Coming Up For Air

22 The wind shall eat up all your rulers, And your lovers shall go into captivity; Surely then you will be ashamed and humiliated For all your wickedness. 23 O inhabitant of Lebanon, Making your nest in the cedars, How gracious will you be when pangs come upon you, Like the pain of a woman in labor? "Lord," reflects Tim Keller in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life , "my forgiveness is skin deep. I refrain from obvious efforts to pay (people) back, but I simmer." Jeremiah 22:22-23 adds enough of the heat of God's correction that such simmering boils over. The majesty and magnanimity of the worst which was easy to manufacture when they operated in an environment subject to their comfort and control will be shown as a skin-deep sham when shame, instead, lays hold of them. Thus convicted, they will be more interested in self-protection than the welfare of the flock. The Scripture likewise challenges the Lebanese as to how thoroughgoing is he suppose it graciousnes...

20 “Go up to Lebanon, and cry out, And lift up your voice in Bashan; Cry from Abarim, For all your lovers are destroyed. 21 I spoke to you in your prosperity, But you said, ‘I will not hear.’ This has been your manner from your youth, That you did not obey My voice. "I felt lucky," confesses Pat Conroy's Will McLean in Lords on Discipline upon the discovery of a tiny sand dollar with a cross in the middle. "You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you." So declares Jeremiah 22:20-21. The Word of the Lord, in fact, shows three ways in which Jehoiakim was defined by giving inordinate value material prosperity. He Who is Himself Pearl above price is in a unique position to declare to men what is comparatively inferior. The pursuit of comfort out of proportion shaped Jehoiakim's relationships and doomed them. Lebanon was the home of the great cedars with which Solomon paneled his palac...

18 Therefore thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: “They shall not lament for him, Saying, ‘Alas, my brother!’ or ‘Alas, my sister!’ They shall not lament for him, Saying, ‘Alas, master!’ or ‘Alas, his glory!’ 19 He shall be buried with the burial of a donkey, Dragged and cast out beyond the gates of Jerusalem. Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire allows vulnerability that as much as he admires Charlemagne, much of his effort was expended on daily concerns or accumulation that would die with him. Gibbon confesses of his search for greatness in the minutia of king's activities, "I can seldom discover the general views and the immortal spirit of the legislator who survives himself for the benefit of posterity." God is delivering this verdict to another king less loftily remembered, Jehoiakim, in Jeremiah 22:18-19. He has authority in his day, and he largely spends it on concerns that will not outlast him. He cannot d...

13 “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness And his chambers by injustice, Who uses his neighbor’s service without wages And gives him nothing for his work, 14 Who says, ‘I will build myself a wide house with spacious chambers, And cut out windows for it, Paneling it with cedar And painting it with vermilion.’ 15 “Shall you reign because you enclose yourself in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink, And do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. 16 He judged the cause of the poor and needy; Then it was well. Was not this knowing Me?” says the Lord. 17 “Yet your eyes and your heart are for nothing but your covetousness, For shedding innocent blood, And practicing oppression and violence.” Neil Miller looks at the paneled houses the Lord derides in Haggai and warns the punch list of finishing touches for personal comfort never ends. “The heart,” he sounds, “will find ways to fill itself.” Indeed, the same heart consumed with self-centered comforts which Haggai...

11 For thus says the Lord concerning Shallum the son of Josiah, king of Judah, who reigned instead of Josiah his father, who went from this place: “He shall not return here anymore, 12 but he shall die in the place where they have led him captive, and shall see this land no more. Jeremiah 22:11-13, New King James Version "As Luther would say," reflects Mike Cosper in The Stories We Tell we are sinners AND saints all at once. We are image bearers and can’t help but cast off reflections of God‘s glory, as dim and pale as they may be." Jeremiah 22:11-13 presents an opportunity to come to terms with that. Josiah foreshadowed Christ in his zeal for the Lord's house and in his reverence for God's Word as the Temple excavations he insisted on actually rediscovered the book of Deuteronomy Jesus uses as His weapon of spiritual warfare in His great temptation in the desert. He certainly, in his turn, faithfully cast off a reflection of Christ's glory. Yet faith does n...

Weep not for the dead, nor bemoan him; Weep bitterly for him who goes away, For he shall return no more, Nor see his native country. Jeremiah 22:10,  New King James Version Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe write in Square Meal of the short memories housewives needed to feed families during the Depression, "Yesterday's worries are cleared away to make room for fresh ones." In Jeremiah 22:10, God is preparing Jeremiah with something like that perspective on his emotions which will well up in his country's crisis. He knows the intensity with which His weeping prophet feels. He heard Jeremiah on the brink of total despair in Jeremiah 9:1 when he said of his people's impending doom, "Oh, that my head were waters, And my eyes a fountain of tears, That I might weep day and night For the slain of the daughter of my people!" Thus, He knows that training Jeremiah in His likeness is largely a matter of training his tears, guiding him so that his strong feelings promp...

