Jeremiah 14:19-21 – Identifying with the Penitents' Plea
19
Have You utterly rejected Judah?
Has Your soul loathed Zion?
Why have You stricken us so that there is no healing for us?
We looked for peace, but there was no good;
And for the time of healing, and there was trouble.
20
We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness
And the iniquity of our fathers,
For we have sinned against You.
21
Do not abhor us, for Your name’s sake;
Do not disgrace the throne of Your glory.
Remember, do not break Your covenant with us.
"If you’re wondering where Jesus’ friends are," identifies Bob Goff in Everybody, Always, "just find people whose feet are a foot off the ground because someone else is lifting them up. You just found our church."
What I recently read that, I was at first thinking about THOSE people. I was thinking about those people MercyMe says can't help but dance they are so persistently aware of God's pervasive forgiveness. I was thinking of those people aglow with awareness of Charles Dickens' anointing from A Christmas Carol, "“It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us. ”
But the power of intercessory prayer also extends to the broken in Jeremiah 14:19-21. There, the prophet, able to read the signs of the times, rejected by his own region and his own house, able to identify with God's righteous anger against those most like him in human terms, he identifies with the penitent among his people.
He takes up their voice as for a few lights indistinguishable from his own. He is, by holy choice, part of the stricken us and we and our crying out for relief throughout these three tear-soaked verses.
Give me a microphone to the ages, and I want to project MY righteousness, albeit with appropriate and sometimes sincere interspersal that this righteousness comes from Christ. Give me a sense that correction is coming, allow me to deliver the message that correction is coming, and as it does, I'll be quick to separate from its targets.
Not Jeremiah, and not Christ Whom Jeremiah presages here. He takes up the plea, however recent and however interested in delivery from punishment in addition to real repentance. These, now, are a people lifted up.
Goff's right. This is so much the Church's vital, identifying mission that we ought to be nearly indistinguishable from those most recent, most scandalous penitents whose cause we take up. As with inspired Jeremiah, our pen is theirs without a great deal of fanfare. As with the priesthood with which Jeremiah was familiar, it is our business, our calling, to position ourselves between the confessing people at the wrath they deserve.
If Jeremiah can sublimate his ego, how much more those in Christ who know they had nothing more to fear from divine wrath? After all, Christ absorbed the stripes both for us who may have decades of following haphazardly after Him and for the most recent, most earnest, most clueless, honestly, of the morning's remnant who have come to themselves.
May Christ Who once gave us ears to hear and eyes to see our own need for Him and His righteousness allow us to insist on identifying with those He continues to draw.
Have You utterly rejected Judah?
Has Your soul loathed Zion?
Why have You stricken us so that there is no healing for us?
We looked for peace, but there was no good;
And for the time of healing, and there was trouble.
20
We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness
And the iniquity of our fathers,
For we have sinned against You.
21
Do not abhor us, for Your name’s sake;
Do not disgrace the throne of Your glory.
Remember, do not break Your covenant with us.
"If you’re wondering where Jesus’ friends are," identifies Bob Goff in Everybody, Always, "just find people whose feet are a foot off the ground because someone else is lifting them up. You just found our church."
What I recently read that, I was at first thinking about THOSE people. I was thinking about those people MercyMe says can't help but dance they are so persistently aware of God's pervasive forgiveness. I was thinking of those people aglow with awareness of Charles Dickens' anointing from A Christmas Carol, "“It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us. ”
But the power of intercessory prayer also extends to the broken in Jeremiah 14:19-21. There, the prophet, able to read the signs of the times, rejected by his own region and his own house, able to identify with God's righteous anger against those most like him in human terms, he identifies with the penitent among his people.
He takes up their voice as for a few lights indistinguishable from his own. He is, by holy choice, part of the stricken us and we and our crying out for relief throughout these three tear-soaked verses.
Give me a microphone to the ages, and I want to project MY righteousness, albeit with appropriate and sometimes sincere interspersal that this righteousness comes from Christ. Give me a sense that correction is coming, allow me to deliver the message that correction is coming, and as it does, I'll be quick to separate from its targets.
Not Jeremiah, and not Christ Whom Jeremiah presages here. He takes up the plea, however recent and however interested in delivery from punishment in addition to real repentance. These, now, are a people lifted up.
Goff's right. This is so much the Church's vital, identifying mission that we ought to be nearly indistinguishable from those most recent, most scandalous penitents whose cause we take up. As with inspired Jeremiah, our pen is theirs without a great deal of fanfare. As with the priesthood with which Jeremiah was familiar, it is our business, our calling, to position ourselves between the confessing people at the wrath they deserve.
If Jeremiah can sublimate his ego, how much more those in Christ who know they had nothing more to fear from divine wrath? After all, Christ absorbed the stripes both for us who may have decades of following haphazardly after Him and for the most recent, most earnest, most clueless, honestly, of the morning's remnant who have come to themselves.
May Christ Who once gave us ears to hear and eyes to see our own need for Him and His righteousness allow us to insist on identifying with those He continues to draw.
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