Jeremiah 15:19 – A Sense of Standing
19 Therefore thus says the Lord:
“If you return,
Then I will bring you back;
You shall stand before Me…
An 18-year-old on the show New Amsterdam who thought he had beaten lymphoma finds out the disease is going to kill him within six months. He doesn't want to tell his parents. He wants to live the time he has left to make up for what cancer has already taken away. Dr. Fromm, the psychiatrist, unsuccessful in talking him out of it directly, persuades the patient to record his five favorite memories to be played for his parents when he passes.
It is through this exercise that the patient realizes what his parents meant in the midst of his previous cancer ordeal. He reconciles with the reality that their relationship is bound up in the fact that they were WITH him throughout the fight.
This expanded sense of "with" is God's gift to His prophet in Jeremiah 15:19. It is a breaching, reaching grace, for Jeremiah has howled in estrangement. Much like the kid on New Amsterdam, he has decided to stake out his own terms of what's fair. In his case, Jeremiah has decried the injustice of going into exile with the very punished people he has tried to correct and whose blowback he has endured. I want what I can get, Jeremiah has declared, listing his religious regimen to buttress his claim to what he can make of a life for himself.
God's response is SO gracious! Rather than reducing that self-righteousness to nothing, which He could do, rather than picking up Jeremiah's somewhat strident tone to defend His own glory, God reaches out. In His own way, He presages Dr. Fromm to help Jeremiah realize the pervasiveness of His Parental bond with His own. Since Jeremiah has cordoned off the past which New Amsterdam's Dr. Fromm uses to remind his patient he is loved, God, Wonderful, Counselor, cast a vision for the future.
You – shall – stand – before – Me. What validation! What advance proof that the Parental bonds will stretch to cover and protect Jeremiah in exile! The "if" that at first disconcerts me in my reflexive effort to make this about the believer's steadfast standing in the righteousness of Christ instead draws me with God's empathetic, pervasive perspective. Not only is God pledging to be WITH Jeremiah in the exile experience and at its end, His use of "if" shows Him completely entering His prophet's unsettled perspective. I'm with you, He steadies, even through your protests. I'm with you even in the if's.
This same standing is ours by faith in Christ, both by unchanging theological standing and by eventual realization through our storm-tossed emotions and experience. We can look back like Dr. Fromm's patient and see Christ's steadying through the very vulnerabilities and suffering we would edit from our own retrospective. We can, likewise, look forward and know that one day our dogged doubts will dissipate. Not only will He and His Word declare that we stand, justified in Christ, before Him, but we will know it as well.
Even in the meantime, we can sing with Reliant K's "Up and Up," "I'm finally catching on to it. The past is just a conduit, And right there at the end is where I'll be."
“If you return,
Then I will bring you back;
You shall stand before Me…
An 18-year-old on the show New Amsterdam who thought he had beaten lymphoma finds out the disease is going to kill him within six months. He doesn't want to tell his parents. He wants to live the time he has left to make up for what cancer has already taken away. Dr. Fromm, the psychiatrist, unsuccessful in talking him out of it directly, persuades the patient to record his five favorite memories to be played for his parents when he passes.
It is through this exercise that the patient realizes what his parents meant in the midst of his previous cancer ordeal. He reconciles with the reality that their relationship is bound up in the fact that they were WITH him throughout the fight.
This expanded sense of "with" is God's gift to His prophet in Jeremiah 15:19. It is a breaching, reaching grace, for Jeremiah has howled in estrangement. Much like the kid on New Amsterdam, he has decided to stake out his own terms of what's fair. In his case, Jeremiah has decried the injustice of going into exile with the very punished people he has tried to correct and whose blowback he has endured. I want what I can get, Jeremiah has declared, listing his religious regimen to buttress his claim to what he can make of a life for himself.
God's response is SO gracious! Rather than reducing that self-righteousness to nothing, which He could do, rather than picking up Jeremiah's somewhat strident tone to defend His own glory, God reaches out. In His own way, He presages Dr. Fromm to help Jeremiah realize the pervasiveness of His Parental bond with His own. Since Jeremiah has cordoned off the past which New Amsterdam's Dr. Fromm uses to remind his patient he is loved, God, Wonderful, Counselor, cast a vision for the future.
You – shall – stand – before – Me. What validation! What advance proof that the Parental bonds will stretch to cover and protect Jeremiah in exile! The "if" that at first disconcerts me in my reflexive effort to make this about the believer's steadfast standing in the righteousness of Christ instead draws me with God's empathetic, pervasive perspective. Not only is God pledging to be WITH Jeremiah in the exile experience and at its end, His use of "if" shows Him completely entering His prophet's unsettled perspective. I'm with you, He steadies, even through your protests. I'm with you even in the if's.
This same standing is ours by faith in Christ, both by unchanging theological standing and by eventual realization through our storm-tossed emotions and experience. We can look back like Dr. Fromm's patient and see Christ's steadying through the very vulnerabilities and suffering we would edit from our own retrospective. We can, likewise, look forward and know that one day our dogged doubts will dissipate. Not only will He and His Word declare that we stand, justified in Christ, before Him, but we will know it as well.
Even in the meantime, we can sing with Reliant K's "Up and Up," "I'm finally catching on to it. The past is just a conduit, And right there at the end is where I'll be."
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