Jeremiah 25:12 – Seasons in Perspective
12 ‘Then it will come to pass, when seventy years are completed, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity,’ says the Lord; ‘and I will make it a perpetual desolation. Jeremiah 25:12, New King James Version
In The Screwtape Letters, a seasoned tempter is teaching his nephew how to make the most of human terror. He tells him that he does not need to set his sites on convincing his target that a given trouble will last forever. He only needs to convince him that the trouble will last longer than he can stand it.
By God's grace, the prophet's audience in Jeremiah 25:12 is given a timeframe for how long the upheaval of exile will last. They can look forward to it ending. They can look forward to returning home, to a land which God in His simultaneous grace has pledged to preserve for them as Abraham's heirs for a thousand generations. They, knowing this, can swat aside tempters' goads toward despair and can, Jeremiah has invited, focus on what God is doing in this season.
We often don't have, brothers and sisters in Christ, a clock or calendar, a specific timeframe of scriptural promise, we can use to get through a difficult season without being swallowed whole by it we can still find comfort here, however, for the threescore and ten which is the length of the exile is, generally speaking, the length of our lives.
The sense of dislocation we feel, it won't last. One day we will know as we are known. The sense of indignation with which we burn because we haven't gotten to harvest everything we planted in good faith, it won't last. Christ is coming, and His imperishable reward is with Him. We will need no currency exchange to render it meaningful. We won't have to figure out how to pack it in haste as we are forced to move from place to place. HIS kingdom is everlasting and without boundary.
Like the exiles, then, under Jeremiah's tutelage, we can settle down. We can plant where we are, even though it isn't where we ultimately want to be. We can build where we are as a tribute to our Creator God, though we ultimately will be at home in a city not built with hands, in the place Christ has intimately gone before us to prepare. We can, like the exiles, preempt petulant preoccupations by praying for the peace of the city where God has placed us, knowing that in His abounding love, the good of the culture in which we are embedded will ultimately be to our good.
The circumstances we are in won't last forever anymore than the exile will. God's capacity to work comely, appropriate, rhythmic good in the strangest and most uncomfortable places, that's a constant. One day, we trust, we will look back, sharing by grace His eye level, and see the golden threads of continuity which ran through every chapter of our lives, when we had plenty, and when we were in need, when we were consciously, conspicuously content, and when we cried out in perplexity.
In The Screwtape Letters, a seasoned tempter is teaching his nephew how to make the most of human terror. He tells him that he does not need to set his sites on convincing his target that a given trouble will last forever. He only needs to convince him that the trouble will last longer than he can stand it.
By God's grace, the prophet's audience in Jeremiah 25:12 is given a timeframe for how long the upheaval of exile will last. They can look forward to it ending. They can look forward to returning home, to a land which God in His simultaneous grace has pledged to preserve for them as Abraham's heirs for a thousand generations. They, knowing this, can swat aside tempters' goads toward despair and can, Jeremiah has invited, focus on what God is doing in this season.
We often don't have, brothers and sisters in Christ, a clock or calendar, a specific timeframe of scriptural promise, we can use to get through a difficult season without being swallowed whole by it we can still find comfort here, however, for the threescore and ten which is the length of the exile is, generally speaking, the length of our lives.
The sense of dislocation we feel, it won't last. One day we will know as we are known. The sense of indignation with which we burn because we haven't gotten to harvest everything we planted in good faith, it won't last. Christ is coming, and His imperishable reward is with Him. We will need no currency exchange to render it meaningful. We won't have to figure out how to pack it in haste as we are forced to move from place to place. HIS kingdom is everlasting and without boundary.
Like the exiles, then, under Jeremiah's tutelage, we can settle down. We can plant where we are, even though it isn't where we ultimately want to be. We can build where we are as a tribute to our Creator God, though we ultimately will be at home in a city not built with hands, in the place Christ has intimately gone before us to prepare. We can, like the exiles, preempt petulant preoccupations by praying for the peace of the city where God has placed us, knowing that in His abounding love, the good of the culture in which we are embedded will ultimately be to our good.
The circumstances we are in won't last forever anymore than the exile will. God's capacity to work comely, appropriate, rhythmic good in the strangest and most uncomfortable places, that's a constant. One day, we trust, we will look back, sharing by grace His eye level, and see the golden threads of continuity which ran through every chapter of our lives, when we had plenty, and when we were in need, when we were consciously, conspicuously content, and when we cried out in perplexity.
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