Jeremiah 19:7-9 – My Consumable Community

7 And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this place, and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their enemies and by the hands of those who seek their lives; their corpses I will give as meat for the birds of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth. 8 I will make this city desolate and a hissing; everyone who passes by it will be astonished and hiss because of all its plagues. 9 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and everyone shall eat the flesh of his friend in the siege and in the desperation with which their enemies and those who seek their lives shall drive them to despair.” ’

Projects Edmund Burke in Greg Weiner's Old Whigs, “The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable.”

That's why Screwtape's sleight-of-hand in CS Lewis's fictional demonic correspondence is so crucial if the God-given, confrontational grace of community is to disintegrate. He wants the confrontational crank, the contrarian counsel, forgotten as soon as possible.

Spouts Screwtape, referring to the patient whose demise he and his nephew are engineering, "You must bring him to a condition," Screwtape , "in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the  same house with him or worked in the same office."

The merciful confrontations in which God so often uses others to slow our blind conformity to the world's ways is what renders Jeremiah 19:7-9 so heartbreaking. His prophets may weep. They may, as we have often seen with Jeremiah, become discouraged and impatient. So may our mentors.

Yet any efficacy such frail vessels experience is specifically by His dictate. When He so decides, as in Jeremiah 19:7, the wise counsel He has seen fit to intersperse with a culture's foolish and malicious discourse is voided, drowned out.

Note what happens next. If I'm free, or rather enslaved, to ignore the Truth in my interactions with others, they become food to me. If I lose any degree of reverence for the possibility that God may be speaking through one of His image-bearers to an aspect of His expectations for my life, I will use and consume them for the degree to which they can further me on what I think is my self-determined course.

When I stop truly listening, when I lose the God-given skepticism that I might be wrong, I sift through what other people offer me for what reinforces my rightness. They serve solely for how they can strengthen me in the crudest sense. Friends who might have once delivered the wounds of correction Proverbs calls blessed are now food.

This spiritual cannibalism carries through from generation to generation, as Jeremiah 19:9 gruesomely pictures. God's mercy is so irrepressible that He says it is new every morning. It is so irrepressible that He speaks through the newness of birth as one biblical deliver after another is born distinctly to illuminate a dark cultural status quo.

By that grace, a child can lead toward repentance. A child, in the cadence of Deuteronomy, is the one asking the questions, prompting the explanations, perpetually renewing his or her culture because new eyes take even old ones back to the root need for the grace of God.

But this renewal is not automatic. God shows Jeremiah that without God's check on the coarsening of men's hearts, they will consume their own children rather than have repentance, renewal, and hope quickened by them. They too become merely fuel to keep the fires to the current Idol burning.

As God removes His hand and people are less and less able to conceive of alternatives to their own slavishness, they speed the hopelessness of this position by closing themselves off to the very people who might ask the right questions.

And so our fate would spiral downward if not for God's plan to use these very tendencies against us. In Christ, He pushed us the way Jeremiah 19:7-9 shows centuries of our cultural deadweight leans. Overlook the infant as anything more than mere material? Okay. By this, Christ as Incarnation comes.

Gain centuries of practice ignoring the prophets and then killing them? Okay. By this very coarseness and conformity, what we intended for evil, God used for good, oh so good! By Christ's stripes, we were healed. By His death at our hands and unstoppable Resurrection, the awful curse of Jeremiah 19:7-9 was broken for His elect.

With the Holy Spirit indwelling us as an aspect of Christ's righteousness, then, we can then weigh the counsel of the craziest person in our lives. We need not foreclose its impact because by it we fear condemnation. We are already righteous in Christ. He may use WHOM He will and what He will to refine His own.

Bring babies, and baby Christians, into our lives with all their needs and their lack of self-consciousness? By these, He may teach us to serve, and also not to despise wisdom because it comes from the young. In Him, then, we can receive on all channels and REJOICE!