Coming Up For Air

21 Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, And pour out their blood By the force of the sword; Let their wives become widows And bereaved of their children. Let their men be put to death, Their young men be slain By the sword in battle. 22 Let a cry be heard from their houses, When You bring a troop suddenly upon them; For they have dug a pit to take me, And hidden snares for my feet. The song "King of My Heart," recorded powerfully by Bethel Music and Kutless, pledges to focus on the Lord's enthronement in a series of metaphors. My favorite, especially as I pass middle-age and consider impact and the distractions from it, is "May the king of my heart be the echo of my days." Without constant re-centering there, the prophet's honesty in Jeremiah 18:21-22 prints off the reality of our heart blockage. Jeremiah's legacy has been threatened by those around him. Being slandered but otherwise ignored so hurts Jeremiah that he escalates this scuttleb...

19 Give heed to me, O Lord, And listen to the voice of those who contend with me! 20 Shall evil be repaid for good? For they have dug a pit for my life. Remember that I stood before You To speak good for them, To turn away Your wrath from them. “A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty," reduces Tim Keller in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life , "that he is and no more.” Generally, the prophet Jeremiah seems more likely to deliver that verdict than need to receive it. God has told him from the commissioning of Jeremiah's ministry that the people won't listen to him, and this has been reinforced in Jeremiah's experience. Surely, if there were a man impervious enough in his identity before God to be able to celebrate it in either abundant or nonexistent ministry results, Jeremiah would be the guy. Yet, even for him, such a discipline perspective corrodes. No mat...

18 Then they said, “Come and let us devise plans against Jeremiah; for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come and let us attack him with the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words.” My wife and I have been watching ER alongside the real-life medical drama which is unfolding these days. It's not uncommon on the show for children to resist the treatment that adults know they need. They will squirm away from the pain of an injection. Sometimes they will lash out at the person who is confronting their condition by painful means. This is reflexive, and we don't blame them. We can even understand when, in a state of spiritual darkness, people lash out at God's messenger addressing the disease of their souls. This is a manifestation of the disease of sin, after all. The people rebelled against Moses. They rebelled against and attacked a variety of God's prophets. Ultimately, we would kill Christ as...

I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will show them the back and not the face In the day of their calamity.” "The tumult of battle," narrates Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' s fifth volume, "allowed no time for doubt or scrutiny." What Edward Gibbon sees in retrospect as the crumbling Roman Empire's defenses, God's prophet foretells an advanced in Jeremiah 18:17. In fact, he already had, connecting the corruption of the culture to cowardice on the battlefield which soldiers could not rely on themselves or each other. In fact, God already foretold this eventuality so far in advance that Moses spoke of it at the end of Deuteronomy. An aspect of blessing, He said, was that small bands of His people would drive multiples of their enemies to flight. Conversely, as He withdraws individual peace and resulting communal protection, His people would be so seized with panic that they would be beyond even an...

15 “Because My people have forgotten Me, They have burned incense to worthless idols. And they have caused themselves to stumble in their ways, From the ancient paths, To walk in pathways and not on a highway, 16 To make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing; Everyone who passes by it will be astonished And shake his head. "History is," Will Durant in The Age of Louis XIV gives the call, "a race between art and war." We are at once in the dust of the derby and gawking from the grandstands. God's Word is faultless guide, but we willfully choose where to linger and allow even it to distort our view. By grace, give it to extol, as Jeremiah has been in the run-up to Jeremiah 18:15-16, the art of redemption, and we will begin to declare our own beauty. What a piece of work, or art, is man, am I, that God would go to that trouble, would pay that price, would have the nations paint the picture for me that He offers refreshment like the Lebanon snow! What a beaut...

13 Therefore thus says the Lord: “Ask now among the Gentiles, Who has heard such things? The virgin of Israel has done a very horrible thing. 14 Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon, Which comes from the rock of the field? Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters? As the story for Return of the Jedi was being fashioned, one of George Lucas's inner circle objected to the sentimental turn it was taking. Darth Vader, the ultimate villain, redeemed and reconciled?! Really?! Lucas, who tended more toward Buddhist concepts of spirituality, looked at his questioner, seeking a sort of reconciliation of his own. I thought, he queried pointedly, you were a Christian. This is the kind of confrontational grace we face in Jeremiah 18:13-14. For, if we can deem the Darth Vaders in our own over-dramatized narrative beyond the reach of plausible grace, we can also get lost in our own maelstrom of self-condemnation. We can readily, as was the Israelite consensus in Jeremia...

