Jeremiah 18:23 – Yet, But Not Yet
Yet, Lord, You know all their counsel
Which is against me, to slay me.
Provide no atonement for their iniquity,
Nor blot out their sin from Your sight;
But let them be overthrown before You.
Deal thus with them
In the time of Your anger.
Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus admits it. "Lord, how poorly I pray! Either I pray vaguely and halfheartedly or I pray heatedly, accusingly telling you exactly what you HAVE to do. Teach me to pray with discipline and passion and yet also contentment with your love and will."
The taught discipline is more effective, more encouraging, if we see someone else struggle with it, preferably someone whose preeminence we respect. Thus, Jeremiah 18:23 is a stop action gift. Jeremiah's heat is as glowering as Keller's, and ours. Jeremiah's anger is as consuming as his empathy once was. Staggering beneath it, as Keller predicts is the way of the human heart, he is telling God exactly what to do.
And yet, there is the word yet. Just barely, by grace, the prophet can see over the top of the load he carries. Even as he directs God's firepower, Jeremiah admits to God's omniscience. Allowing for the possibility that a few seconds of sound theology is his quarter inserted in the divine payphone so he can continue his rant, knowing that God is faithful to finish the work He started in Jeremiah, in retrospect we can also see the seeds of patient, prayerful perspective beginning to take root, or in his case to take root again.
In us as Jeremiah's heirs, our hotter, more earthbound concerns may well, at any given moment, outnumber and out-shout the allowances we make for faith, the micro-moments we rest in theology. Yet, as James allows in the negative, the small rudder steers the great ship. The small spark starts the great conflagration.
As we lay our hearts before God, anger and all, Christ is our Advocate. The Holy Spirit is our Translator. Seconds of our spiel may maintain the biblical perspective, yet these are preserved pristine. Our prayers, says Revelation of a time when God's people are persecuted and praying for retribution, are preserved as incense.
The same Divine patience, then, can do its work in how we proceed and perceive through the blaze of someone else's anger. Christ is our fire suit. From the perspective of our eternal identity and security, the hottest of their anger cannot hurt us, even if some of our behaviors are targeted by it. We can listen for the yet. We can listen for the intact desire behind the disappointment, the valor behind the volume, the heart hope held out beneath the hollering.
Where they seek justice, restitution, retribution, they seek, knowingly or not, the God of those things. They long for His verdict more lasting than that of earthly powers strutting and fretting in their hour across Earth's stage.
Can we stand in long enough to await our ordained moment to pivot to hope? Can we be refreshed enough by our persistent hope in Christ and by His faithfulness in our last rant, to calmly and coolly let the heat of someone else's anger blow over us. Yet is coming. Yet will last.
Which is against me, to slay me.
Provide no atonement for their iniquity,
Nor blot out their sin from Your sight;
But let them be overthrown before You.
Deal thus with them
In the time of Your anger.
Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus admits it. "Lord, how poorly I pray! Either I pray vaguely and halfheartedly or I pray heatedly, accusingly telling you exactly what you HAVE to do. Teach me to pray with discipline and passion and yet also contentment with your love and will."
The taught discipline is more effective, more encouraging, if we see someone else struggle with it, preferably someone whose preeminence we respect. Thus, Jeremiah 18:23 is a stop action gift. Jeremiah's heat is as glowering as Keller's, and ours. Jeremiah's anger is as consuming as his empathy once was. Staggering beneath it, as Keller predicts is the way of the human heart, he is telling God exactly what to do.
And yet, there is the word yet. Just barely, by grace, the prophet can see over the top of the load he carries. Even as he directs God's firepower, Jeremiah admits to God's omniscience. Allowing for the possibility that a few seconds of sound theology is his quarter inserted in the divine payphone so he can continue his rant, knowing that God is faithful to finish the work He started in Jeremiah, in retrospect we can also see the seeds of patient, prayerful perspective beginning to take root, or in his case to take root again.
In us as Jeremiah's heirs, our hotter, more earthbound concerns may well, at any given moment, outnumber and out-shout the allowances we make for faith, the micro-moments we rest in theology. Yet, as James allows in the negative, the small rudder steers the great ship. The small spark starts the great conflagration.
As we lay our hearts before God, anger and all, Christ is our Advocate. The Holy Spirit is our Translator. Seconds of our spiel may maintain the biblical perspective, yet these are preserved pristine. Our prayers, says Revelation of a time when God's people are persecuted and praying for retribution, are preserved as incense.
The same Divine patience, then, can do its work in how we proceed and perceive through the blaze of someone else's anger. Christ is our fire suit. From the perspective of our eternal identity and security, the hottest of their anger cannot hurt us, even if some of our behaviors are targeted by it. We can listen for the yet. We can listen for the intact desire behind the disappointment, the valor behind the volume, the heart hope held out beneath the hollering.
Where they seek justice, restitution, retribution, they seek, knowingly or not, the God of those things. They long for His verdict more lasting than that of earthly powers strutting and fretting in their hour across Earth's stage.
Can we stand in long enough to await our ordained moment to pivot to hope? Can we be refreshed enough by our persistent hope in Christ and by His faithfulness in our last rant, to calmly and coolly let the heat of someone else's anger blow over us. Yet is coming. Yet will last.
I love the way you framed out this concept. The tension of the Christian "yet" and the "now" of the world is palpable. We struggle under and through, at times loving the one and hating the other before switching our stance, albeit briefly. In the end, every person on earth understands the inequity and imbalance of the world and holds a deep craving for a savior figure to rectify all 'those things and people out there' that seem amiss. In Christ, however, we understand that while God will rectify all things, He chose to start with us and not them. He has made us divine key holders of a mysterious union, the downpayment of reconciliation to a desperate world.
ReplyDeleteSo we live on the edge, set out against ourselves. We constantly zoom our perspective on the present v. eternity, the divine v. worldly, and grace v. retribution. In the end, we align ourselves with Jeremiah under the shelter of the wings of the Almighty and the counsel of his will that works all things (Eph. 1:11) together for his glory, even our dichotomous minds.