Jeremiah 24:8 – Taking A Second Look
And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad’—surely thus says the Lord—‘so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt. Jeremiah 24:8, New King James Version
My wife and I are just finishing a watch through a long-running series ER. Earlier in it, the patient resisted the urging of a nurse named Lydia to take clothing she needed from the resource class at the hospital maintained. Lydia persisted, "We've got some pretty rich dead people."
God makes much the same deeper points to His prophet in Jeremiah 24:8. Since Jeremiah has withstood audiences with and persecution from the most powerful in his culture and God determined that he needed remediation in order to avoid being overawed by the pretensions of his age, we certainly do. Rich people die. If they are not to do so, they depend on the Lord's forbearance, knowingly or not, for their continuance.
God tells Jeremiah that all He need do is withdraw His hand of protection from the kings and the princes Jeremiah's culture reveres and they will be seen as the residue they are. Simultaneously, the unimpressive, those common people who might have been regarded as residue before, He has already said that they will flourish as He re-plants them and then brings them back in His time.
How is He similarly preparing us to see people's mutual need for Him and propensity to reject it? How will He expose the pretensions and affectations with which we are overly impressed, toward which we tend to doff respect while ignoring, James says, the image of God in our brother who is poor in the goods of this world and therefore more demonstrably dependent on Him?
Mindfully, this is not the opportunity to be universally dismissive, to shift from making assumptions about the spiritual poverty of the poor to making assumptions about the spiritual poverty of the rich. God used a bounty of goods to demonstrate His generosity to Abraham and David, and He just said that His regathered people would develop hearts receptive to His holiness AFTER they were blessed materially.
Ours, then, is to lightly trust our culture's training, and to ask God to see people as He does, to see the true ascendancy of His eternal, royal priesthood, and the residue toward which those who trust in this world's goods and popularity are degrading.
My wife and I are just finishing a watch through a long-running series ER. Earlier in it, the patient resisted the urging of a nurse named Lydia to take clothing she needed from the resource class at the hospital maintained. Lydia persisted, "We've got some pretty rich dead people."
God makes much the same deeper points to His prophet in Jeremiah 24:8. Since Jeremiah has withstood audiences with and persecution from the most powerful in his culture and God determined that he needed remediation in order to avoid being overawed by the pretensions of his age, we certainly do. Rich people die. If they are not to do so, they depend on the Lord's forbearance, knowingly or not, for their continuance.
God tells Jeremiah that all He need do is withdraw His hand of protection from the kings and the princes Jeremiah's culture reveres and they will be seen as the residue they are. Simultaneously, the unimpressive, those common people who might have been regarded as residue before, He has already said that they will flourish as He re-plants them and then brings them back in His time.
How is He similarly preparing us to see people's mutual need for Him and propensity to reject it? How will He expose the pretensions and affectations with which we are overly impressed, toward which we tend to doff respect while ignoring, James says, the image of God in our brother who is poor in the goods of this world and therefore more demonstrably dependent on Him?
Mindfully, this is not the opportunity to be universally dismissive, to shift from making assumptions about the spiritual poverty of the poor to making assumptions about the spiritual poverty of the rich. God used a bounty of goods to demonstrate His generosity to Abraham and David, and He just said that His regathered people would develop hearts receptive to His holiness AFTER they were blessed materially.
Ours, then, is to lightly trust our culture's training, and to ask God to see people as He does, to see the true ascendancy of His eternal, royal priesthood, and the residue toward which those who trust in this world's goods and popularity are degrading.
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