Jeremiah 14:10 – Autopsy of Iniquity
10 Thus says the Lord to this people:
“Thus they have loved to wander;
They have not restrained their feet.
Therefore the Lord does not accept them;
He will remember their iniquity now,
And punish their sins.” Jeremiah 14:10, New King James Version
"The imagination," diagnoses Richard Foster in Celebration of Discipline, "like all our faculties, has participated in the fall."
The twofold indictment God drops in Jeremiah 14:10 concurs. It convicts His people, then and now, of wayward love which does not esteem Him as it should and instead covets and savors other things in the mind, the affection, and, yes, the imagination.
The corruption of the imagination, though, has a downstream consequence to which Jeremiah 14:10 also speaks. We react to the confrontation in that verse, and, for instance, in the teachings of Jesus on adultery that we have already sinned in our minds and our hearts, and, perversely, we let that same infected imagination have a primary place in determining what happens next. "Well, I've already sinned," condemnation and indulgence harmonize, "there's nothing I can do. I might as well live out my desires. I might as well continue to live them out as I did yesterday.
God's Word to Jeremiah, a man who was no stranger to all-consuming emotion, calls us back. It confronts a people who not only sinned at the level of desire. That verse details the fact that they did not take corrective action in response to it. They did not, God says, restrain their feet. We don't because we imagine we can't. God's Word interrupts that script played on a life-sapping loop.
It reminds us, as my church's You 2.0 devotional does in a more positive sense, "People don't fall into community. They pursue it." We don't tend to drink of idolatry's lies alone. We build habits and actively pursue communities which reinforce its intoxicating power. There, where affection comes action, is another chance to repent, to confess our absolute dependence on God's power.
We can then build community around that wary renewal. Aware of our tendency to fear that God is not enough to satisfy, and of our tendency to placate that with the active pursuit of other things, we can do as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet. "We will put fetters upon this fear which now goes too free-footed."
The alternative, thuds the end of Jeremiah 14:10, is stark. With Romans, it concurs that the wages of sin is death, and it autopsies this death as alienation from God Himself as the ongoing source of life from sanctified imagination, two new habits flowing from it, do new communities frolicking in Him as new life. Why would we forsake Him as ever-flowing cistern to decide on having the buttons of our affections pushed by the world and resigning to the results?
“Thus they have loved to wander;
They have not restrained their feet.
Therefore the Lord does not accept them;
He will remember their iniquity now,
And punish their sins.” Jeremiah 14:10, New King James Version
"The imagination," diagnoses Richard Foster in Celebration of Discipline, "like all our faculties, has participated in the fall."
The twofold indictment God drops in Jeremiah 14:10 concurs. It convicts His people, then and now, of wayward love which does not esteem Him as it should and instead covets and savors other things in the mind, the affection, and, yes, the imagination.
The corruption of the imagination, though, has a downstream consequence to which Jeremiah 14:10 also speaks. We react to the confrontation in that verse, and, for instance, in the teachings of Jesus on adultery that we have already sinned in our minds and our hearts, and, perversely, we let that same infected imagination have a primary place in determining what happens next. "Well, I've already sinned," condemnation and indulgence harmonize, "there's nothing I can do. I might as well live out my desires. I might as well continue to live them out as I did yesterday.
God's Word to Jeremiah, a man who was no stranger to all-consuming emotion, calls us back. It confronts a people who not only sinned at the level of desire. That verse details the fact that they did not take corrective action in response to it. They did not, God says, restrain their feet. We don't because we imagine we can't. God's Word interrupts that script played on a life-sapping loop.
It reminds us, as my church's You 2.0 devotional does in a more positive sense, "People don't fall into community. They pursue it." We don't tend to drink of idolatry's lies alone. We build habits and actively pursue communities which reinforce its intoxicating power. There, where affection comes action, is another chance to repent, to confess our absolute dependence on God's power.
We can then build community around that wary renewal. Aware of our tendency to fear that God is not enough to satisfy, and of our tendency to placate that with the active pursuit of other things, we can do as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet. "We will put fetters upon this fear which now goes too free-footed."
The alternative, thuds the end of Jeremiah 14:10, is stark. With Romans, it concurs that the wages of sin is death, and it autopsies this death as alienation from God Himself as the ongoing source of life from sanctified imagination, two new habits flowing from it, do new communities frolicking in Him as new life. Why would we forsake Him as ever-flowing cistern to decide on having the buttons of our affections pushed by the world and resigning to the results?
Comments
Post a Comment