if we don't see obvious problems.
We will, instead, develop expectations more in line with what God is teaching the prophet in Jeremiah 12:6, more in line with John Eldridge's Love and War, that the relationships which can yield the biggest blessing, the brightest testimony, are going to be the bitterest battleground. We don't, then, take our armor off when we crossed the threshold of home. We don't, then, cease to measure our speech and to seek the Lord as its source. Instead, we recognize with Paul's 360° calling on the Church's earliest leaders that what happens in the home can stifle, or amplify, our wider testimony.
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