Jeremiah 14:14-16 – Pushed the Way the Heart Leans
14 And the Lord said to me, “The prophets prophesy lies in My name. I have not sent them, commanded them, nor spoken to them; they prophesy to you a false vision, divination, a worthless thing, and the deceit of their heart. 15 Therefore thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who prophesy in My name, whom I did not send, and who say, ‘Sword and famine shall not be in this land’—‘By sword and famine those prophets shall be consumed! 16 And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword; they will have no one to bury them—them nor their wives, their sons nor their daughters—for I will pour their wickedness on them.’
"The heart of bias," plums Jane Leavy in Sandy Koufax, "is as intangible as it is corrosive."
We get a glimpse of that in Jeremiah 14:14-16. Jeremiah has gotten around God's ban on his intercession for the wayward people by narrating their plight rather than submitting a specific request. His intercession is just beneath the surface, anyway. Pleading the prominence of false prophets, Jeremiah seems to say, Lord, if You don't give me a message from You to compete in the marketplace of ideas and affection, Your enemies will have the field to themselves.
Even as we admire the insistence of Jeremiah's stubborn, shepherding heart for people misled, as many passages as we can line up from other prophets, including Christ Himself, lamenting the sheep without a true shepherd, God Who sees the heart and not just the interpersonal dynamics plunges deeper. Put this passage against a backdrop of His unabashed sovereignty. In 1 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 18, He shows complete agency in sending out a lying spirit to expose the motives of His people. Not here. He actively disavows such means in Jeremiah 14:14-15.
We arrive at the true, more frightening culprit at the end of Jeremiah 14:14, the one to which Leavy points in her baseball book. Deceit is in the heart. Before we ever find confirmation in the spiritual realm, from false friends, from twisted Scripture, or, in ways Jeremiah would understand and be vexed by, from the fact that we continue to prosper and haven't been immediately punished, deceit is in the heart. Surrender the battle there because we love something else more than Christ, and then we go looking for evidence to support our slipshod fallacy.
"The eye which sees what things are right," pronounces the excellent spiritual ophthalmologist GK Chesterton in Heretics, "is growing mistier and mistier." Lose the battle in the heart without firing a shot, without clinging to Scripture rightly applied to the supremacy of Christ and our desperate need for Him, and the enemy of our souls will gladly supply "evidence" for our verdict. As here, he can easily line up false prophets once we have decided what we want to hear. Woe unto the gifts of God which they use as props for their fiction, however.
God will not continue, He says, to bless with and protect the means we would use to construct story and security apart from Him. If we would so measure spiritual well-being, He will respond in kind. He will take those things we willfully use as distraction from our desperation. He does this not so much out of anger, although anger has a just place, as because we have said what matters to our hearts. We have declared, so to speak, our love language, and He will use that dialect to show us all is not well.
Cruel as this seems, consider for a moment the impact of actual pain. Just as Screwtape warns his agent of demonic distraction, "Five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem," pain dispels wishful visions of what-if. It is one of the tools of the trauma team to determine the patient's awareness of his or her condition. In the right hands, the hands which might inflict pain with the right hand while implanting the grace to respond aright with the left, it is the means to true satisfaction and dependence.
We are, perhaps, granted the opportunity today to respond to the heart's reflex test before the rot shows in our relationships. Before we are estranged from the people we have allowed to stand in for the intimacy with Christ for Whom we were created, we can acknowledge that something is not quite right with our hearts. Before we step out the door in a quest for willful distraction, an active search for instruments to tell us all is well apart from Christ the well of Living Water, we can confess that only He will satisfy.
"The heart of bias," plums Jane Leavy in Sandy Koufax, "is as intangible as it is corrosive."
We get a glimpse of that in Jeremiah 14:14-16. Jeremiah has gotten around God's ban on his intercession for the wayward people by narrating their plight rather than submitting a specific request. His intercession is just beneath the surface, anyway. Pleading the prominence of false prophets, Jeremiah seems to say, Lord, if You don't give me a message from You to compete in the marketplace of ideas and affection, Your enemies will have the field to themselves.
Even as we admire the insistence of Jeremiah's stubborn, shepherding heart for people misled, as many passages as we can line up from other prophets, including Christ Himself, lamenting the sheep without a true shepherd, God Who sees the heart and not just the interpersonal dynamics plunges deeper. Put this passage against a backdrop of His unabashed sovereignty. In 1 Kings 22 and 2 Chronicles 18, He shows complete agency in sending out a lying spirit to expose the motives of His people. Not here. He actively disavows such means in Jeremiah 14:14-15.
We arrive at the true, more frightening culprit at the end of Jeremiah 14:14, the one to which Leavy points in her baseball book. Deceit is in the heart. Before we ever find confirmation in the spiritual realm, from false friends, from twisted Scripture, or, in ways Jeremiah would understand and be vexed by, from the fact that we continue to prosper and haven't been immediately punished, deceit is in the heart. Surrender the battle there because we love something else more than Christ, and then we go looking for evidence to support our slipshod fallacy.
"The eye which sees what things are right," pronounces the excellent spiritual ophthalmologist GK Chesterton in Heretics, "is growing mistier and mistier." Lose the battle in the heart without firing a shot, without clinging to Scripture rightly applied to the supremacy of Christ and our desperate need for Him, and the enemy of our souls will gladly supply "evidence" for our verdict. As here, he can easily line up false prophets once we have decided what we want to hear. Woe unto the gifts of God which they use as props for their fiction, however.
God will not continue, He says, to bless with and protect the means we would use to construct story and security apart from Him. If we would so measure spiritual well-being, He will respond in kind. He will take those things we willfully use as distraction from our desperation. He does this not so much out of anger, although anger has a just place, as because we have said what matters to our hearts. We have declared, so to speak, our love language, and He will use that dialect to show us all is not well.
Cruel as this seems, consider for a moment the impact of actual pain. Just as Screwtape warns his agent of demonic distraction, "Five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem," pain dispels wishful visions of what-if. It is one of the tools of the trauma team to determine the patient's awareness of his or her condition. In the right hands, the hands which might inflict pain with the right hand while implanting the grace to respond aright with the left, it is the means to true satisfaction and dependence.
We are, perhaps, granted the opportunity today to respond to the heart's reflex test before the rot shows in our relationships. Before we are estranged from the people we have allowed to stand in for the intimacy with Christ for Whom we were created, we can acknowledge that something is not quite right with our hearts. Before we step out the door in a quest for willful distraction, an active search for instruments to tell us all is well apart from Christ the well of Living Water, we can confess that only He will satisfy.
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