Jeremiah 13:23-27 – Three Reasons The New Birth Is Needed
23
Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?
Then may you also do good who are accustomed to do evil.
24
“Therefore I will scatter them like stubble
That passes away by the wind of the wilderness.
25
This is your lot,
The portion of your measures from Me,” says the Lord,
“Because you have forgotten Me
And trusted in falsehood.
26
Therefore I will uncover your skirts over your face,
That your shame may appear.
27
I have seen your adulteries
And your lustful neighings,
The lewdness of your harlotry,
Your abominations on the hills in the fields.
Woe to you, O Jerusalem!
Will you still not be made clean?”
"There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said," as quoted by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who hopefully adds, "meaning that it is born ruined – that any social system is rotten already, yet it still keeps most people fed and placated."
"Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less. In the same way," extends Gopnik, "there is always a lot of chaos in the hero – meaning not all heroes are chaotic but that the elements of heroes and flow back and forth uncertainly through a life."
The audience to whom Jeremiah speaks, in his day and this, certainly falls under the plan of already ruined. Yet because as Gopnik and Smith point out, the system continues to function for a while, we need reminders of the scope of our ruin. Thus God provides Jeremiah 13:23-27.
A pragmatic people apart from God, He knows we would seek to solve the problems piecemeal, and so He begins by announcing their endemic character. Sin is, he says, as much a part of our condition as an Ethiopian's skintone. A new birth is needed, but before pointing to the Good News, again, He would have us know thoroughly the cost of the old system.
Sin's greatest and root cost forward from Eden to Jeremiah 13:23-24 is estrangement from God in that right, intimate, joyfully dependent relationship for which we were created. As it stands now, He announces, the portion of your measures is stubble. Instead of the Bread of Life, as Jesus will phrase it in the New Testament, His people will for a time subsist on husks, on outward forms that can be blown about by the winds as they themselves will be in exile.
Like the residual function Gopnik and Smith point to, I wonder how long that lasts for many a believer before we realize something is dreadfully wrong, that we are in some sense the walking dead no longer connected to Christ as vibrant Root, but rather are blown about by every wind of doctrine, every sort of idol which promises to sustain us? We need, then, the Word to remember what and where we were, because scattered subsistence quickly becomes our norm, and we write rationalizations to continue in it.
Perhaps because we don't study and study the juxtaposition between the grace we use to experience and the spiritual scavenging by which we often live now, God confronts more directly, as in Jeremiah 13:26. He exposes our shame and vulnerability. Because we so quickly adjust, and adapt, and rationalize the naked as normal when He has offered to clothe us in His righteousness, He often performs this exposure before others.
Even the nations, says the Word elsewhere, with their limited understanding, or capable of expressing amazement that God's people would turn away from Him, and to lament the cost of doing so. Perhaps their unwitting "sermon" is what we need to hear. The Emperor has no clothes. God's royal priesthood would rather be naked than clothed in Him.
Perhaps because we would be quick to fix on the symptom, to blame the culture, the Divine's diagnosis penetrates to the desires in Jeremiah 13:27. The depravity of our condition apart from Him is not just about lost productivity and comfort. It isn't just about what others do to us or the remarks they make.
The cancer of sin is at the level of desire, whether others notice its sickly flourishing or not. He sees what we neigh after, our willful degradation to the level of animal in preference for fellowship with and submission to Him.
No wonder, then, He checks the idea of cultural change, a behavior reformation before it can be suggested. He must change us, as only He can change an Ethiopian, metaphorically, into one of Abraham's descendants.
Only He, says the Psalm, can rightly reckon, this one and that one, with human root in all sorts of idolatry, they were born in a Jerusalem more true than the one whose condition Jeremiah bewailed and detailed.
Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots?
Then may you also do good who are accustomed to do evil.
24
“Therefore I will scatter them like stubble
That passes away by the wind of the wilderness.
25
This is your lot,
The portion of your measures from Me,” says the Lord,
“Because you have forgotten Me
And trusted in falsehood.
26
Therefore I will uncover your skirts over your face,
That your shame may appear.
27
I have seen your adulteries
And your lustful neighings,
The lewdness of your harlotry,
Your abominations on the hills in the fields.
Woe to you, O Jerusalem!
Will you still not be made clean?”
"There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said," as quoted by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who hopefully adds, "meaning that it is born ruined – that any social system is rotten already, yet it still keeps most people fed and placated."
"Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less. In the same way," extends Gopnik, "there is always a lot of chaos in the hero – meaning not all heroes are chaotic but that the elements of heroes and flow back and forth uncertainly through a life."
The audience to whom Jeremiah speaks, in his day and this, certainly falls under the plan of already ruined. Yet because as Gopnik and Smith point out, the system continues to function for a while, we need reminders of the scope of our ruin. Thus God provides Jeremiah 13:23-27.
A pragmatic people apart from God, He knows we would seek to solve the problems piecemeal, and so He begins by announcing their endemic character. Sin is, he says, as much a part of our condition as an Ethiopian's skintone. A new birth is needed, but before pointing to the Good News, again, He would have us know thoroughly the cost of the old system.
Sin's greatest and root cost forward from Eden to Jeremiah 13:23-24 is estrangement from God in that right, intimate, joyfully dependent relationship for which we were created. As it stands now, He announces, the portion of your measures is stubble. Instead of the Bread of Life, as Jesus will phrase it in the New Testament, His people will for a time subsist on husks, on outward forms that can be blown about by the winds as they themselves will be in exile.
Like the residual function Gopnik and Smith point to, I wonder how long that lasts for many a believer before we realize something is dreadfully wrong, that we are in some sense the walking dead no longer connected to Christ as vibrant Root, but rather are blown about by every wind of doctrine, every sort of idol which promises to sustain us? We need, then, the Word to remember what and where we were, because scattered subsistence quickly becomes our norm, and we write rationalizations to continue in it.
Perhaps because we don't study and study the juxtaposition between the grace we use to experience and the spiritual scavenging by which we often live now, God confronts more directly, as in Jeremiah 13:26. He exposes our shame and vulnerability. Because we so quickly adjust, and adapt, and rationalize the naked as normal when He has offered to clothe us in His righteousness, He often performs this exposure before others.
Even the nations, says the Word elsewhere, with their limited understanding, or capable of expressing amazement that God's people would turn away from Him, and to lament the cost of doing so. Perhaps their unwitting "sermon" is what we need to hear. The Emperor has no clothes. God's royal priesthood would rather be naked than clothed in Him.
Perhaps because we would be quick to fix on the symptom, to blame the culture, the Divine's diagnosis penetrates to the desires in Jeremiah 13:27. The depravity of our condition apart from Him is not just about lost productivity and comfort. It isn't just about what others do to us or the remarks they make.
The cancer of sin is at the level of desire, whether others notice its sickly flourishing or not. He sees what we neigh after, our willful degradation to the level of animal in preference for fellowship with and submission to Him.
No wonder, then, He checks the idea of cultural change, a behavior reformation before it can be suggested. He must change us, as only He can change an Ethiopian, metaphorically, into one of Abraham's descendants.
Only He, says the Psalm, can rightly reckon, this one and that one, with human root in all sorts of idolatry, they were born in a Jerusalem more true than the one whose condition Jeremiah bewailed and detailed.
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