Jeremiah 16:14-15 – God's Glory on Repeat
14 “Therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that it shall no more be said, ‘The Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ 15 but, ‘The Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where He had driven them.’ For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers.
David Zwirner admits to The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear that the controversy Jordan Wolfson stirs up is effective. "Annoyingness is an interesting strategy in art-making."
Jeremiah 16:14-15 emblazons that principle on unforgettable display. For, if the annoying but largely harmless idiosyncrasies of an artist can draw people to his work as Goodyear suggests, the art God makes out of the dark hues of human depravity and His contrasting light is all the more captivating.
The Divine Dramatist has spent considerable time tamping down expectations. He has told Jeremiah how hopeless the culture is in which he is embedded. Don't pray for them, He has said twice. Don't find cause to celebrate with them, He has said most recently. The sentence has been passed, and it will not be reversed. They deserve exile, at least, for their sins, and they are going. Neither the pleas of the culture wrapped in excuses nor Jeremiah's entreaties with a somewhat closer idea of the believer's position wrapped in the righteousness of Christ are going to change the course of events.
But no sooner has God established His justice, His offended majesty, than his mercy and grace peek through from behind the cultural clouds. Lyricist William Cowper, who knew the Lord's faithfulness through oppressive seasons of depression, insists for himself personally that which applies on the scale of nations, ""Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face." What must hearten Jeremiah as soon as he begins to surrender to his countrymen's deserve punishment, God pledges to use even THIS to reinvigorate the people's present awareness of His power and goodness.
This is not just a deserved punishment, God reframes. This is a new Exodus. This will plant in present memory My power which this people have only heard about and ascribed to bygone days. God will use even chastisement to remind us what He can do for and through us even now.
Should we, then, keep on sinning that this kind of irrepressible grace might abound? With him, we insist, certainly not! For, just as the people to whom Jeremiah proclaims that all hope is not lost will be in exile for 70 years, the remainder of some of their lives, the correction for sin in individual lives is still great. God abides with us in seasons of deserved chastening, to be sure, just as He was with Daniel, and Esther, and Mordechai in exile and promised His people that he would prosper them even there, but many of them would not see home. Many of us, in our lifetimes, won't see the end of what we forsake for our folly.
Yet, because of the price Christ paid once and for all on behalf of His own, deserve punishment will not be the end of us – or His story in and through us. Joy will come in the morning and be hinted at, as in Jeremiah 16:14-15, throughout the watches of the night. Our hope, however undeserved, is never completely smothered either by our just conviction or by the condemnation into which the enemy of our souls manipulates it. Gospel hope is stubbornly resilient, woven in so often in God's Word that if we merely keep reading, we will never leave hopeless.
David Zwirner admits to The New Yorker's Dana Goodyear that the controversy Jordan Wolfson stirs up is effective. "Annoyingness is an interesting strategy in art-making."
Jeremiah 16:14-15 emblazons that principle on unforgettable display. For, if the annoying but largely harmless idiosyncrasies of an artist can draw people to his work as Goodyear suggests, the art God makes out of the dark hues of human depravity and His contrasting light is all the more captivating.
The Divine Dramatist has spent considerable time tamping down expectations. He has told Jeremiah how hopeless the culture is in which he is embedded. Don't pray for them, He has said twice. Don't find cause to celebrate with them, He has said most recently. The sentence has been passed, and it will not be reversed. They deserve exile, at least, for their sins, and they are going. Neither the pleas of the culture wrapped in excuses nor Jeremiah's entreaties with a somewhat closer idea of the believer's position wrapped in the righteousness of Christ are going to change the course of events.
But no sooner has God established His justice, His offended majesty, than his mercy and grace peek through from behind the cultural clouds. Lyricist William Cowper, who knew the Lord's faithfulness through oppressive seasons of depression, insists for himself personally that which applies on the scale of nations, ""Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face." What must hearten Jeremiah as soon as he begins to surrender to his countrymen's deserve punishment, God pledges to use even THIS to reinvigorate the people's present awareness of His power and goodness.
This is not just a deserved punishment, God reframes. This is a new Exodus. This will plant in present memory My power which this people have only heard about and ascribed to bygone days. God will use even chastisement to remind us what He can do for and through us even now.
Should we, then, keep on sinning that this kind of irrepressible grace might abound? With him, we insist, certainly not! For, just as the people to whom Jeremiah proclaims that all hope is not lost will be in exile for 70 years, the remainder of some of their lives, the correction for sin in individual lives is still great. God abides with us in seasons of deserved chastening, to be sure, just as He was with Daniel, and Esther, and Mordechai in exile and promised His people that he would prosper them even there, but many of them would not see home. Many of us, in our lifetimes, won't see the end of what we forsake for our folly.
Yet, because of the price Christ paid once and for all on behalf of His own, deserve punishment will not be the end of us – or His story in and through us. Joy will come in the morning and be hinted at, as in Jeremiah 16:14-15, throughout the watches of the night. Our hope, however undeserved, is never completely smothered either by our just conviction or by the condemnation into which the enemy of our souls manipulates it. Gospel hope is stubbornly resilient, woven in so often in God's Word that if we merely keep reading, we will never leave hopeless.
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