Jeremiah 21:3-5 – No Excuses
3 Then Jeremiah said to them, “Thus you shall say to Zedekiah, 4 ‘Thus says the Lord God of Israel: “Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that are in your hands, with which you fight against the king of Babylon and the Chaldeans who besiege you outside the walls; and I will assemble them in the midst of this city. 5 I Myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm, even in anger and fury and great wrath.
"Bad baseball luck," dictates Roger Angell in Five Seasons, "can usually be nullified by perfect defense."
Perhaps this tendency to presume the possibility of perfect defense nullifying "bad luck" is why God so explicitly addresses in Jeremiah 21:3-5 any hope Judah has in her national defense establishment. As the saying goes that generals usually fight the last war, God knows the human tendency to project outcomes based on the tools we have to address them.
To that, He presents Himself as Personal and unstoppable opposition. He will remove the weapons, the tools, the technology we use to project hope outside of him.
Will S. Hilton in The Atlantic gives an alternate picture of human vulnerability to the one in our vain imagination. Measures a person just 66 feet beneath the ocean‘s surface is under twice as much pressure as someone on land. A vehicle operating on the ocean floor is under 2,000,000 pounds of pressure.
Our sense of efficacy, then, of ability to defend ourselves, is only possible within a narrow range of conditions God grants by His grace and mercy. This is His Providence to remove. When He so dictates, as in Jeremiah 21:3-5, that sense of security is gone.
Better for us, then, to lay our weapons down, to lay our tools down, to lay ourselves down His altar preemptively. As living sacrifices, we can admit our helplessness and hopelessness without Him. We can confess our tendency to hope in the latest gadget and to project vulnerability based on the last situation we vainly suppose we were able to overcome.
We can admit our direct accountability to Him with no intervening excuses. We can admit our readiness for cold calculation based on prideful presumptions, and our inveterate readiness to forget the comprehensive nature of His wrath simply because He has restrained it for so long.
As when He fights, anyone in anything He fights against will be ineffective, we can, alternately, rejoice in being on His side. In that posture, it isn't the weapons in our hands in which we have confidence, even the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith. It is God Who renders these effective. He is the fixation of our faith, and the giver of His Spirit by the finished work of Christ.
"Bad baseball luck," dictates Roger Angell in Five Seasons, "can usually be nullified by perfect defense."
Perhaps this tendency to presume the possibility of perfect defense nullifying "bad luck" is why God so explicitly addresses in Jeremiah 21:3-5 any hope Judah has in her national defense establishment. As the saying goes that generals usually fight the last war, God knows the human tendency to project outcomes based on the tools we have to address them.
To that, He presents Himself as Personal and unstoppable opposition. He will remove the weapons, the tools, the technology we use to project hope outside of him.
Will S. Hilton in The Atlantic gives an alternate picture of human vulnerability to the one in our vain imagination. Measures a person just 66 feet beneath the ocean‘s surface is under twice as much pressure as someone on land. A vehicle operating on the ocean floor is under 2,000,000 pounds of pressure.
Our sense of efficacy, then, of ability to defend ourselves, is only possible within a narrow range of conditions God grants by His grace and mercy. This is His Providence to remove. When He so dictates, as in Jeremiah 21:3-5, that sense of security is gone.
Better for us, then, to lay our weapons down, to lay our tools down, to lay ourselves down His altar preemptively. As living sacrifices, we can admit our helplessness and hopelessness without Him. We can confess our tendency to hope in the latest gadget and to project vulnerability based on the last situation we vainly suppose we were able to overcome.
We can admit our direct accountability to Him with no intervening excuses. We can admit our readiness for cold calculation based on prideful presumptions, and our inveterate readiness to forget the comprehensive nature of His wrath simply because He has restrained it for so long.
As when He fights, anyone in anything He fights against will be ineffective, we can, alternately, rejoice in being on His side. In that posture, it isn't the weapons in our hands in which we have confidence, even the sword of the Spirit and the shield of faith. It is God Who renders these effective. He is the fixation of our faith, and the giver of His Spirit by the finished work of Christ.
Isn't it just like humans to take a general, good thing that God creates and make it corrupt? God created food; we overeat. God created sex; we ignite passions in every area we can. Here, God created a system of reaping and sowing; we make it prescriptive of how things MUST work. Back in Jeremiah 9 God instructed people to not boast in wisdom, strength, or wealth. Here, Zedekiah attempts to utilize all three to defeat the king of Babylon and turn back God's prophecy on its head. If he sows properly, then he will reap according. But God asserts his sovereignty over everything that exists in all time by assuring the validity of his prophecy about Jerusalem's downfall. I pray that I would be found to be on the side of gratefulness towards God sovereignty in all things rather than hunkering down against his will, ready to fight by my own wisdom, strength, or wealth.
ReplyDeleteGood thoughts. And check out the context of the passage you referred to in Jeremiah 9. It was eye-opening when you went through it. He is describing the same breakdown he is bringing in Jeremiah 21, and there in the middle of it, He talks about not glorying in strength and wisdom.
DeleteAt the time I thought on, and still think on, the tendency of those who are spared the worst and most immediate consequences for our sin to start constructing reasons why, to assume we are the righteous remnant, and to harden our pride rather than double down on self-examination and repentance.
Thanks always for stopping by and discussing. It is one of the highlights of my day.