Jeremiah 23:15-17 – Recycling Rather Than Reviving
15 “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets:
‘Behold, I will feed them with wormwood,
And make them drink the water of gall;
For from the prophets of Jerusalem
Profaneness has gone out into all the land.’ ”
16 Thus says the Lord of hosts:
“Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you.
They make you worthless;
They speak a vision of their own heart,
Not from the mouth of the Lord.
17
They continually say to those who despise Me,
‘The Lord has said, “You shall have peace” ’;
And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say,
‘No evil shall come upon you.’ ”
Dr. Rufus Fears in the lecture series Books That Have Changed History renders the inscription above the door at the oracle of Delphi: “Nothing in excess. Know yourself.”
Jeremiah 23:15-17 offers the next step of admonition. For, if we put an excessive priority on knowing ourselves, seeking counsel from our reflection of our own experience, we are in the same predicament God points out there that binds the false prophets. We, like them, speak a vision of our own hearts. We pick and choose from what we have stored there to assume the outcome we want.
Not only do we feed ourselves on this recycled wormwood, but we readily offer it to others as a Word from the Lord. We take them many times He delights in the Earthly prosperity of His people as a pattern more precious than our correction and sanctification.
We play publicly our favorite tracks from our inward parts because we lack the courage to ask of the Lord and hear that we have been found wanting. It played well in our sphere the last time we comforted with the pat answer that no evil shall befall those we care about, so we play it again, Sam.
This is excess to the point of deception. This is failing to place reliance outside ourselves, failing to surrender to the possibility that the Lord may break us in our assumption of immediately comfortable well-being only to rebuild them again according to His definition and glory. Thus in individual, insular isolation, we become like stricken president Woodrow Wilson and Scott Berg's biography, only by hardness of heart rather than organic brain dysfunction. Wilson, he comments, "frequently petulant because he was stuck in a world of his own mind most of the time."
So it can be with us, positioned as God's prophets and priesthood, yet using what strength we have to keep conviction at arm's length. We have a vague sense that all is not well, but rather than address it with confession, rather than lose face in front of the community that has learned to use us as a gumball dispenser of sweet good news, we impart the same message that requires no change. We atrophy inside and bypass a chance to become more like Christ by the Spirit's inner reclamation and tenderizing. No peace will be ours in that state.
‘Behold, I will feed them with wormwood,
And make them drink the water of gall;
For from the prophets of Jerusalem
Profaneness has gone out into all the land.’ ”
16 Thus says the Lord of hosts:
“Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you.
They make you worthless;
They speak a vision of their own heart,
Not from the mouth of the Lord.
17
They continually say to those who despise Me,
‘The Lord has said, “You shall have peace” ’;
And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say,
‘No evil shall come upon you.’ ”
Dr. Rufus Fears in the lecture series Books That Have Changed History renders the inscription above the door at the oracle of Delphi: “Nothing in excess. Know yourself.”
Jeremiah 23:15-17 offers the next step of admonition. For, if we put an excessive priority on knowing ourselves, seeking counsel from our reflection of our own experience, we are in the same predicament God points out there that binds the false prophets. We, like them, speak a vision of our own hearts. We pick and choose from what we have stored there to assume the outcome we want.
Not only do we feed ourselves on this recycled wormwood, but we readily offer it to others as a Word from the Lord. We take them many times He delights in the Earthly prosperity of His people as a pattern more precious than our correction and sanctification.
We play publicly our favorite tracks from our inward parts because we lack the courage to ask of the Lord and hear that we have been found wanting. It played well in our sphere the last time we comforted with the pat answer that no evil shall befall those we care about, so we play it again, Sam.
This is excess to the point of deception. This is failing to place reliance outside ourselves, failing to surrender to the possibility that the Lord may break us in our assumption of immediately comfortable well-being only to rebuild them again according to His definition and glory. Thus in individual, insular isolation, we become like stricken president Woodrow Wilson and Scott Berg's biography, only by hardness of heart rather than organic brain dysfunction. Wilson, he comments, "frequently petulant because he was stuck in a world of his own mind most of the time."
So it can be with us, positioned as God's prophets and priesthood, yet using what strength we have to keep conviction at arm's length. We have a vague sense that all is not well, but rather than address it with confession, rather than lose face in front of the community that has learned to use us as a gumball dispenser of sweet good news, we impart the same message that requires no change. We atrophy inside and bypass a chance to become more like Christ by the Spirit's inner reclamation and tenderizing. No peace will be ours in that state.
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