Jeremiah 23:1-2 – Discipling Distraction
“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of My pasture!” says the Lord. 2 Therefore thus says the Lord God of Israel against the shepherds who feed My people: “You have scattered My flock, driven them away, and not attended to them. Behold, I will attend to you for the evil of your doings,” says the Lord.
"They are worthless," judges Augustine of false teachers in a letter quoted in Augustine as Mentor by Edward Smither on the danger of interspersing philosophy and revealed Truth, "not because everything they say is false, but because they have put their trust in many false theories, and, when they are found to speak the truth, they are strangers to the grace of Christ, who is truth itself."
John Bunyan in Come and Welcome Jesus Christ warns the same starvation by subterfuge can be accomplished socially. "What! teach men to put God and his Word out of their minds, by running to merry company, by running to the world, by gossiping? This is as much to bid them to say to God, 'Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways;' here is the devil in grain!"
This is how sheep are scattered. This is how distraction is discipled. God in His grace makes them herding animals. Only the outlier wanders, and only for a time. Knowing sheep as their Creator and knowing man, even fallen man, with the same discernment, God draws an expert metaphor his prophet and those he will confront in Jeremiah 23:1-2.
Having confronted His chosen keepers of the state in Jeremiah 22, God turns His conviction on the keepers of the religious community, likewise responsible before Him, and likewise reprehensible in their neglect.
The watchcare of Judah's spiritual leaders has been so derelict, so shot through with purposeful neglect, they have caused sheep to go against their God-given genetic programming. Projected to the men represented in the opening of Jeremiah 23:1-2, these spiritual leaders have fed from God's Word so poorly and unpredictably that sheep who would rather congregate, who would rather settle into a norm in which they expect to be fed, as they will with Christ in John 8:2, learn the habit of forging alone because they can no longer expect their "shepherds" to feed them.
With kings setting a tone for pervasive self-indulgence, a national besetting sin of which God warned Samuel when the people sought a king, there can be little doubt that aping this affection has begun to draw the hearts of the spiritual leadership.
If our royalty can impanel itself in splendor as though Earthly comfort worthy final verdict, we have to keep up, or so might the carnal thinking go of those "spiritual" leaders who sought to "serve" the flock by impressing them rather than discipling them.
The Church and her individual outposts can be just as compromised. We can seek to drop in the world's wisdom, or fall in behind it. We can seek to show our sophistication by defying James's epistle and maintaining friendship with the world and, we think, some semblance of friendship with God.
When some in the world by a work of God's grace become aware of their hunger and the poor nutrients in what they are fed, when they are drawn by their restored instincts to congregate with those with the same true hunger, what heartbreak, what loneliness, to perceive the Jeremiah 23:1-2 reality! The shepherds are no better, no more discerning! Hungry souls, like hungry sheep, must scatter in hopes of being fed.
What will the drawn sheep, matted and starving, find when he or she makes a way to those of us who, by God's grace, have long been fed in His Word? Does it, and God by it, still captivate our affections in such a way as to inspire hope in any who follow behind us?
Or, are our hearts divided? Do we seek spiritual authority from a smattering of God's Word along with the wisdom of the world? Would we send this sheep, drive the sheep in the phrasing of Jeremiah 23:1-2, back out from whence they came to seek sustenance in the world? May it not be so.
"They are worthless," judges Augustine of false teachers in a letter quoted in Augustine as Mentor by Edward Smither on the danger of interspersing philosophy and revealed Truth, "not because everything they say is false, but because they have put their trust in many false theories, and, when they are found to speak the truth, they are strangers to the grace of Christ, who is truth itself."
John Bunyan in Come and Welcome Jesus Christ warns the same starvation by subterfuge can be accomplished socially. "What! teach men to put God and his Word out of their minds, by running to merry company, by running to the world, by gossiping? This is as much to bid them to say to God, 'Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways;' here is the devil in grain!"
This is how sheep are scattered. This is how distraction is discipled. God in His grace makes them herding animals. Only the outlier wanders, and only for a time. Knowing sheep as their Creator and knowing man, even fallen man, with the same discernment, God draws an expert metaphor his prophet and those he will confront in Jeremiah 23:1-2.
Having confronted His chosen keepers of the state in Jeremiah 22, God turns His conviction on the keepers of the religious community, likewise responsible before Him, and likewise reprehensible in their neglect.
The watchcare of Judah's spiritual leaders has been so derelict, so shot through with purposeful neglect, they have caused sheep to go against their God-given genetic programming. Projected to the men represented in the opening of Jeremiah 23:1-2, these spiritual leaders have fed from God's Word so poorly and unpredictably that sheep who would rather congregate, who would rather settle into a norm in which they expect to be fed, as they will with Christ in John 8:2, learn the habit of forging alone because they can no longer expect their "shepherds" to feed them.
With kings setting a tone for pervasive self-indulgence, a national besetting sin of which God warned Samuel when the people sought a king, there can be little doubt that aping this affection has begun to draw the hearts of the spiritual leadership.
If our royalty can impanel itself in splendor as though Earthly comfort worthy final verdict, we have to keep up, or so might the carnal thinking go of those "spiritual" leaders who sought to "serve" the flock by impressing them rather than discipling them.
The Church and her individual outposts can be just as compromised. We can seek to drop in the world's wisdom, or fall in behind it. We can seek to show our sophistication by defying James's epistle and maintaining friendship with the world and, we think, some semblance of friendship with God.
When some in the world by a work of God's grace become aware of their hunger and the poor nutrients in what they are fed, when they are drawn by their restored instincts to congregate with those with the same true hunger, what heartbreak, what loneliness, to perceive the Jeremiah 23:1-2 reality! The shepherds are no better, no more discerning! Hungry souls, like hungry sheep, must scatter in hopes of being fed.
What will the drawn sheep, matted and starving, find when he or she makes a way to those of us who, by God's grace, have long been fed in His Word? Does it, and God by it, still captivate our affections in such a way as to inspire hope in any who follow behind us?
Or, are our hearts divided? Do we seek spiritual authority from a smattering of God's Word along with the wisdom of the world? Would we send this sheep, drive the sheep in the phrasing of Jeremiah 23:1-2, back out from whence they came to seek sustenance in the world? May it not be so.
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