Jeremiah 17:10 – Seeing the Fullness of Christ in the Faith of His Own
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, undeterred light of Jeremiah 17:10 which still looks for good. God is so confident in the seed of His Word received in the faith He imparts, so seeing the most depraved era backward through the lens of the accomplishment of the cross still to come in human terms that He announces rewards based on the incipient changes of mind and heart He has made possible.
What a contrast! Try to rest in the remnant under judgment, and our psyche doesn't change. Rebuffed in any attempt to absorb renewal by osmosis, we retreat to the desert of self-disciplined hardiness figuring to follow in what we know of the way of Elijah or John the Baptist, but we can't renew ourselves there either. The God resistance of our hearts follows us whether alone or with many, amid the flourishing familiar or exile that reduces us to life's existential questions.
Yet God… Yet God acts on His own initiative. Yet God has the audacity to reward motives and see fruit before it is even apparent to human eyes. While we are still looking for a regimen to follow after because so many of our resolutions have failed, He sees the seeds of Christ's righteousness planted in faith and rewards the whole harvest preemptively.
It is no longer ours, then, to psychically swim against the stream, an endeavor so strenuous that Rachel Aviv's subject in The New Yorker committed suicide. Even those who recognize the hunger for "other" like Willoughby Britton are on their way to agreeing with the apostle Paul that in us dwells no good thing. But, beginning to observe Christ's work in us, His commitment to it, His faithfulness to finish what He started and reward and affirm along the way, we begin to hope again.
This time, our hope is not weighed down by man's metrics. Renewed constantly by God's Word fanning the flames of our new identity in Christ, we press on toward the high calling in Him. The power is His, and not according to our will.
We begin to see it in the small beginnings and not just stumble toward it on the ever-elusive horizon. No longer fixated on our own frustratingly slow progress, we begin to have His heart toward those who grow faint along the way. We see opportunities to encourage them, to affirm what He sees in their hearts, and thereby to encourage ourselves.
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, undeterred light of Jeremiah 17:10 which still looks for good. God is so confident in the seed of His Word received in the faith He imparts, so seeing the most depraved era backward through the lens of the accomplishment of the cross still to come in human terms that He announces rewards based on the incipient changes of mind and heart He has made possible.
What a contrast! Try to rest in the remnant under judgment, and our psyche doesn't change. Rebuffed in any attempt to absorb renewal by osmosis, we retreat to the desert of self-disciplined hardiness figuring to follow in what we know of the way of Elijah or John the Baptist, but we can't renew ourselves there either. The God resistance of our hearts follows us whether alone or with many, amid the flourishing familiar or exile that reduces us to life's existential questions.
Yet God… Yet God acts on His own initiative. Yet God has the audacity to reward motives and see fruit before it is even apparent to human eyes. While we are still looking for a regimen to follow after because so many of our resolutions have failed, He sees the seeds of Christ's righteousness planted in faith and rewards the whole harvest preemptively.
It is no longer ours, then, to psychically swim against the stream, an endeavor so strenuous that Rachel Aviv's subject in The New Yorker committed suicide. Even those who recognize the hunger for "other" like Willoughby Britton are on their way to agreeing with the apostle Paul that in us dwells no good thing. But, beginning to observe Christ's work in us, His commitment to it, His faithfulness to finish what He started and reward and affirm along the way, we begin to hope again.
This time, our hope is not weighed down by man's metrics. Renewed constantly by God's Word fanning the flames of our new identity in Christ, we press on toward the high calling in Him. The power is His, and not according to our will.
We begin to see it in the small beginnings and not just stumble toward it on the ever-elusive horizon. No longer fixated on our own frustratingly slow progress, we begin to have His heart toward those who grow faint along the way. We see opportunities to encourage them, to affirm what He sees in their hearts, and thereby to encourage ourselves.
Comments
Post a Comment