And they said, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart.”  Jeremiah 18:12, New King James Version "What strikes me," an ER physician tells The New Yorker 's Ryka Galchen on the constant triage of care in these times straining our medical system, "is the deterioration of what's normal." Jeremiah 18:12 speaks to the same phenomenon with respect to the sin virus more deadly than anything biological we face. Convicted, perhaps in sincerity, the cultural chorus finally responds to Jeremiah's confrontation of sinful assumptions. Collectively, they bewail hopelessness, but the next words are telling. We will walk, they resign, according to our own PLANS. That is, the degraded normal of estrangement from God and of temporary, fleeting satisfaction elsewhere has become so intertwined with cultural expectations that people's self-talk includes it as part of a plan. Perhaps no indiv...

And they said, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart.”  Jeremiah 18:12, New King James Version Brandon Heath in "Sore Eyes" diagnoses that being "full of regret" can be "sweet and bitter." This is evident in Jeremiah 18:12. It's a phenomenon called secondary gain. We suffer from something, in this case, the rightful conviction of what we are doing wrong. The voice of the culture lamenting in the verse is correct that the heart of evil courses through the decisions that have become conventional wisdom. But, what then? Collectively, and strangely, they find this state sweet and bitter. Rather than resolve to demonstrate repentant choices, they tip over and wallow in condemning themselves where God has not, pointedly, rendered a final verdict. Now that the culture has heard Jeremiah at all, it has zeroed in on the worst consequences. Its members have missed that, through hi...

11 “Now therefore, speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.” ’ ” When I get a mass email, even one that is helpful, very often it comes from an email address designed for that purpose. "Do not reply," when I look, is built into that originating email address. Sometimes, the person writing the copy will even add as a coda to the organization's message the de-escalating reality that any responses, probably irritable ones, will go to an unmonitored inbox There's a little of that built-in imperviousness as God turns his otherwise sensitive prophet to address hot words of impending doom to Jerusalem and Judah again. God explicitly includes the prophetic imprimatur. Tell them, He instructs Jeremiah repeatedly but again in Jeremiah 18:11, that these are My words rather than you...

7 The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, 8 if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. 9 And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, 10 if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it. "Jesus is," declares David Mathis in Habits of Grace , "the Word of God embodied. He is the grace of God incarnate  (Titus 2:11). So full and complete is his revealing of God," relishes Mathis, "that he is not a  word-thing, but a Word-person." We need this revelation of His fullness, both from Mathis and from Jeremiah 18:7-10. The ability to read is so pivotal in this culture. From kindergarten or first grade, it separates those who are seen as successful from those who are not. An...

 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the Lord. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel! 7 The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it." "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," extends Gopnik, "there is always a lot of chaos in the hero – meaning not all heroes are chaotic but that the elements of heroes and flow back and forth uncertainly through a life." Because we become accustomed to systems and men a certain amount of dysfunction and chaos, we need direct reminders like Jeremiah 18:6-7. F...

5 Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying: 6 “O house of Israel…" Drawing again from my favorite television drama The West Wing , there is a time when natural disaster strikes the Midwest. Pres. Bartlet admirably alters his schedule to be present with hurting people. We are drawn in as he drops the pretensions of his massive intellect and office in order to relate to people's everyday struggles. The thing is, he nearly gets stuck there. He finds such a payoff in being able to physically see the short-cycle difference he gets to make that the press secretary who advocated for the trip actually has to confront him with the broader perspective. You are the President, she says in essence. You need to do what you are called and equipped to do, even when it's hard, even when you don't see immediate results. You need to get back to Washington. I'm drawn toward that dynamic at the camera angle in Jeremiah's narrative shifts yet again and the Father's c...

4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. "My dreams," confesses Hillsong in "Every Little Thing" "are small compared to Yours." To Hillsong's perpetual bounce, and Todd Agnew's baritone rumbling in "If You Wanted," "At least down here, I know what we're chasing, and it's hard to trust that Your dreams are so much better than mine." That's the resonance of the word good in Jeremiah 18:4. That's the surprising validation that causes me to pause over the frame story before moving on to the message directly from the Lord. Jeremiah, veteran of visions, lingers here over the theology reflected in vocation. Keeping off haste, Jeremiah watches not just the potter's work but the potter himself. If anyone has license to give up on good theology reflected through God's erstwhile image-bearers it's...

3 Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. 4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make. “What children we are," admits Lew Wallace in Ben-Hur , "even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.” Jeremiah could have displayed the peevishness of a child in the interim that comes down to us as Jeremiah 18:3-4. He was called from Jerusalem's gate, from a dressing down of the prominent of the culture at the end of Jeremiah 17. He takes with grace, or at least with silence what men might view as a demotion to a smaller, more mundane venue of the potter's house, and indeed makes allowances for the Almighty with his mature willingness to listen rather than proclaim from there. The childishness still at times extant in me would expect immediate gratification for such indulgent obe...

