Jeremiah 14:1-4 – A Side of Shame?
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The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the droughts.
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“Judah mourns,
And her gates languish;
They mourn for the land,
And the cry of Jerusalem has gone up.
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Their nobles have sent their lads for water;
They went to the cisterns and found no water.
They returned with their vessels empty;
They were ashamed and confounded
And covered their heads.
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Because the ground is parched,
For there was no rain in the land,
The plowmen were ashamed;
They covered their heads.
“This poor kind of heroism: shame,” decrees Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free. “The trouble with shame is that it goes down deep or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one throws it off as soon as he himself is injured (as, of course, in total war, he is likely to be, in his family, his property, his position, his person). If it does, if it goes down deep enough, it is a form of suicide."
Scripture, piercing the true state of men as well as cultures, tells us the same in Jeremiah 14:1-4. God's people did not create water. They did not supply their Promised Land with it. When they needed it on the Exodus, He used even a vexed and prideful Moses to provide it from a rock.
Though it is understandable that His sometime people should cry out for the lack of such a basic need, we see how quickly even confession curdles. That there was no water is a state of fact. That this condition may be tied to the sin of the land and its leaders is not unreasonable supposition. We arrive, then, at a healthy state of conviction from which the leaders and the people en masse can cry out for the Lord's help. It happened constantly in Judges, and He answered.
Yet, shame makes such a predicament so much the worse. Through it, the enemy of our souls hurries to make us forget that pride still lingers, even in our confession. He hurries to distract us from the fact that we did not sustain ourselves, did not hold our atoms together, did not, in the last, even hydrate ourselves in the best of times. This is his crafty, stubborn rearguard action against faith's penitence.
Cry out, then, brothers and sisters, without pride's petulance, for Your deliverance may be at hand! Send shame packing, for there is no condemnation in Christ. Even in His reprimand there is grace. Though He, perchance, deprive us even of water for a season, He is our Living Water still. He is our righteousness, proving His discipline, and providing hours, in those thirsty days in the desert. Rejoice, and rebuff despair, which Screwtape rightly scores as a worse sin than the sins which provoked it.
The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the droughts.
2
“Judah mourns,
And her gates languish;
They mourn for the land,
And the cry of Jerusalem has gone up.
3
Their nobles have sent their lads for water;
They went to the cisterns and found no water.
They returned with their vessels empty;
They were ashamed and confounded
And covered their heads.
4
Because the ground is parched,
For there was no rain in the land,
The plowmen were ashamed;
They covered their heads.
“This poor kind of heroism: shame,” decrees Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free. “The trouble with shame is that it goes down deep or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, one throws it off as soon as he himself is injured (as, of course, in total war, he is likely to be, in his family, his property, his position, his person). If it does, if it goes down deep enough, it is a form of suicide."
Scripture, piercing the true state of men as well as cultures, tells us the same in Jeremiah 14:1-4. God's people did not create water. They did not supply their Promised Land with it. When they needed it on the Exodus, He used even a vexed and prideful Moses to provide it from a rock.
Though it is understandable that His sometime people should cry out for the lack of such a basic need, we see how quickly even confession curdles. That there was no water is a state of fact. That this condition may be tied to the sin of the land and its leaders is not unreasonable supposition. We arrive, then, at a healthy state of conviction from which the leaders and the people en masse can cry out for the Lord's help. It happened constantly in Judges, and He answered.
Yet, shame makes such a predicament so much the worse. Through it, the enemy of our souls hurries to make us forget that pride still lingers, even in our confession. He hurries to distract us from the fact that we did not sustain ourselves, did not hold our atoms together, did not, in the last, even hydrate ourselves in the best of times. This is his crafty, stubborn rearguard action against faith's penitence.
Cry out, then, brothers and sisters, without pride's petulance, for Your deliverance may be at hand! Send shame packing, for there is no condemnation in Christ. Even in His reprimand there is grace. Though He, perchance, deprive us even of water for a season, He is our Living Water still. He is our righteousness, proving His discipline, and providing hours, in those thirsty days in the desert. Rejoice, and rebuff despair, which Screwtape rightly scores as a worse sin than the sins which provoked it.
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