Jeremiah 22:6-7 – A Disciplined Priority on Souls Prospering
6 For thus says the Lord to the house of the king of Judah:
“You are Gilead to Me,
The head of Lebanon;
Yet I surely will make you a wilderness,
Cities which are not inhabited.
7
I will prepare destroyers against you,
Everyone with his weapons;
They shall cut down your choice cedars
And cast them into the fire.
"At least down here, I know what we're chasing," reflects Todd Agnew in the song "If You Wanted," on the habit of chasing material prosperity as an end in itself. "It's hard to trust," he confesses by comparison, that Your dreams are so much better than mine." Then he turns his prayer to a pointed question, "If You wanted me to die to myself, why'd You make me full so deeply in love with life?"
This is the predicament of prosperity presented by God Himself in Jeremiah 22:6-7. If we have any Bible in us at all, our binary sensibilities truncate wisdom to see money as the root of all evil. We begin to co-opt Plato as much as the teaching of the Holy Spirit and to see life in a material realm as a reluctant, temporary situation begrudged to us by God Who is, the Bible says, Spirit and must be worshiped in spirit. At times we can, as Agnew's honesty reveals, wonder if we were set up by a bent toward material comforts.
God shows Jeremiah, Jeremiah's Earthly king, and us as Jeremiah's heirs more deeply into His heart, that we would abandon some of that easy cynicism that would drain the pleasure from His blessings. Before He pronounces the judgment on king and kingdom we have come to expect from Jeremiah's book, He establishes a delight in blessing as an extension of His nature. Through Jeremiah, He will tell this king that he is an instrument of healing to his people. He is like the soaring forests of Lebanon God has nurtured for years that they might, among other purposes, provide the timber for His Temple.
Lovingkindness in ways we can understand is His default. Remember, the enticement toward repentance in Jeremiah 22:5 was that the profit would help the profligate king see himself ruling in security and splendor. We need to know deeply, in ways that penetrate what remains of our holy imagination that our Heavenly Father knows how to plan for and give good gifts, how to brag on flawed human beings and set us up with influence and prosperity in order to bless others.
Only after we linger on the naming and the purpose at the beginning of Jeremiah 22:6, the flashes back to Eden and forward to the promises that follow repentance and, ultimately, to the unchallengeable prosperity of the New Jerusalem, do we have any ability to view His correction in perspective. He loves to set up countable, material flourishing, to allow a king, or a parent, or a business owner to rejoice in the many people he or she gets to influence, but He will reduce these and return to the baseline of our absolute dependence on Him when prosperity begins to steal our hearts.
When we begin to look at the cedars of our lives, the reflections of His long-standing, splendid, superfluous care and begin to see these as evidence of entitlement to future prosperity, as preoccupations which distract us from the servant leadership this king has forgotten, He will remove them.
The momentum of human governments sometimes lurches forward based on sunk cost, continuing to spend on a project because so much has been spent already, but He Whose resources and perspective are both limitless is willing to cut the trees down and start again. Samson's hair, says Judges, began to grow back on the other side of this chastening. So will God's trees. So will the measures of His favor that we value, and He values, but not at the expense of Parental prudence.
He sends earthly fires to burn away our substitutes for Him as Provision, to purify the truest metal of trust in Him, that we might repent before the eternal fires show us the waste we have made of the wives He granted. If we lose now on Earth, we can, with His irrepressible grace and mercy, begin to build and invest in. If we find out before His judgment seat that what we live for has burned away, what then?
“You are Gilead to Me,
The head of Lebanon;
Yet I surely will make you a wilderness,
Cities which are not inhabited.
7
I will prepare destroyers against you,
Everyone with his weapons;
They shall cut down your choice cedars
And cast them into the fire.
"At least down here, I know what we're chasing," reflects Todd Agnew in the song "If You Wanted," on the habit of chasing material prosperity as an end in itself. "It's hard to trust," he confesses by comparison, that Your dreams are so much better than mine." Then he turns his prayer to a pointed question, "If You wanted me to die to myself, why'd You make me full so deeply in love with life?"
This is the predicament of prosperity presented by God Himself in Jeremiah 22:6-7. If we have any Bible in us at all, our binary sensibilities truncate wisdom to see money as the root of all evil. We begin to co-opt Plato as much as the teaching of the Holy Spirit and to see life in a material realm as a reluctant, temporary situation begrudged to us by God Who is, the Bible says, Spirit and must be worshiped in spirit. At times we can, as Agnew's honesty reveals, wonder if we were set up by a bent toward material comforts.
God shows Jeremiah, Jeremiah's Earthly king, and us as Jeremiah's heirs more deeply into His heart, that we would abandon some of that easy cynicism that would drain the pleasure from His blessings. Before He pronounces the judgment on king and kingdom we have come to expect from Jeremiah's book, He establishes a delight in blessing as an extension of His nature. Through Jeremiah, He will tell this king that he is an instrument of healing to his people. He is like the soaring forests of Lebanon God has nurtured for years that they might, among other purposes, provide the timber for His Temple.
Lovingkindness in ways we can understand is His default. Remember, the enticement toward repentance in Jeremiah 22:5 was that the profit would help the profligate king see himself ruling in security and splendor. We need to know deeply, in ways that penetrate what remains of our holy imagination that our Heavenly Father knows how to plan for and give good gifts, how to brag on flawed human beings and set us up with influence and prosperity in order to bless others.
Only after we linger on the naming and the purpose at the beginning of Jeremiah 22:6, the flashes back to Eden and forward to the promises that follow repentance and, ultimately, to the unchallengeable prosperity of the New Jerusalem, do we have any ability to view His correction in perspective. He loves to set up countable, material flourishing, to allow a king, or a parent, or a business owner to rejoice in the many people he or she gets to influence, but He will reduce these and return to the baseline of our absolute dependence on Him when prosperity begins to steal our hearts.
When we begin to look at the cedars of our lives, the reflections of His long-standing, splendid, superfluous care and begin to see these as evidence of entitlement to future prosperity, as preoccupations which distract us from the servant leadership this king has forgotten, He will remove them.
The momentum of human governments sometimes lurches forward based on sunk cost, continuing to spend on a project because so much has been spent already, but He Whose resources and perspective are both limitless is willing to cut the trees down and start again. Samson's hair, says Judges, began to grow back on the other side of this chastening. So will God's trees. So will the measures of His favor that we value, and He values, but not at the expense of Parental prudence.
He sends earthly fires to burn away our substitutes for Him as Provision, to purify the truest metal of trust in Him, that we might repent before the eternal fires show us the waste we have made of the wives He granted. If we lose now on Earth, we can, with His irrepressible grace and mercy, begin to build and invest in. If we find out before His judgment seat that what we live for has burned away, what then?
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