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying: 2 “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause you to hear My words.” In yet another of my favorite scenes from The West Wing , Leo, the craggy, practical political strategist who goes from best friend to campaign chairman, to White House Chief of Staff plants the seed of wholesome presidential ambition within his friend, Gov. Jed Bartlet. Leo isn't given to rhetorical flourishes himself, but he tells Gov. Bartlet's, "You are going to open your mouth and lift houses off the ground." Jeremiah has already been there and done that. See the end of Jeremiah 17. He tells us the nobles and notables that the houses and gates in which they trust will be gone. How does one follow that grand, well, jeremiad in the Lord's service? With our ingrained sense of meritocracy, we envision and assume bigger and bigger audiences and influence. We transcribe that the journey from glory to glory will be discerni...

27 “But if you will not heed Me to hallow the Sabbath day, such as not carrying a burden when entering the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched.” ’ ” I once brought a gun to school. My parents were out of town and didn't ask the usual questions, didn't help perform the usual rhetorical inspections before crossing one of life's thresholds from one setting where one set of practices was perfectly acceptable to another. Thus, I accidentally violated the civic sanctity of middle school with a cap gun, which in days lessons necessarily suspicious I promptly turned over to a wise teacher without consequences. We cross thresholds all the time from one setting and set of norms to another. We often do so heedlessly. Thus, Jeremiah 17:27 warns us that without circumspection what we carry can define us. God's people are given both the commandment and opportunity to ...

24 “And it shall be, if you heed Me carefully,” says the Lord, “to bring no burden through the gates of this city on the Sabbath day, but hallow the Sabbath day, to do no work in it, 25 then shall enter the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, accompanied by the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and this city shall remain forever. 26 And they shall come from the cities of Judah and from the places around Jerusalem, from the land of Benjamin and from the lowland, from the mountains and from the South, bringing burnt offerings and sacrifices, grain offerings and incense, bringing sacrifices of praise to the house of the Lord. On The West Wing 's episode "Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc," former professor and now President, and lifelong Latinate, Josiah Bartlett is holding class on the title phrase. His court is measuring when carrying the state of Texas in a presidential electio...

 21 Thus says the Lord: “Take heed to yourselves, and bear no burden on the Sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem; 22 nor carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath day, nor do any work, but hallow the Sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers. 23 But they did not obey nor incline their ear, but made their neck stiff, that they might not hear nor receive instruction. Science fiction author N. K. Jemisin tells The New Yorker 's Raffi Khatchadourian her, "writing process often begins with dreams; imagery vivid enough to hang on into wakefulness. She does not so much mine them for insight as treat them as portals into hidden worlds. Her tendency is to interrogate what she sees with if/then questions, until her field of vision widens enough for her to glimpse a landscape that can hold a narrative." Something like this may be what the Lord has in mind in Jeremiah 17:21-23. Why else tell His prophet, while Jeremiah is to have the fleeting attention of the ...

19 Thus the Lord said to me: “Go and stand in the gate of the children of the people, by which the kings of Judah come in and by which they go out, and in all the gates of Jerusalem; 20 and say to them, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you kings of Judah, and all Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who enter by these gates." "Proverbs," typifies Tim Keller in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life , "insists that wisdom takes time to develop, and this makes sense if wisdom is a person and we have to learn how he thinks, what his attributes are, and what actions would please him." What Keller attributes to Proverbs, we can attribute to the Word of God as a whole and see in particular in Jeremiah 17:19-20. Previously, Jeremiah has notated his patience in delivering this Word and has vented that this patience has expired. God is marvelously indirect in dealing with the pique of his prophet, not diagnosing for us whether Jeremiah is hungry for the full revela...

18 Let them be ashamed who persecute me, But do not let me be put to shame; Let them be dismayed, But do not let me be dismayed. Bring on them the day of doom, And destroy them with double destruction! As CS Lewis opens the fictional demon's fourteenth letter, he has Screwtape note with guarded alarm that the patient whose spiritual growth he and his nephew both want to despoil has become humble. They are not without recourse, though, he notes. "All the virtues are less formidable once the man is aware that he has them." Something like this self-awareness may have happened in Jeremiah's heart. As recently as Jeremiah 17:16, he marks the intercessory patience God is discipling in him. He hasn't, as he puts it, desired the woeful day. He hasn't wanted judgment to come, even though this would validate the warnings he has been giving. Now forbearance may become less of a virtue once he is aware of it. He has, as it were, pulled out his spiritual timepiece, noticed...

16 As for me, I have not hurried away from being a shepherd who follows You, Nor have I desired the woeful day; You know what came out of my lips; It was right there before You. 17 Do not be a terror to me; You are my hope in the day of doom. Garcia Burnham in her memoir of captivity In the Presence of My Enemy is equally candid about her faith and her depression during the ordeal. At one point when she broke into sobs, she saw parenthood differently. Too often, she had accused her son of using tears to manipulate or to escape responsibility. She resolved she would be more understanding. Knowing his own times of tears, Jeremiah is also in such a place of emphasizing faith-filled empathy in Jeremiah 17:16-17. He has known what it is to be intimidated. Yet, he says, he has engaged in the shepherd's work to which God has called him. His words, he recalls, flowed from his intimate connection with the Lord rather than the expediency of what would endear him to men or disting...