8 And many nations will pass by this city; and everyone will say to his neighbor, ‘Why has the Lord done so to this great city?’ 9 Then they will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God, and worshiped other gods and served them.’ ” "Unity in itself is neutral," scores Matthew Sink in his devotional in Galatians 4:20. "Whether it is good or bad depends on what binds people together. When people unify around the wrong beliefs or ideals, the result is negative." This tendency to reinforce the wrong conclusion even when life's most important questions the more often we hear our opinions echoed by our cultural cohort is, perhaps, while we get wide-angle shots like Jeremiah 22:8-9. Within our culture, even our church culture as Paul lamented in Galatians, we can acclimate to a cooling-off of the reverence Christ deserves. If we see the same experience in the life of the person in the next pew, and perhaps can suppose that we are a little...

6 For thus says the Lord to the house of the king of Judah: “You are Gilead to Me, The head of Lebanon; Yet I surely will make you a wilderness, Cities which are not inhabited. 7 I will prepare destroyers against you, Everyone with his weapons; They shall cut down your choice cedars And cast them into the fire. "At least down here, I know what we're chasing," reflects Todd Agnew in the song "If You Wanted," on the habit of chasing material prosperity as an end in itself. "It's hard to trust," he confesses by comparison, that Your dreams are so much better than mine." Then he turns his prayer to a pointed question, "If You wanted me to die to myself, why'd You make me full so deeply in love with life?" This is the predicament of prosperity presented by God Himself in Jeremiah 22:6-7. If we have any Bible in us at all, our binary sensibilities truncate wisdom to see money as the root of all evil. We begin to co-opt Plato as much as...

 4 For if you indeed do this thing, then shall enter the gates of this house, riding on horses and in chariots, accompanied by servants and people, kings who sit on the throne of David. 5 But if you will not hear these words, I swear by Myself,” says the Lord, “that this house shall become a desolation.” ’ ”Jeremiah 22:4-5, New King James Version Quoted in Gene Edward Veith's God at Work , Martin Luther internalizes the tenderizing impact of faith this way, "Faith creates rest, satisfaction, and peace, and dispels weariness." Luther then contrasts what those downstream from us experience from our faithlessness. "But where faith is lacking in man judges according to his own feelings, ideas, and perception, behold, weariness arises. Because he feels only his own misery and not that of his neighbor, he does not see his own privileges, nor how unfortunate his neighbor is. The result of this unsatisfied feeling is aversion, trouble and toil throughout life." We watch...

1 Thus says the Lord: “Go down to the house of the king of Judah, and there speak this word, 2 and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O king of Judah, you who sit on the throne of David, you and your servants and your people who enter these gates! 3 Thus says the Lord: “Execute judgment and righteousness, and deliver the plundered out of the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong and do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. Jeremiah 22: 1-3, New King James Version In the movie We Are Marshall , the school is devastated when almost all of the football team dies in an airplane crash. Seeking to recover, the athletic department wants an NCAA exception to field freshmen, against the rules at the time. When no response is forthcoming, the athletic director rallies in reasons, how many of us proposed marriage by mail? He then decides to show up in person and plead his case. Within issue more important than resuming football, God leads His...

13 “Behold, I am against you, O inhabitant of the valley, And rock of the plain,” says the Lord, “Who say, ‘Who shall come down against us? Or who shall enter our dwellings?’ 14 But I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings,” says the Lord; “I will kindle a fire in its forest, And it shall devour all things around it.” ’ ” Asking us to picture a rising kindergartner's claims on self-sufficiency, Jon Hauser admits our claim to "autonomy is really pretty humorous." Jeremiah 21:13-14 rails against the same pretensions, only the prophet is past laughing. He has labored chapter after chapter against exceptionalism. The people he warns against God's coming judgment, it seems, are even willing to use geography to justify to themselves that the most dire of his warnings won't apply to them. You and the valley, the Babylonians are coming for you, Jeremiah confronts specifically. You who think your stability is in your position on the plains, judgment still ap...

11 “And concerning the house of the king of Judah, say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, 12 O house of David! Thus says the Lord: “Execute judgment in the morning; And deliver him who is plundered Out of the hand of the oppressor, Lest My fury go forth like fire And burn so that no one can quench it, Because of the evil of your doings. "Kings would do well," admonishes Will Durant in Rousseau and Revolution , "to visit the peasant huts now and then and see the poverty that pays for the royal pomp." So concurs God's edict in Jeremiah 21:11-12. Judah's king has inquired of the prophet for purposes of state expediency. He would see his people spared the siege Jeremiah has foretold. Yet the king is unaware of the constraints already upon his people, the internal oppression which already goes on. He hasn't, as Durant would suspect, visited the peasant huts and submitted to the Lord's prompting to serve those at the bottom of society by defending t...

