Jeremiah 23:18-20 – Blown Away
18
For who has stood in the counsel of the Lord,
And has perceived and heard His word?
Who has marked His word and heard it?
19
Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord has gone forth in fury—
A violent whirlwind!
It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.
20
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
Until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart.
In the latter days you will understand it perfectly. Jeremiah 23:18-20, New King James Version
Jiayang Fan illustrates in The New Yorker a Chinese culture so steeped in denial that a family will gather for a wedding in order to visit a dying relative without admitting to mortality. She broadens to admit, "No culture relishes talking about death."
We chuckle with condescension, but our turning away is just as contrived as our assumptions are dying. Foundational underpinnings of the way in which we have looked at the world are being uprooted and blown away in God's sovereign storm of Jeremiah 23:19, and we don't want to let them go. We marry and are given in marriage. We go on as before when the whole man-centered order around us is dying, and humanity, for all its pretensions, cannot protect itself.
God will not share His glory, His Word says with another. He will finish exposing the limits of what we call our security. He will show that we have no true identity other than as his image-bearers. As we lean into that transformative wind by faith, though, and begin to appreciate His work, we have much to look forward to after man's shams have been exposed.
For those who have trusted in Christ, and more deeply so as they have felt the winds He sent rock any security short of that, the house built on Him as the rock still stands. We, according to the prediction of Jeremiah 23:20, will understand perfectly those events which so unsettle us in the midst of them.
Even when Christ's unsettling, as with Peter at the Last Supper, confront layers of our self-protection and challenges us to expose our need for His cleansing in front of fellow believers, we can rest in His similar promise to Peter that we will understand hereafter.
We are works in progress. Christ will bless and protect His own in a setting for a season, but He is not confined to that setting, nor His own restricted to the part we play in those confines. Because we need to be reminded of that, settings and roles often have built-in obsolescence in His sight by the reckoning He gives Jeremiah, and He will blow them away rather than allowing us to settle into seeing Him as less than Years.
For who has stood in the counsel of the Lord,
And has perceived and heard His word?
Who has marked His word and heard it?
19
Behold, a whirlwind of the Lord has gone forth in fury—
A violent whirlwind!
It will fall violently on the head of the wicked.
20
The anger of the Lord will not turn back
Until He has executed and performed the thoughts of His heart.
In the latter days you will understand it perfectly. Jeremiah 23:18-20, New King James Version
Jiayang Fan illustrates in The New Yorker a Chinese culture so steeped in denial that a family will gather for a wedding in order to visit a dying relative without admitting to mortality. She broadens to admit, "No culture relishes talking about death."
We chuckle with condescension, but our turning away is just as contrived as our assumptions are dying. Foundational underpinnings of the way in which we have looked at the world are being uprooted and blown away in God's sovereign storm of Jeremiah 23:19, and we don't want to let them go. We marry and are given in marriage. We go on as before when the whole man-centered order around us is dying, and humanity, for all its pretensions, cannot protect itself.
God will not share His glory, His Word says with another. He will finish exposing the limits of what we call our security. He will show that we have no true identity other than as his image-bearers. As we lean into that transformative wind by faith, though, and begin to appreciate His work, we have much to look forward to after man's shams have been exposed.
For those who have trusted in Christ, and more deeply so as they have felt the winds He sent rock any security short of that, the house built on Him as the rock still stands. We, according to the prediction of Jeremiah 23:20, will understand perfectly those events which so unsettle us in the midst of them.
Even when Christ's unsettling, as with Peter at the Last Supper, confront layers of our self-protection and challenges us to expose our need for His cleansing in front of fellow believers, we can rest in His similar promise to Peter that we will understand hereafter.
We are works in progress. Christ will bless and protect His own in a setting for a season, but He is not confined to that setting, nor His own restricted to the part we play in those confines. Because we need to be reminded of that, settings and roles often have built-in obsolescence in His sight by the reckoning He gives Jeremiah, and He will blow them away rather than allowing us to settle into seeing Him as less than Years.
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