Jeremiah 13:1-2 – God's Will in Great and Small
13 Thus the Lord said to me: “Go and get yourself a linen sash, and put it around your waist, but do not put it in water.” 2 So I got a sash according to the word of the Lord, and put it around my waist.
"The prophets were accustomed not only to preach," relates Spurgeon as a prince in that art in his message "Everybody's Sermon," but to be themselves as signs and wonders to the people."
We see this totality of people as message beautifully in the transition between the end of Jeremiah 12 and the beginning of Jeremiah 13. As Jeremiah 12 ends, the prophet is moving around some of theology's heaviest, most wondrous furniture. By God's grace, Jeremiah is being used to pronounce God's capacity to elect whom he will to salvation from among Abraham's genetic kindred – and from those who would conquer the same. He is positively, presciently Pauline in announcing that some of the conquerors will be granted faith and grafted in with his people while others, by God's prerogative, will be damned.
Now that Jeremiah has turned up the timbre of his most resonant prophetic voice, now that he has stared into deep time to get more than a glimpse of the most amazing mysteries of God's sovereignty, Jeremiah next hears that sovereignty focused on… his wardrobe. That's right. The eye which foresees and instructs in the fate of nations is not focused on what Jeremiah should wear before his contemporary audience. Jeremiah hears what will presage Matthew 6, that God cares about the picayune details of what he will wear.
For better or worse, New Testament believers have become accustomed to that level of care. The bigger challenge for us, perhaps, is the adaptability of our listening and sense of obedience and mission. Perhaps especially as Americans, we expect to ride the escalator of importance. We take the general principle that he who is faithful in little will be faithful and much and assume that God counts little and much as we do.
There is part of our ambition reserved unto the notion that if I am faithful in today's task, I'll be assigned something tomorrow that even fallen humans know is more important. If I get to speak to two nations to close Jeremiah 12, by Jeremiah 13 I should be speaking to a subcontinent.
God, however, determines what obedience looks like at any given moment. The flipside of His care over what we eat and what we wear is that He might actually dictate those choices, and celebrate in ways we can scarcely imagine when we obey. Within the range of modesty, we are usually given a great deal of liberty with respect to our clothing, but do we ever stop to say thank you and to ask if choosing one article over another would honor Him more?
When we choose from the range of foods and drinks which would amaze the ages, do we ask, as Paul would, whether our choices would cause another to stumble? Our witness is made up as much of these selections as it is in our few conscious moments of great influence.
"The prophets were accustomed not only to preach," relates Spurgeon as a prince in that art in his message "Everybody's Sermon," but to be themselves as signs and wonders to the people."
We see this totality of people as message beautifully in the transition between the end of Jeremiah 12 and the beginning of Jeremiah 13. As Jeremiah 12 ends, the prophet is moving around some of theology's heaviest, most wondrous furniture. By God's grace, Jeremiah is being used to pronounce God's capacity to elect whom he will to salvation from among Abraham's genetic kindred – and from those who would conquer the same. He is positively, presciently Pauline in announcing that some of the conquerors will be granted faith and grafted in with his people while others, by God's prerogative, will be damned.
Now that Jeremiah has turned up the timbre of his most resonant prophetic voice, now that he has stared into deep time to get more than a glimpse of the most amazing mysteries of God's sovereignty, Jeremiah next hears that sovereignty focused on… his wardrobe. That's right. The eye which foresees and instructs in the fate of nations is not focused on what Jeremiah should wear before his contemporary audience. Jeremiah hears what will presage Matthew 6, that God cares about the picayune details of what he will wear.
For better or worse, New Testament believers have become accustomed to that level of care. The bigger challenge for us, perhaps, is the adaptability of our listening and sense of obedience and mission. Perhaps especially as Americans, we expect to ride the escalator of importance. We take the general principle that he who is faithful in little will be faithful and much and assume that God counts little and much as we do.
There is part of our ambition reserved unto the notion that if I am faithful in today's task, I'll be assigned something tomorrow that even fallen humans know is more important. If I get to speak to two nations to close Jeremiah 12, by Jeremiah 13 I should be speaking to a subcontinent.
God, however, determines what obedience looks like at any given moment. The flipside of His care over what we eat and what we wear is that He might actually dictate those choices, and celebrate in ways we can scarcely imagine when we obey. Within the range of modesty, we are usually given a great deal of liberty with respect to our clothing, but do we ever stop to say thank you and to ask if choosing one article over another would honor Him more?
When we choose from the range of foods and drinks which would amaze the ages, do we ask, as Paul would, whether our choices would cause another to stumble? Our witness is made up as much of these selections as it is in our few conscious moments of great influence.
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