14 Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; Save me, and I shall be saved, For You are my praise. 15 Indeed they say to me, “Where is the word of the Lord? Let it come now!” "It is always himself," warns Cormac McCarthy as conveyed by Jim Abbott in the appropriately named pitching memoir Imperfect , "the coward abandons first." Perhaps it is this self-confrontation from which Jeremiah cries out preemptively in Jeremiah 17:14-15, "Heal me!" At first, we start. It is the culture around him that is rotting from within rather than Jeremiah. Jeremiah's connection to the Lord is vital and constantly reorienting him. The culture he confronts, on the other hand, seeks sustenance from secondary sources. Heal him? He might well have been expected to present himself as the spiritual specimen instead. Yet, Jeremiah is the veteran of spiritual warfare with a healthy suspicion of himself in the battles he is about to fight. He knows the culture he will confront. Its ...

11 “As a partridge that broods but does not hatch, So is he who gets riches, but not by right; It will leave him in the midst of his days, And at his end he will be a fool.” 12 A glorious high throne from the beginning Is the place of our sanctuary. 13 O Lord, the hope of Israel, All who forsake You shall be ashamed. “Those who depart from Me Shall be written in the earth, Because they have forsaken the Lord, The fountain of living waters.” Will Durant opines in The Age of Napoleon on the Church of that day, "Variously privileged, the Church in France accumulated large domains, reckoned by some as a fifth of the soil; and these it ruled as feudal properties, collecting feudal dues. It turned the contributions of the faithful into gold and  silver ornaments which, like the jewels of the crown, were  consecrated and inviolable hedges against the inflation that  seemed ingrained in history." His picture is a useful one as we consider the indictment of Jer...

I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings. "People underestimate," determines meditation expert Willoughby Britton in Rachel Aviv's piece in The New Yorker , "how difficult it is to change your culture in terms of lived experience. You can't just decide,'I am going to reform my psyche and being according to another culture's definition.'" That is the wonder of the sharp turn between Jeremiah 17:9 and 10. In fact, inspired Jeremiah has split the book's entire seventeenth chapter talking about the frailty and oftentimes the futility of human growth. In Jeremiah 17:9, he has just conveyed God's verdict on the culture's efforts. Their ways are wicked, all the more so because it is now the norm to pretend that all is well and to shun the goodness of God's unmerited grace when it comes. Juxtapose that bottomless blackness with the searching, undeter...

“The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?" The third season of the Windsor drama The Crown as the Queen enters her mature years is typically darker. It takes on poignancy, however, when she, sans royal finery and pomp, goes to see the uncle who forsook the crown and shifted its burdens onto her as an unsuspecting young woman. She would comfort and reconcile with a dying man, but he puts his energies elsewhere. In contrast to her simplicity of gesture, he insists on being fully decked out for the occasion, hiding his expiring vulnerability to last. His tone betrays that this is not out of respect for the sovereign holding the authority which could have been his but is a last attempt to show that he is in control of his fate and convinced of his own rightness. What here might be family rivalry is in its extreme form of wickedness described in Jeremiah 17:9. For, the antecedent to the wicked heart the prophet describes there is a hear...

7 “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, And whose hope is the Lord. 8 For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, Which spreads out its roots by the river, And will not fear when heat comes; But its leaf will be green, And will not be anxious in the year of drought, Nor will cease from yielding fruit. Jeremiah 17:7-8, New King James Version 1 Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful; 2 But his delight is in the law of the Lord, And in His law he meditates day and night. 3 He shall be like a tree Planted by the rivers of water, That brings forth its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also shall not wither; And whatever he does shall prosper. Psalm 1:1-3, New King James Version Jars of Clay invokes in the band's unforgettable song "Inland," afraid of your convictions they said the land will change you steady your confession your course make no corrections when you are a ...

5 Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man And makes flesh his strength, Whose heart departs from the Lord. 6 For he shall be like a shrub in the desert, And shall not see when good comes, But shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, In a salt land which is not inhabited. "Self-reliance," the devotional You 2.0 takes the temperature, "quenches the fire for God and turns it into cold ashes. Hardships have the same effect." So warns, by the back door, Jeremiah 17:6. The prophet counsels his countrymen about to be driven into exile that dependence on each other in such upheaval will be the natural recourse. But, he says, people are unfit repositories for ultimate trust and ultimate expectation of strength. People who go into human interactions with such expectations, he diagnoses, gradually give their hearts away. Not only do we not get our expectations met by the latest hero or heroine in our story, we gradually develop a tre...