Jeremiah 15:12-14 – Where is Your Equity?
12
Can anyone break iron,
The northern iron and the bronze?
13
Your wealth and your treasures
I will give as plunder without price,
Because of all your sins,
Throughout your territories.
14
And I will make you cross over with your enemies
Into a land which you do not know;
For a fire is kindled in My anger,
Which shall burn upon you.”
My brother has recently come to faith. He and I were reflecting the other day on that faith we saw in the life our grandfather lived before us, and how differently we see it now. Growing up, we reveled in the spitefully conspiratorial impression that he was to Heavenly minded to be of much Earthly good. Looking back now through believing eyes ourselves, we recognize how wrong we were.
He held down a full-time job as a cash register salesman through which he provided for a wife and seven children. Beyond the energy and faith this required, though, he was always redeeming the time with that aspect of the day's work was finished. He renovated World War II Army barracks for married students at Bob Jones University. He turned the same attention to his own home, often, he said, undertaking repairs because this or that action would improve the value of the property for future sale.
God had an interesting way of showing even this faith-filled man where value comes from, however. A developer bought the house for the land on which it sat, thus demolishing as irrelevant his improvements. In the end, value was determined without reference to his sweat equity, and his future and his wife's were provided for by means outside his calculation.
God is doing much the same work as highlighted in Jeremiah 15:12-14. In the eleventh verse, He has responded to what it would be easy to dismiss as Jeremiah's whining that the prophet is weary of contending with his countrymen. God has been tender with His man and has assured Jeremiah that he will be saved and provided for along with a remnant of his countrymen. Now, in the ensuing three verses, comes the contrast.
This remnant with which Jeremiah will be gathered by grace breathed the same air as the rest of the culture. The members of the remnant may have been used, from time to time, to point out the arrogance of the culture's calculated sense of equity and security, but some cross-contamination is inevitable. Thus, the Lord takes pains to sketch what happens to the rest of the culture. The speculations the worldlings made comments the improvements, the bets on a controllable future, will be rendered worthless.
God takes the opportunity to distance Himself, in fact, from any mercenary spirit. Just as the material reserves in which His people trusted won't help them in the day of trouble, He says in verse 13 the trading for advantage is not part of His motive. The wealth they stored up, He says, He gives to the conquerors as plunder without price.
Where are we investing, really? If my grandfather is capable of an idle thought here and there that by this or that action he is insuring his own future, surely each of God's people have taken up a little of this thinking. My grandfather, though, by grace, poured all that he was into the world to come and the One Whose superiority and reward be evident in that world. Are our thoughts, then, preoccupied with that which will burn up around us, that from which, like Jeremiah in the room that he was part of by grace, we will be separated from to prove whether Christ is indeed our Treasure?
Can anyone break iron,
The northern iron and the bronze?
13
Your wealth and your treasures
I will give as plunder without price,
Because of all your sins,
Throughout your territories.
14
And I will make you cross over with your enemies
Into a land which you do not know;
For a fire is kindled in My anger,
Which shall burn upon you.”
My brother has recently come to faith. He and I were reflecting the other day on that faith we saw in the life our grandfather lived before us, and how differently we see it now. Growing up, we reveled in the spitefully conspiratorial impression that he was to Heavenly minded to be of much Earthly good. Looking back now through believing eyes ourselves, we recognize how wrong we were.
He held down a full-time job as a cash register salesman through which he provided for a wife and seven children. Beyond the energy and faith this required, though, he was always redeeming the time with that aspect of the day's work was finished. He renovated World War II Army barracks for married students at Bob Jones University. He turned the same attention to his own home, often, he said, undertaking repairs because this or that action would improve the value of the property for future sale.
God had an interesting way of showing even this faith-filled man where value comes from, however. A developer bought the house for the land on which it sat, thus demolishing as irrelevant his improvements. In the end, value was determined without reference to his sweat equity, and his future and his wife's were provided for by means outside his calculation.
God is doing much the same work as highlighted in Jeremiah 15:12-14. In the eleventh verse, He has responded to what it would be easy to dismiss as Jeremiah's whining that the prophet is weary of contending with his countrymen. God has been tender with His man and has assured Jeremiah that he will be saved and provided for along with a remnant of his countrymen. Now, in the ensuing three verses, comes the contrast.
This remnant with which Jeremiah will be gathered by grace breathed the same air as the rest of the culture. The members of the remnant may have been used, from time to time, to point out the arrogance of the culture's calculated sense of equity and security, but some cross-contamination is inevitable. Thus, the Lord takes pains to sketch what happens to the rest of the culture. The speculations the worldlings made comments the improvements, the bets on a controllable future, will be rendered worthless.
God takes the opportunity to distance Himself, in fact, from any mercenary spirit. Just as the material reserves in which His people trusted won't help them in the day of trouble, He says in verse 13 the trading for advantage is not part of His motive. The wealth they stored up, He says, He gives to the conquerors as plunder without price.
Where are we investing, really? If my grandfather is capable of an idle thought here and there that by this or that action he is insuring his own future, surely each of God's people have taken up a little of this thinking. My grandfather, though, by grace, poured all that he was into the world to come and the One Whose superiority and reward be evident in that world. Are our thoughts, then, preoccupied with that which will burn up around us, that from which, like Jeremiah in the room that he was part of by grace, we will be separated from to prove whether Christ is indeed our Treasure?
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