Jeremiah 16:1-4 – Freed from Family Assumptions
1 The word of the Lord also came to me, saying, 2 “You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place.” 3 For thus says the Lord concerning the sons and daughters who are born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them and their fathers who begot them in this land: 4 “They shall die gruesome deaths; they shall not be lamented nor shall they be buried, but they shall be like refuse on the face of the earth. They shall be consumed by the sword and by famine, and their corpses shall be meat for the birds of heaven and for the beasts of the earth.”
"There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said," as quoted by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who hopefully adds, "meaning that it is born ruined – that any social system is rotten already, yet it still keeps most people fed and placated. Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less. In the same way,"
I think of Smith's assertion when I come across passages of Scripture like Jeremiah 16:1-4 depicting the depth and dearth of what we deserve and compare that picture to the relative comfort we experience in our daily lives. The reality of ruin is not negated. It is merely forestalled by the grace of God. He is, asserts Peter as a married apostle in 2 Peter 3:9, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
So what is our state of mind and heart as we get to experience God's blessings which He precluded Jeremiah's tasting? Our first recourse, as ever, is in the righteousness of Christ. He knew what it was to be forsaken in human terms as a present, Earthly reality. He chose His Father's pleasure.
He chose the joy set before Him and eternal fellowship with us as His redeemed flock. He chose these instead of the conventional comforts of a temporary family. He paid that price for us. Because He did, we are adopted into the eternal family of the Trinity more bonded, more blissful than any Hallmark family He or Jeremiah could have idealized but gave up for the sake of obedience.
Because Christ was complete in His righteousness without wife and children, we know that we can be. We know that we can rest in the Father when we have no place to lay our heads, when, even with a roof and an address, home is not restful.
Because Christ was and is complete in familial bonds with His Father, we can, inspired Paul says, live and give in these family relationships but not allow them to define us. Christ is better, bigger, brighter, and more replenishing. We need not burden spouses or children with the responsibility of validating who we are. God already has through Christ.
If there are seasons of family life, then, where we feel alone, or closer to alone than cultural promises of bliss would have promised, seasons of illness or estrangement, Christ is gone before us in this. He is the better Hosea, marrying His bride the Church and purchasing her back. He can relate to the sting of unrequited love more intimately than we imagine.
He will fulfill our deepest longings. When those Earthly relationships we experience seem purposed only to make the suffering of those we care about hurt more, we can rest in the reality that Christ cried over His people whom He would have gathered.
We can love, then, those humans He has placed closest to us irrespective of probable return. Matthew Sink charges us so, charting that apart from Christ human love SEEKS value, but that in Him, love CREATES value.
We can go through some of what God warned the prophet about in Jeremiah 16:1-4 and know that the value He assigned at the price of His blood is undiminished. He has paid the price of rot and ruin, obvious and implicit, and brings us forth as the Firstborn of many brethren with an eternal family.
"There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith once said," as quoted by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who hopefully adds, "meaning that it is born ruined – that any social system is rotten already, yet it still keeps most people fed and placated. Those systems and practices can be dysfunctional while the whole still works, more or less. In the same way,"
I think of Smith's assertion when I come across passages of Scripture like Jeremiah 16:1-4 depicting the depth and dearth of what we deserve and compare that picture to the relative comfort we experience in our daily lives. The reality of ruin is not negated. It is merely forestalled by the grace of God. He is, asserts Peter as a married apostle in 2 Peter 3:9, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
So what is our state of mind and heart as we get to experience God's blessings which He precluded Jeremiah's tasting? Our first recourse, as ever, is in the righteousness of Christ. He knew what it was to be forsaken in human terms as a present, Earthly reality. He chose His Father's pleasure.
He chose the joy set before Him and eternal fellowship with us as His redeemed flock. He chose these instead of the conventional comforts of a temporary family. He paid that price for us. Because He did, we are adopted into the eternal family of the Trinity more bonded, more blissful than any Hallmark family He or Jeremiah could have idealized but gave up for the sake of obedience.
Because Christ was complete in His righteousness without wife and children, we know that we can be. We know that we can rest in the Father when we have no place to lay our heads, when, even with a roof and an address, home is not restful.
Because Christ was and is complete in familial bonds with His Father, we can, inspired Paul says, live and give in these family relationships but not allow them to define us. Christ is better, bigger, brighter, and more replenishing. We need not burden spouses or children with the responsibility of validating who we are. God already has through Christ.
If there are seasons of family life, then, where we feel alone, or closer to alone than cultural promises of bliss would have promised, seasons of illness or estrangement, Christ is gone before us in this. He is the better Hosea, marrying His bride the Church and purchasing her back. He can relate to the sting of unrequited love more intimately than we imagine.
He will fulfill our deepest longings. When those Earthly relationships we experience seem purposed only to make the suffering of those we care about hurt more, we can rest in the reality that Christ cried over His people whom He would have gathered.
We can love, then, those humans He has placed closest to us irrespective of probable return. Matthew Sink charges us so, charting that apart from Christ human love SEEKS value, but that in Him, love CREATES value.
We can go through some of what God warned the prophet about in Jeremiah 16:1-4 and know that the value He assigned at the price of His blood is undiminished. He has paid the price of rot and ruin, obvious and implicit, and brings us forth as the Firstborn of many brethren with an eternal family.
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