Jeremiah 21:8-10 – Christ's Moving Mercies
8 “Now you shall say to this people, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death. 9 He who remains in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence; but he who goes out and defects to the Chaldeans who besiege you, he shall live, and his life shall be as a prize to him. 10 For I have set My face against this city for adversity and not for good,” says the Lord. “It shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire.” ’
"We have lost a measure of freedom," announces Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his prison opus The Gulag Archipelago. "We have no means of telling where it begins and where it ends."
WHERE is a word aptly chosen therefore double emphasis. We tend to associate freedom with a place, a situation. Here I'm free. Away from here, lacking the prerogatives of my station and unfamiliar with the customs elsewhere, I wouldn't be. My freedom is situational.
We recoil, then, as the citizens of Judah did at the order of Jeremiah 21:8-10, at God's insistence on forced uprooting. If my freedoms are here, protected by walls and customs, to be taken from here and arbitrarily moved there is to be deprived of them. To be exposed to the bare dictates of God's sovereignty is a stark and unsettling experience.
Yet, it is only in these uncomfortable transitions that we experience the scope of His writ, far outdistancing the realm within which our habits and customs were respected. As we move when He says move, we experience true freedom in Him.
We also often see with retrospective clarity what bound us within our previous status quo. Some of these constraints were invisible from day-to-day as we were triggered by this and fearful of that. In his exquisitely titled description of life in Nazi Germany They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer notes the subtle sapping of overlapping norms on our growth and identity when he records, "I might have a job and property, never lose them, and STILL be in exile."
So in Jeremiah 21:8-10, God announces He is pulling up stakes. His undeserved protection goes with His people in literal exile, not the metaphorical estrangement from true meaning which Milton Mayer describes, but actual relocation, actual distancing from previous norms and weigh stations for a sense of security.
As they distance themselves from what they THOUGHT made them free, they will experience the true freedom of faith, of trusting His grace and mercy extended to them rather than the boundaries of a particular circumstance.
His New Testament elect are likewise imbued with a similar eye for the horizon. We, says Hebrews, will only truly settle in a Heavenly city not made with hands. Until then, any Earthly culture which makes us feel safe and valued is to be viewed with at least a small inoculation of suspicion.
We are to be wary of our own habits in these stations, knowing how readily we attach our hearts to geographical and social distinctions. It is our God's prerogative to move us from familiarity to grow us in spirit.
We are, then, very much like Bill Buford's wife in the piece he wrote in The New Yorker. When he got the opportunity as a midlife family man to pursue training as a French chef in France, his wife responded with eagerness. She, he writes admiringly, "lived for the next chance to pack her bags."
We are that spouse of Christ as we grow in faith in and love for Him. To be sure, there is no shadow of turning with Him. He does not capriciously change His mind from day to day in the plans He has had for His own from before the foundation of the world, but as quickly as we settle into a new norm as a forever norm, we must be prepared for His next call to seem unexpected.
We must, like Buford's admirable bride, live with our bags packed, knowing Christ is both our source and our comfort, the guardian of our souls against the desensitizing effects of a particular place.
"We have lost a measure of freedom," announces Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his prison opus The Gulag Archipelago. "We have no means of telling where it begins and where it ends."
WHERE is a word aptly chosen therefore double emphasis. We tend to associate freedom with a place, a situation. Here I'm free. Away from here, lacking the prerogatives of my station and unfamiliar with the customs elsewhere, I wouldn't be. My freedom is situational.
We recoil, then, as the citizens of Judah did at the order of Jeremiah 21:8-10, at God's insistence on forced uprooting. If my freedoms are here, protected by walls and customs, to be taken from here and arbitrarily moved there is to be deprived of them. To be exposed to the bare dictates of God's sovereignty is a stark and unsettling experience.
Yet, it is only in these uncomfortable transitions that we experience the scope of His writ, far outdistancing the realm within which our habits and customs were respected. As we move when He says move, we experience true freedom in Him.
We also often see with retrospective clarity what bound us within our previous status quo. Some of these constraints were invisible from day-to-day as we were triggered by this and fearful of that. In his exquisitely titled description of life in Nazi Germany They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer notes the subtle sapping of overlapping norms on our growth and identity when he records, "I might have a job and property, never lose them, and STILL be in exile."
So in Jeremiah 21:8-10, God announces He is pulling up stakes. His undeserved protection goes with His people in literal exile, not the metaphorical estrangement from true meaning which Milton Mayer describes, but actual relocation, actual distancing from previous norms and weigh stations for a sense of security.
As they distance themselves from what they THOUGHT made them free, they will experience the true freedom of faith, of trusting His grace and mercy extended to them rather than the boundaries of a particular circumstance.
His New Testament elect are likewise imbued with a similar eye for the horizon. We, says Hebrews, will only truly settle in a Heavenly city not made with hands. Until then, any Earthly culture which makes us feel safe and valued is to be viewed with at least a small inoculation of suspicion.
We are to be wary of our own habits in these stations, knowing how readily we attach our hearts to geographical and social distinctions. It is our God's prerogative to move us from familiarity to grow us in spirit.
We are, then, very much like Bill Buford's wife in the piece he wrote in The New Yorker. When he got the opportunity as a midlife family man to pursue training as a French chef in France, his wife responded with eagerness. She, he writes admiringly, "lived for the next chance to pack her bags."
We are that spouse of Christ as we grow in faith in and love for Him. To be sure, there is no shadow of turning with Him. He does not capriciously change His mind from day to day in the plans He has had for His own from before the foundation of the world, but as quickly as we settle into a new norm as a forever norm, we must be prepared for His next call to seem unexpected.
We must, like Buford's admirable bride, live with our bags packed, knowing Christ is both our source and our comfort, the guardian of our souls against the desensitizing effects of a particular place.
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