8 “Now you shall say to this people, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death. 9 He who remains in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but he who goes out and defects to the Chaldeans who besiege you, he shall live, and his life shall be as a prize to him. 10 For I have set My face against this city for adversity and not for good,” says the Lord. “It shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire.” ’ "We have lost a measure of freedom," announces Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his prison opus The Gulag Archipelago . "We have no means of telling where it begins and where it ends." WHERE is a word aptly chosen therefore double emphasis. We tend to associate freedom with a place, a situation. Here I'm free. Away from here, lacking the prerogatives of my station and unfamiliar with the customs elsewhere, I wouldn't be. My freedom is situational. We reco...

 6 I will strike the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast; they shall die of a great pestilence. 7 And afterward,” says the Lord, “I will deliver Zedekiah king of Judah, his servants and the people, and such as are left in this city from the pestilence and the sword and the famine, into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of those who seek their life; and he shall strike them with the edge of the sword. He shall not spare them, or have pity or mercy.” ’ In Witness , Whittaker Chambers writes of exposed Communist Alger Hiss and the impact of his downfall on his influential set, "His roots could not be disturbed without disturbing all roots on all sides of them." The same comprehensive phenomenon is described in Jeremiah 21:6-7. The society's roots, Jeremiah laments, are nestled in the wrong place. Communally, the people he has been ministering among no longer rely on the Lord. Their uprooting from this ...

3 Then Jeremiah said to them, “Thus you shall say to Zedekiah, 4 ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, with which you fight against the king of Babylon and the Chaldeans who besiege you outside the walls; and I will assemble them in the midst of this city. 5 I Myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger and fury and great wrath. "Bad baseball luck," dictates Roger Angell in Five Seasons , "can usually be nullified by perfect defense." Perhaps this tendency to presume the possibility of perfect defense nullifying "bad luck" is why God so explicitly addresses in Jeremiah 21:3-5 any hope Judah has in her national defense establishment. As the saying goes that generals usually fight the last war, God knows the human tendency to project outcomes based on the tools we have to address them. To that, He presents Himself as Personal and unstoppable opp...

 2 “Please inquire of the Lord for us, for Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon makes war against us. Perhaps the Lord will deal with us according to all His wonderful works, that the king may go away from us.” Jeremiah 21:2, was I "We often worship not Your true self," confesses a congregational prayer printed in the bulletin for a friend's church, "but Who we wish You to be. We too often ask You to bless what we do rather than seeking to do what You bless. Forgive us," it asks, "when our worship shapes You into what we want, instead of shaping us into what You want." This is the pragmatic shape of Pashhur's summoned awe. When Jeremiah in chapter 20 presented a boisterous, confrontational Word from the Lord in the Temple court, Pashhur didn't allow for wonder. If it wasn't in the order of service for which he was responsible, he wasn't willing to humbly search his character or the history of his people to allow for the possibility that God m...

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord when King Zedekiah sent to him Pashhur the son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah, the priest, saying, Jeremiah 21:1, New King James Version I just finished Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order 1919-33 . In it, two years from entering the tension-laden atmosphere of presidential politics himself and Pres. John F. Kennedy's side, Schlesinger traces the tension between president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and Pres. Herbert Hoover as the outgoing chief. "Even after the election, "Schlesinger writes of Hoover, "the president still had the aroma of battle on him." We might expect that to be Jeremiah's prevailing scent. This is a new chapter and a new scene, but the same Pashhur who put him in the stocks in the Temple court approaches. As Jeremiah is a man like we are, we can expect triggers of both intimidation and indignation. His endocrine system is surely preloaded with the same res...

14 Cursed be the day in which I was born! Let the day not be blessed in which my mother bore me! 15 Let the man be cursed Who brought news to my father, saying, “A male child has been born to you!” Making him very glad. 16 And let that man be like the cities Which the Lord overthrew, and did not relent; Let him hear the cry in the morning And the shouting at noon, 17 Because he did not kill me from the womb, That my mother might have been my grave, And her womb always enlarged with me. 18 Why did I come forth from the womb to see labor and sorrow, That my days should be consumed with shame? "Our base hearts," admits Thomas Watson in The Art of Contentment , "are more discontented at one loss than thankful for a hundred mercies." Perhaps this phenomenon of fallenness explains Jeremiah's spiritual cratering beginning in Jeremiah 20:14. Even in the stocks, he hasn't been restrained from reflecting on God sovereignly calling him. Even in the stocks, his heart ha...

Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord! For He has delivered the life of the poor From the hand of evildoers. Jeremiah 20:13, New King James Version "There are some men," decrees Kenneth Holden in The Making of the Great Communicator as he describes a car salesman, "impressive personalities – who can make you see the sunny side of a simple transaction." For a beat, anyway, Jeremiah is able to wait in that spirit. He can't transact. He is in the stocks or following the Lord's call to proclaim in the Temple. Emboldened in faith in the ramp-up of the previous verses, he is calling for the Lord to not only frustrates the schemes of his opposition, but to sweep the field of them while Jeremiah is watching. The way the prophet feeds that faith, though, in Jeremiah 20:13 is instructive. The same revolutionary power which Jeremiah proclaims is able to deliver him from religious and societal power in the wrong hands, that power has already demonstrated an ability to deli...

11 But the Lord is with me as a mighty, awesome One. Therefore my persecutors will stumble, and will not prevail. They will be greatly ashamed, for they will not prosper. Their everlasting confusion will never be forgotten. 12 But, O Lord of hosts, You who test the righteous, And see the mind and heart, Let me see Your vengeance on them; For I have pleaded my cause before You. "For the first few years of his life," compares Glen Weldon in Superman: The Unauthorized Biography , on the hero's being matched against petty criminals, "Superman was the ballistic missile brought to a knife fight." That is Jeremiah's realization and argument as Jeremiah 20:11-12 unfolds. He pivots from admitting in the previous verse that men's words hurt. He salves those scrapes with the unction of his calling, but he renders them truly light and momentary with his turn toward theology. What are men's side swiping jibes compared to the mighty, awesome One Who hears Jeremiah...

7 O Lord, You induced me, and I was persuaded; You are stronger than I, and have prevailed. I am in derision daily; Everyone mocks me. 8 For when I spoke, I cried out; I shouted, “Violence and plunder!” Because the word of the Lord was made to me A reproach and a derision daily. 9 Then I said, “I will not make mention of Him, Nor speak anymore in His name.” But His word was in my heart like a burning fire Shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it back, And I could not. 10 For I heard many mocking: “Fear on every side!” “Report,” they say, “and we will report it!” All my acquaintances watched for my stumbling, saying, “Perhaps he can be induced; Then we will prevail against him, And we will take our revenge on him.” The splendid fanfiction of Paradise Regained is John Milton's narrative handbook for spiritual warfare. As it unfolds, Satan is buffeting Christ with the suggestion that He is lost as He has been driven by the Spirit into the wilderness. Christ's retort which M...

 4 For thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends; and they shall fall by the sword of their enemies, and your eyes shall see it. I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them captive to Babylon and slay them with the sword. 5 Moreover I will deliver all the wealth of this city, all its produce, and all its precious things; all the treasures of the kings of Judah I will give into the hand of their enemies, who will plunder them, seize them, and carry them to Babylon. 6 And you, Pashhur, and all who dwell in your house, shall go into captivity. You shall go to Babylon, and there you shall die, and be buried there, you and all your friends, to whom you have prophesied lies.’ ” A contemporary observed of Robert Taft in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s A Life in the 20th Century of Sen. Taft's, “Donald Duck resistance to new ideas“: “He has the best mind in Washington, until he makes it up.” Our feathered...

And it happened on the next day that Pashhur brought Jeremiah out of the stocks. Then Jeremiah said to him, “The Lord has not called your name Pashhur, but Magor-Missabib. Jeremiah 20:3, New King James Version “Lord, my anger is indeed unlike yours," confesses Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus . "May your Spirit purify me so my anger is not triggered by my hurt ego as much as by real injustice and evil, and so that it does not remain in me to harden and poison my joy but readily gives way to compassion."  Our plea for this intervention is all the more earnest when we see the inverse process in Jeremiah 20:3. We are perhaps disadvantaged by dramatic irony as we consider Pashhur in the run-up to this verse. We know the rotten culture which positioned him in spiritual authority, and if we have read this section of Scripture before, we know his fate. Therefore, reading backward, we are less likely to be convicted by his plight. Pause and reconsider more broadly. There is a place ...

Now Pashhur the son of Immer, the priest who was also chief governor in the house of the Lord, heard that Jeremiah prophesied these things. 2 Then Pashhur struck Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the Lord. "Perhaps some of the Puritanic fathers may have gone too far," Spurgeon allows in his sermon "Turn or Burn," and have given too great a prominence to the terrors of the Lord in their ministry: but the age in which we live has sought to forget those terrors altogether, and if we dare to tell men that God will punish them for their sins, it is charged upon us that want to bully them into religion, and if we faithfully and honestly tell our hearers that sin must bring after it certain destruction, it is said that we are attempting to frighten them into goodness." Jeremiah 20:1-2, though, shows Spurgeon's age was not the first to depend overmuch on the temperament of established m...