Jeremiah 14:13 – Spiritual Hunger Abhors a Vacuum.
13 Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Behold, the prophets say to them, ‘You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place.’ ”
"The culture codifies and institutionalizes narrative," warns Amanda Petrusich in the software you. "We hunger for conclusions, especially when there aren’t any good ones. Human beings are so uncomfortable with ambiguity that we'll ado nearly anything to avoid it."
Jeremiah notes this in Jeremiah 14:13, and his people's tendency to fill silence with their own conclusions so burdens him that he feels compelled to break silence himself. God has told him in Jeremiah 14:11, for the second time, to stop praying for this people.
How long the insistent intercessor can maintain this prophetic passivity between verses 11 and 13 is unknown, but Jeremiah, who elsewhere tells us that his bones burn when he doesn't speak up is burdened to speak here.
However it must have hurt to speak up and be ignored, to recognize rejection from one's own region and house, Jeremiah here senses the alternative kind of pain. The people form their own conclusions from the absence of immediate punishment for their iniquity and idolatry.
The anointing of sometime prophets, formal or informal, who will connect the events or absence of events into a story the people want to hear is only a matter of time. As much as Jeremiah hated to confront his people with a hurtful message and to be shunted aside for it, to see them satisfied with this sham spirituality of the status quo is worse.
Technically, perhaps Jeremiah does not violate God's ban on praying for the people. Given the transactional shape of so many of our prayers, we could stand to note that, redirected, he is not asking for anything. This, like the conversation between God and Abraham, is a conversation between two friends, albeit with one friend obtaining such standing entirely by grace.
Picture Jeremiah taking off the figurative mantle of his professional prophetic calling for a time, as ordered. He STILL talks with God about what he sees. Who else could understand?
Jeremiah is a latter-day Enoch, walking much more closely with God than the people to whom he is related in human terms. So are we. We are called out by revolutionary, rewiring grace from the incessant need for answers. This habit is so distorting that we will make answers up and give them the imprimatur of divine authority.
Yet, by God's persistent grace, we begin to take on the character of Abraham, the character of Jeremiah, the character of the psalmist's picture of a weaned child in his mother's arms. We begin to be SATISFIED in God.
Conversely, ironically, we begin to notice and be vexed when the erstwhile cohort with which we once traveled mindlessly is NOT satisfied in Him. It rightly vexes us when those humans we care about prop up figures to take turns being Shepherd.
Intermittently, we converse with Him at peace, beginning to understand and revel in His ability to get glory from both the repentant and unrepentant. Then, as He moves the new heart He created in us, we are rightly troubled by the present state of affairs, the disparity between Heaven and Earth.
There is holiness in both resting in the Lord and in actively interceding for others. Recognizing the deafness of any other audience, we bring our emerging understanding to Him and ask Him to teach us how to respond. As the old, pat conclusions don't satisfy us anymore, the play-by-play we relate to God in order to understand Earth's doings better is progressively three-dimensional.
He is the Analyst, the Color Commentator Who connects the events before us to overall purpose. Hereafter, God may, by grace, show us strategy and put us back in the game.
God did not tell us not to pray for our families and our countrymen. Yet, learning from Jeremiah's enforced hiatus from prayer, we would pray as the Holy Spirit moves us rather than by individual inclination or religious habit. More sure in our own connection with God, we would hold more loosely to those humans we imbue with the authority to speak for Him.
This healthy skepticism, though, will come more easily because we tend to hear from Him and to operate with confidence that He hears us even as we process the day's events and before we have put them in terms of pointed petitions.
"The culture codifies and institutionalizes narrative," warns Amanda Petrusich in the software you. "We hunger for conclusions, especially when there aren’t any good ones. Human beings are so uncomfortable with ambiguity that we'll ado nearly anything to avoid it."
Jeremiah notes this in Jeremiah 14:13, and his people's tendency to fill silence with their own conclusions so burdens him that he feels compelled to break silence himself. God has told him in Jeremiah 14:11, for the second time, to stop praying for this people.
How long the insistent intercessor can maintain this prophetic passivity between verses 11 and 13 is unknown, but Jeremiah, who elsewhere tells us that his bones burn when he doesn't speak up is burdened to speak here.
However it must have hurt to speak up and be ignored, to recognize rejection from one's own region and house, Jeremiah here senses the alternative kind of pain. The people form their own conclusions from the absence of immediate punishment for their iniquity and idolatry.
The anointing of sometime prophets, formal or informal, who will connect the events or absence of events into a story the people want to hear is only a matter of time. As much as Jeremiah hated to confront his people with a hurtful message and to be shunted aside for it, to see them satisfied with this sham spirituality of the status quo is worse.
Technically, perhaps Jeremiah does not violate God's ban on praying for the people. Given the transactional shape of so many of our prayers, we could stand to note that, redirected, he is not asking for anything. This, like the conversation between God and Abraham, is a conversation between two friends, albeit with one friend obtaining such standing entirely by grace.
Picture Jeremiah taking off the figurative mantle of his professional prophetic calling for a time, as ordered. He STILL talks with God about what he sees. Who else could understand?
Jeremiah is a latter-day Enoch, walking much more closely with God than the people to whom he is related in human terms. So are we. We are called out by revolutionary, rewiring grace from the incessant need for answers. This habit is so distorting that we will make answers up and give them the imprimatur of divine authority.
Yet, by God's persistent grace, we begin to take on the character of Abraham, the character of Jeremiah, the character of the psalmist's picture of a weaned child in his mother's arms. We begin to be SATISFIED in God.
Conversely, ironically, we begin to notice and be vexed when the erstwhile cohort with which we once traveled mindlessly is NOT satisfied in Him. It rightly vexes us when those humans we care about prop up figures to take turns being Shepherd.
Intermittently, we converse with Him at peace, beginning to understand and revel in His ability to get glory from both the repentant and unrepentant. Then, as He moves the new heart He created in us, we are rightly troubled by the present state of affairs, the disparity between Heaven and Earth.
There is holiness in both resting in the Lord and in actively interceding for others. Recognizing the deafness of any other audience, we bring our emerging understanding to Him and ask Him to teach us how to respond. As the old, pat conclusions don't satisfy us anymore, the play-by-play we relate to God in order to understand Earth's doings better is progressively three-dimensional.
He is the Analyst, the Color Commentator Who connects the events before us to overall purpose. Hereafter, God may, by grace, show us strategy and put us back in the game.
God did not tell us not to pray for our families and our countrymen. Yet, learning from Jeremiah's enforced hiatus from prayer, we would pray as the Holy Spirit moves us rather than by individual inclination or religious habit. More sure in our own connection with God, we would hold more loosely to those humans we imbue with the authority to speak for Him.
This healthy skepticism, though, will come more easily because we tend to hear from Him and to operate with confidence that He hears us even as we process the day's events and before we have put them in terms of pointed petitions.
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