Jeremiah 19:10-13 – Not Other People's Gospel
10 “Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, 11 and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: “Even so I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, which cannot be made whole again; and they shall bury them in Tophet till there is no place to bury. 12 Thus I will do to this place,” says the Lord, “and to its inhabitants, and make this city like Tophet. 13 And the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah shall be defiled like the place of Tophet, because of all the houses on whose roofs they have burned incense to all the host of heaven, and poured out drink offerings to other gods.” ’ ”
During the pandemic, "Were All in This Together," has become a rallying cry. Celebrities take it up, using their influence to remind us of our mutual vulnerability. However, a cartoon I came across pivoted interestingly. It spelled out the slogan – using celebrity yachts safely distant in the Atlantic Ocean.
Jeremiah 19:10-13 attempts to breach that sense of distance and insulation from real danger. Jeremiah is talking to the equivalent of the yachting class of his day. They are used to, "We are all in this together," being a quaint metaphor as they deliver warnings for other people. Jeremiah speaks to them directly.
To a leadership class accustomed to thinking in terms of relative prosperity and comfort, to the equivalent of normal ups and downs in investment portfolio, he is called to shake them to think in terms of complete collapse. In this effort, he breaks a flask to give them a picture of irreparable damage. Then he is to bring that message directly society's elite again, specifically targeting the houses of the kings of Judah.
What flasks has the Lord broken in your sight and in your hearing, that Gospel confrontation and application would be brought home to your heart? We are awash in education and information. Even in the 1980s when this flood was at a relative trickle, Neil Postman in Entertaining Ourselves to Death pointed out the danger of a kind of vague interest in information we don't act on. We become desensitized, he feared, to what really calls for action. The real grist of life becomes background noise.
Thus God in His confrontational grace sends singular figures like Jeremiah into our lives. They call out to us in particular, or, as in Jeremiah 19, a small group, a demographic slice, a targeted impact. God's message is delivered in a way that clearly isn't the same old shtick, the Word, as NT Wright put it, as verbal wallpaper. The THIS we are in together is the brokenness of guilt before the Lord, and Humpty Dumpty stands a better chance of being put back together by all the king's horses and all the king's men than we do a being made whole by human effort.
It could be that the flask has been broken, that the singular figure has been sent, that TODAY is the day of salvation, the day of, from a human perspective, choosing between filing this as another message for other people and taking it home to ourselves.
Even where we have believed in general, relied on faith in Christ's righteousness, for our eternal destination, aren't there still areas where He breaks the flask, reminding us that He wants ALL that we are, every relationship as demonstrated in His deployment of Jeremiah?
We may not have relational capital with Oprah that would make a confrontational outreach meaningful. But we do, on reflection, have the equivalent within our social sphere. We have those too respected, too useful, too intimidating to break the flask in front of them and risk the relationship in order to bring their attention once and for all to their soul's peril, or so we think.
Who, then, is our soul's hope? Do we trust in man whose help we can leverage in the day of trouble, or at last in Christ Who says bluntly that if we deny Him before men He will deny us before His Father.
His is our every relationship. His is our every means of persuasion. His is the real, genuine, total glory only hinted at in those who intimidate us or elicit our admiration. May we sense His Jeremiah 19 call to lay those relationships on His alter, to put our flasks at His disposal, that all we are might convey Him unmistakably from the least to the greatest.
During the pandemic, "Were All in This Together," has become a rallying cry. Celebrities take it up, using their influence to remind us of our mutual vulnerability. However, a cartoon I came across pivoted interestingly. It spelled out the slogan – using celebrity yachts safely distant in the Atlantic Ocean.
Jeremiah 19:10-13 attempts to breach that sense of distance and insulation from real danger. Jeremiah is talking to the equivalent of the yachting class of his day. They are used to, "We are all in this together," being a quaint metaphor as they deliver warnings for other people. Jeremiah speaks to them directly.
To a leadership class accustomed to thinking in terms of relative prosperity and comfort, to the equivalent of normal ups and downs in investment portfolio, he is called to shake them to think in terms of complete collapse. In this effort, he breaks a flask to give them a picture of irreparable damage. Then he is to bring that message directly society's elite again, specifically targeting the houses of the kings of Judah.
What flasks has the Lord broken in your sight and in your hearing, that Gospel confrontation and application would be brought home to your heart? We are awash in education and information. Even in the 1980s when this flood was at a relative trickle, Neil Postman in Entertaining Ourselves to Death pointed out the danger of a kind of vague interest in information we don't act on. We become desensitized, he feared, to what really calls for action. The real grist of life becomes background noise.
Thus God in His confrontational grace sends singular figures like Jeremiah into our lives. They call out to us in particular, or, as in Jeremiah 19, a small group, a demographic slice, a targeted impact. God's message is delivered in a way that clearly isn't the same old shtick, the Word, as NT Wright put it, as verbal wallpaper. The THIS we are in together is the brokenness of guilt before the Lord, and Humpty Dumpty stands a better chance of being put back together by all the king's horses and all the king's men than we do a being made whole by human effort.
It could be that the flask has been broken, that the singular figure has been sent, that TODAY is the day of salvation, the day of, from a human perspective, choosing between filing this as another message for other people and taking it home to ourselves.
Even where we have believed in general, relied on faith in Christ's righteousness, for our eternal destination, aren't there still areas where He breaks the flask, reminding us that He wants ALL that we are, every relationship as demonstrated in His deployment of Jeremiah?
We may not have relational capital with Oprah that would make a confrontational outreach meaningful. But we do, on reflection, have the equivalent within our social sphere. We have those too respected, too useful, too intimidating to break the flask in front of them and risk the relationship in order to bring their attention once and for all to their soul's peril, or so we think.
Who, then, is our soul's hope? Do we trust in man whose help we can leverage in the day of trouble, or at last in Christ Who says bluntly that if we deny Him before men He will deny us before His Father.
His is our every relationship. His is our every means of persuasion. His is the real, genuine, total glory only hinted at in those who intimidate us or elicit our admiration. May we sense His Jeremiah 19 call to lay those relationships on His alter, to put our flasks at His disposal, that all we are might convey Him unmistakably from the least to the greatest.
As you relate the breaking of this flask to God's intentions to bring us to the place of abandoning our pretense, it draws to mind the flask of perfume that was broken over Christ in anointing him for burial in Mark 14. As this woman sacrificed willingly to prepare our only hope for burial, we are connected with this story. God instructed Jeremiah to break the flask to show the leaders how they would be scattered. Yet he, in Christ, gives us opportunity to sacrifice the retention of this flask in our life for his use and greatness. Undoubtedly, this plays out differently in the life of every person but it demonstrates God's leading to surrender that which we hold dear for "his disposal."
ReplyDeleteNicely connected. The stand-there-and-be-wrong part is powerful and we need that, but the drawback to the Gospel you made is sweet.
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