Jeremiah 19:14-15 – Bringing Confrontation Near
14 Then Jeremiah came from Tophet, where the Lord had sent him to prophesy; and he stood in the court of the Lord’s house and said to all the people, 15 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Behold, I will bring on this city and on all her towns all the doom that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their necks that they might not hear My words.’ ”
"The kiss of outward profession is very cheap and easy," dismisses Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon, "but the practical cleaving to the Lord, which must show itself in holy decision for truth and holiness, is not so small a matter."
This distinction draws Jeremiah to continue his confrontational mission in Jeremiah 19:14-15. He has been at life's gates, at the point of decision in the busyness of our days. He has spoken to the rich and the powerful, whom we could easily see being sullied and distracted by worldly concerns.
Now, though, the business of the Lord draws him on that same perseverating, purifying errand to the Temple, by name the Lord's house. His work continues even there, where the kiss of outward profession before fellow congregants between clucks at what goes on in the outside world is the substitute shibboleth.
Would we plant our feet in the most revered locales and routines, dismiss the possibility of the Lord's work among those who do not do so, and THEN not listen to the very Word we say we came for? This is the just condemnation of Jeremiah 19:14-15. Our eyes pointed upward in respectable piety, it seems, will still be supported by stiff necks of self-will – but for the Lord's specific intervention.
Ears that have received God's Word well enough to quote it in disapproval at what goes on outside of the equivalent of the Temple in our lives are deaf to its actual appraisal of our hearts. God's living, penetrating Word has become an extension of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, pretty and all-purpose, all-purpose except for humbling the hearer to contrition. Man looks on the outside, the calendar, the full plate, and pew, and devotional notebook and is satisfied. God looks on the heart, and His verdict echoes on emptiness.
Yet, the humble remnant rises still from such unpromising soil of religious culture, pruned and cultivated by the very severe justice of God's Jeremiah 19:14-15 verdict. By that strict grace, we learn where we, as Richard Rohr in Falling Upward phrases it, once defended signposts but have now arrived by grace where the sign is pointing.
Purely by God's Personal, sovereign pursuit, we have arrived at real relationship which will not be satiated by the mere hearing of the Word, only by His intimate empowering of its enacting in our lives.
In this repentant, regenerate state, the devil is not still. He inflames the recovering alcoholic's loud indignation at the barroom scene. He goads us, former practiced hypocrites, to a perpetual scold toward God's people assembled because there are hypocrites among them.
We would, in such a state, insist that He take the Temple's inhabitants along the same road to repentance He took us, forgetting how long He tarried and how gently He led between those especially confrontational moments like Jeremiah 19:14-15.
We are locked into a scolding posture because, as Spurgeon admits in Morning and Evening, "It is far easier to fight with sin in public men to pray against it in private." But, alas, He Who freed us from the hypnosis of hypocrisy can free us from the addiction to indignation.
He is the Better Jeremiah in the very courtyard of our heart's Temple, alike calling for sincere worship from every corner and showing Himself lovely to make that both possible and pleasant to our parched souls.
"The kiss of outward profession is very cheap and easy," dismisses Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon, "but the practical cleaving to the Lord, which must show itself in holy decision for truth and holiness, is not so small a matter."
This distinction draws Jeremiah to continue his confrontational mission in Jeremiah 19:14-15. He has been at life's gates, at the point of decision in the busyness of our days. He has spoken to the rich and the powerful, whom we could easily see being sullied and distracted by worldly concerns.
Now, though, the business of the Lord draws him on that same perseverating, purifying errand to the Temple, by name the Lord's house. His work continues even there, where the kiss of outward profession before fellow congregants between clucks at what goes on in the outside world is the substitute shibboleth.
Would we plant our feet in the most revered locales and routines, dismiss the possibility of the Lord's work among those who do not do so, and THEN not listen to the very Word we say we came for? This is the just condemnation of Jeremiah 19:14-15. Our eyes pointed upward in respectable piety, it seems, will still be supported by stiff necks of self-will – but for the Lord's specific intervention.
Ears that have received God's Word well enough to quote it in disapproval at what goes on outside of the equivalent of the Temple in our lives are deaf to its actual appraisal of our hearts. God's living, penetrating Word has become an extension of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, pretty and all-purpose, all-purpose except for humbling the hearer to contrition. Man looks on the outside, the calendar, the full plate, and pew, and devotional notebook and is satisfied. God looks on the heart, and His verdict echoes on emptiness.
Yet, the humble remnant rises still from such unpromising soil of religious culture, pruned and cultivated by the very severe justice of God's Jeremiah 19:14-15 verdict. By that strict grace, we learn where we, as Richard Rohr in Falling Upward phrases it, once defended signposts but have now arrived by grace where the sign is pointing.
Purely by God's Personal, sovereign pursuit, we have arrived at real relationship which will not be satiated by the mere hearing of the Word, only by His intimate empowering of its enacting in our lives.
In this repentant, regenerate state, the devil is not still. He inflames the recovering alcoholic's loud indignation at the barroom scene. He goads us, former practiced hypocrites, to a perpetual scold toward God's people assembled because there are hypocrites among them.
We would, in such a state, insist that He take the Temple's inhabitants along the same road to repentance He took us, forgetting how long He tarried and how gently He led between those especially confrontational moments like Jeremiah 19:14-15.
We are locked into a scolding posture because, as Spurgeon admits in Morning and Evening, "It is far easier to fight with sin in public men to pray against it in private." But, alas, He Who freed us from the hypnosis of hypocrisy can free us from the addiction to indignation.
He is the Better Jeremiah in the very courtyard of our heart's Temple, alike calling for sincere worship from every corner and showing Himself lovely to make that both possible and pleasant to our parched souls.
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