Jeremiah 19:1-2 – Obedience as Cooling Off
Thus says the Lord: “Go and get a potter’s earthen flask, and take some of the elders of the people and some of the elders of the priests. 2 And go out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the Potsherd Gate; and proclaim there the words that I will tell you, Jeremiah 19:1-2, New King James Version
"The first way to help an angry person," suggests Tim Keller in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life, "is to surround them with non-angry speech."
On cue, the Lord does just that in the transition between Jeremiah 18 and 19. He has allowed Jeremiah to see behind the veil, to begin to understand His ways. Thus, Jeremiah is especially fixed by men's indifference to the spiritual realities Jeremiah is beginning to understand – especially when their indifference threatens his sense of identity and importance as God's prophet. When men don't see what Jeremiah sees, and, worse, when they threatened to help obscure it and render him forgettable, he is very angry.
God's remedy, then, is to turn the page, to move to the next chapter. The wrath of man, He knows and says, does not accomplish the righteousness of God. Obedience to God's next move means to Jeremiah must dig deeper, must renew himself in the Lord as David did when faced with mutiny, and must lead in spite of his feelings.
God gives him different people to address, elders and priests. He grants him a different setting. As God's mercies are new every morning, so, as Winston Churchill says, a change is as good as a rest – when we perceive God as the Giver of that change.
To open one's hand and accept that gift of newness, to move one's feet toward new horizons as God leads, takes face. Dug in and rejected, we want to win where we are. We are at least as likely as Jeremiah to take rejection personally and to measure the metric of success as overcoming it on the spot.
God's plan is bigger. When Jesus taught directly, He prepared His guys for rejection at particular places and times in advance. Train your minds and bodies, He taught them, to move on. He gave them a gesture to trigger that faith-filled renewal when he told them to wipe the dust of a rejecting village off their feet. There are more to reach, He said.
Are you thwarted at a particular spot, in a particular objective? Has the scuttlebutt around you worked its way into your soul, producing a kind of infected inflammation? Perhaps, then, your indignation is battling to out-shout the quiet leading of the Lord. Perhaps in following Him, and starting anew in Him Who reigns from setting to setting, He will grant you an audience with opinion-shapers, the elders and the priests, as it were, in a different place. Perhaps the testimony He has been working in you, rejected heretofore, was being readied to be heard elsewhere.
Do we have the faith to ask, to invite, even to entice, without carrying over the grudges from our previous rejections? We do if we see ourselves in relation to Christ's long-suffering love. We rejected Him as vehemently as Peter, as treacherously as Judas.
The only reason we still hear and walk with Him is because of HIS faithfulness. We could be on the other side, religious likely elders and the priests of Jeremiah 19:1-2, yet not perceiving the Gospel. As we convey God's message, He continues to preach His claiming and transforming call to our souls.
"The first way to help an angry person," suggests Tim Keller in God's Wisdom for Navigating Life, "is to surround them with non-angry speech."
On cue, the Lord does just that in the transition between Jeremiah 18 and 19. He has allowed Jeremiah to see behind the veil, to begin to understand His ways. Thus, Jeremiah is especially fixed by men's indifference to the spiritual realities Jeremiah is beginning to understand – especially when their indifference threatens his sense of identity and importance as God's prophet. When men don't see what Jeremiah sees, and, worse, when they threatened to help obscure it and render him forgettable, he is very angry.
God's remedy, then, is to turn the page, to move to the next chapter. The wrath of man, He knows and says, does not accomplish the righteousness of God. Obedience to God's next move means to Jeremiah must dig deeper, must renew himself in the Lord as David did when faced with mutiny, and must lead in spite of his feelings.
God gives him different people to address, elders and priests. He grants him a different setting. As God's mercies are new every morning, so, as Winston Churchill says, a change is as good as a rest – when we perceive God as the Giver of that change.
To open one's hand and accept that gift of newness, to move one's feet toward new horizons as God leads, takes face. Dug in and rejected, we want to win where we are. We are at least as likely as Jeremiah to take rejection personally and to measure the metric of success as overcoming it on the spot.
God's plan is bigger. When Jesus taught directly, He prepared His guys for rejection at particular places and times in advance. Train your minds and bodies, He taught them, to move on. He gave them a gesture to trigger that faith-filled renewal when he told them to wipe the dust of a rejecting village off their feet. There are more to reach, He said.
Are you thwarted at a particular spot, in a particular objective? Has the scuttlebutt around you worked its way into your soul, producing a kind of infected inflammation? Perhaps, then, your indignation is battling to out-shout the quiet leading of the Lord. Perhaps in following Him, and starting anew in Him Who reigns from setting to setting, He will grant you an audience with opinion-shapers, the elders and the priests, as it were, in a different place. Perhaps the testimony He has been working in you, rejected heretofore, was being readied to be heard elsewhere.
Do we have the faith to ask, to invite, even to entice, without carrying over the grudges from our previous rejections? We do if we see ourselves in relation to Christ's long-suffering love. We rejected Him as vehemently as Peter, as treacherously as Judas.
The only reason we still hear and walk with Him is because of HIS faithfulness. We could be on the other side, religious likely elders and the priests of Jeremiah 19:1-2, yet not perceiving the Gospel. As we convey God's message, He continues to preach His claiming and transforming call to our souls.
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