Jeremiah 13:6-7 – The Joy of a Sure Return
6 Now it came to pass after many days that the Lord said to me, “Arise, go to the Euphrates, and take from there the sash which I commanded you to hide there.” 7 Then I went to the Euphrates and dug, and I took the sash from the place where I had hidden it; and there was the sash, ruined. It was profitable for nothing.
Dave Ramsey tells a story in his Financial Peace University of a car he really wanted as a younger man. He decided not to purchase it and instead put the money in savings. As it happened, he left the money that would have gone toward purchasing that car by itself. One day years later, he pulled up at a stoplight beside that much deteriorated model he had longed for. He went home and was able to compare the way in which the money he would have spent on it had compounded by comparison.
Jeremiah 13:6-7, before it speaks to matters of national destiny and lost opportunities for the glory of God, offers a stoplight or a similar realization to that which occurred to Dave Ramsey. If we attempt to purchase splendor and significance with our time and with our money, it won't last.
Like Jeremiah's sash and like the car Dave Ramsey once wanted, the things we long for will come to ruin. Without divinely ordained stoplights or the divine gift of discipline to build in pauses for reflection, we won't realize the pattern. We will be too busy chasing after the next sash the next status, to realize with Ecclesiastes that they will come to nothing.
This is more than a jeremiad against other people's particularly ostentatious material choices. We note that in Jeremiah 13 the prophet made this purchase directly at God's command. The part of us which reads Scripture according to the flesh, dominated by worldly comparisons, may well expect that Jeremiah's obedience, and ours, would be better rewarded.
HIS sash shouldn't rot because he was spiritual in the purchase of it. OUR deeds done at the Lord's behest should stand up for immediate, Earthly comparison. It should be clear, we think, Whom we serve because the laws of a fallen Earth don't apply to us or that which we touch.
Such reasoning didn't work. The Exodus excepted, our clothes wear out. We have to depend on God to clothe us again. Jesus says He is eager to do so. We also have to face the Gospel fact that the Father left Jesus exposed on the cross to shame from men.
We will never have to pay the price He did once for all His elect, but we may suffer shame like Him in order to become like Him, one instance of entropy at a time. It is as our alternative treasures turn worthless, however, that we find and declare our ultimate treasure in Him.
Christ is, He declares, worth everything else we could trade in comparison. Every Jeremiah transaction in which we seem to have gotten the worse in the of the deal because we obeyed His instructions will turn out to be the investment of a lifetime. Our return is so sure, in fact, that in the short run we can be distinctly joyful losers.
His Kingdom, values Matthew 13:44, is like the treasure buried in a field which, with a man discovers it, he goes and for the joy of it sells all he has to buy the field. Though our price is paid one sash at a time rather than in a single act of ecstasy, His worth is undiminished.
Dave Ramsey tells a story in his Financial Peace University of a car he really wanted as a younger man. He decided not to purchase it and instead put the money in savings. As it happened, he left the money that would have gone toward purchasing that car by itself. One day years later, he pulled up at a stoplight beside that much deteriorated model he had longed for. He went home and was able to compare the way in which the money he would have spent on it had compounded by comparison.
Jeremiah 13:6-7, before it speaks to matters of national destiny and lost opportunities for the glory of God, offers a stoplight or a similar realization to that which occurred to Dave Ramsey. If we attempt to purchase splendor and significance with our time and with our money, it won't last.
Like Jeremiah's sash and like the car Dave Ramsey once wanted, the things we long for will come to ruin. Without divinely ordained stoplights or the divine gift of discipline to build in pauses for reflection, we won't realize the pattern. We will be too busy chasing after the next sash the next status, to realize with Ecclesiastes that they will come to nothing.
This is more than a jeremiad against other people's particularly ostentatious material choices. We note that in Jeremiah 13 the prophet made this purchase directly at God's command. The part of us which reads Scripture according to the flesh, dominated by worldly comparisons, may well expect that Jeremiah's obedience, and ours, would be better rewarded.
HIS sash shouldn't rot because he was spiritual in the purchase of it. OUR deeds done at the Lord's behest should stand up for immediate, Earthly comparison. It should be clear, we think, Whom we serve because the laws of a fallen Earth don't apply to us or that which we touch.
Such reasoning didn't work. The Exodus excepted, our clothes wear out. We have to depend on God to clothe us again. Jesus says He is eager to do so. We also have to face the Gospel fact that the Father left Jesus exposed on the cross to shame from men.
We will never have to pay the price He did once for all His elect, but we may suffer shame like Him in order to become like Him, one instance of entropy at a time. It is as our alternative treasures turn worthless, however, that we find and declare our ultimate treasure in Him.
Christ is, He declares, worth everything else we could trade in comparison. Every Jeremiah transaction in which we seem to have gotten the worse in the of the deal because we obeyed His instructions will turn out to be the investment of a lifetime. Our return is so sure, in fact, that in the short run we can be distinctly joyful losers.
His Kingdom, values Matthew 13:44, is like the treasure buried in a field which, with a man discovers it, he goes and for the joy of it sells all he has to buy the field. Though our price is paid one sash at a time rather than in a single act of ecstasy, His worth is undiminished.
"Christ is, He declares, worth everything else we could trade in comparison. Every Jeremiah transaction in which we seem to have gotten the worse in the of the deal because we obeyed His instructions will turn out to be the investment of a lifetime. Our return is so sure, in fact, that in the short run we can be distinctly joyful losers."
ReplyDeleteMost often, we do not realize the level to which we derive our own significance and purpose from surroundings and possessions until they teeter on the brink of destruction/loss. In the face of such loss, however, we grapple with what those things have meant to us for years in contrast to what we have told others. So, with career or prized possession or other idol, we strive to have the attitude of a joyful loser, even while we desperately plead with God not to remove their joy from us. The subsequent loss of such things confounds our souls and wrecks our peace. Then, in the midst of loss, we must wrestle with the idea that our ultimate reward is less personal than that for which God will be glorified. Our reward is his glory, exaltation, and presence with us. I pray that God will make me a joyful loser!