Jeremiah 17:18 – Patience on a Pedestal?
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 the markings on his spiritual calendar. As Jesus will say in the New Testament, one hand now knows what the other is doing.
Having realized that he has been patient, Jeremiah seems ready within one verse for this exercise to end. Let them be put to shame, he says. Okay. Shame can serve its purpose as God's Spirit uses its indiscriminate heaviness to draw us to seek Him, to ask that it be traded for a garment of praise and for a relationship normalized by points of specific conviction which can foster repentance and growth.
Let them be dismayed, invokes the prophet. This too can serve God's purposes as the relatively harmless flashbang to disorient before His assault on human assumptions. Dismay is the sudden, uncomfortable realization that what we were believing and doing isn't working. It is the perfect precursor to being humbled for His merciful and gracious instruction.
But since Jeremiah, perhaps, believes he has accumulated enough Patience Points to cash them in, he calls for the very day of doom he said two verses ago he hadn't hurried. The purity of any patience we are able to exercise by grace putrefies just as quickly.
As with Jeremiah, nothing will test the source of our sustenance like noting progress in a virtue. If we can measure it, we can compare it to its exercise in our neighbor's life. If we can become enmeshed in such human-to-human competition, largely unconscious, we lose sight of our own Jeremiah 17:17 vulnerability before and accountability to God.
Real, perseverance patience is rooted more deeply and will flourish in season and out of season, irrespective of how long we have been patient and how other humans react. Real, persevering patience doesn't evaporate like manna as the sun gets hot.
It invigorates us throughout the day because we continue to draw on an ongoing relationship with Christ, the One Who has been and continues to be patient with us. As we grow, we, like Jeremiah in his more perceptive moments in this chapter, know that dread is but one impulse away and that we rely on CHRIST'S standing for any sense of peace.
Any calendar we mark off as we measure patience with others, then, is scored entirely differently. If we are granted reflection to see that we have been patient for weeks or years, that we, like Peter purported, have forgiven seven times, we don't look for congratulations and a change of course. Instead, we marvel at the long-suffering love of God to and in us, that He has been faithful long enough to work these virtues in the real-time vexing interactions with humans among whom He has placed us.
There is, of course a time to long for His reckoning. The martyrs in Revelation do this directly to God without being corrected. We know that the Day of the Lord is one step in a process towards all things being set right, toward knowing Him as we are known. In this, we certainly rejoice.
We plead with John, even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus, even as we know and don't downplay His righteous place in judgment. But as we do, we recognize that we are, by rights, under judgment except for His intervention. We recognize that any different trajectory in our lives is solely a work of His persevering grace.
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 the markings on his spiritual calendar. As Jesus will say in the New Testament, one hand now knows what the other is doing.
Having realized that he has been patient, Jeremiah seems ready within one verse for this exercise to end. Let them be put to shame, he says. Okay. Shame can serve its purpose as God's Spirit uses its indiscriminate heaviness to draw us to seek Him, to ask that it be traded for a garment of praise and for a relationship normalized by points of specific conviction which can foster repentance and growth.
Let them be dismayed, invokes the prophet. This too can serve God's purposes as the relatively harmless flashbang to disorient before His assault on human assumptions. Dismay is the sudden, uncomfortable realization that what we were believing and doing isn't working. It is the perfect precursor to being humbled for His merciful and gracious instruction.
But since Jeremiah, perhaps, believes he has accumulated enough Patience Points to cash them in, he calls for the very day of doom he said two verses ago he hadn't hurried. The purity of any patience we are able to exercise by grace putrefies just as quickly.
As with Jeremiah, nothing will test the source of our sustenance like noting progress in a virtue. If we can measure it, we can compare it to its exercise in our neighbor's life. If we can become enmeshed in such human-to-human competition, largely unconscious, we lose sight of our own Jeremiah 17:17 vulnerability before and accountability to God.
Real, perseverance patience is rooted more deeply and will flourish in season and out of season, irrespective of how long we have been patient and how other humans react. Real, persevering patience doesn't evaporate like manna as the sun gets hot.
It invigorates us throughout the day because we continue to draw on an ongoing relationship with Christ, the One Who has been and continues to be patient with us. As we grow, we, like Jeremiah in his more perceptive moments in this chapter, know that dread is but one impulse away and that we rely on CHRIST'S standing for any sense of peace.
Any calendar we mark off as we measure patience with others, then, is scored entirely differently. If we are granted reflection to see that we have been patient for weeks or years, that we, like Peter purported, have forgiven seven times, we don't look for congratulations and a change of course. Instead, we marvel at the long-suffering love of God to and in us, that He has been faithful long enough to work these virtues in the real-time vexing interactions with humans among whom He has placed us.
There is, of course a time to long for His reckoning. The martyrs in Revelation do this directly to God without being corrected. We know that the Day of the Lord is one step in a process towards all things being set right, toward knowing Him as we are known. In this, we certainly rejoice.
We plead with John, even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus, even as we know and don't downplay His righteous place in judgment. But as we do, we recognize that we are, by rights, under judgment except for His intervention. We recognize that any different trajectory in our lives is solely a work of His persevering grace.
Comments
Post a Comment