Jeremiah 25:34 – Precious, Yet Purposefully Broken
“Wail, shepherds, and cry!
Roll about in the ashes,
You leaders of the flock!
For the days of your slaughter and your dispersions are fulfilled;
You shall fall like a precious vessel. Jeremiah 25:34, New King James Version
On the political drama The West Wing, personable assistant Donna Moss continues her everyperson education on behalf of the viewer unacquainted with some of the realities with which the show deals. In one instance, she is helping new watch commander Jack Reese set up his office.
She is taken with him, and she can't understand why someone so honorable would vote against her Democratic boss. She tries to differentiate between spending for vital weapons and the waste her boss would cut, say, on overpriced ashtrays for which the Pentagon pays so much more than market value.
Jack opts for an expensive and memorable lesson. He smashes one of those ashtrays and notes for Donna's benefit that it breaks in three dull pieces. He instructs calmly that when a submarine like those on which he has served is under attack, the last thing the captain needs to worry about is flying glass. We lead a different life out there, he says, and it's a little more expensive.
Jeremiah 25:34 is the Lord's similar lesson. As with the special ashtray, He has made Israel's shepherds, Israel's spiritual leaders, for a particular role. More exacting even than the manufacturing process for the ashtrays, the work to position these spiritual leaders has been a long-term process of proving preciousness.
To understand what God has invested in and now is purposefully breaking down, another analogy to the world's navies helps. George Friedman notes in The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like “Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.”
Now that the New Testament believer begins to understand that the fullness of God is evident in Christ, we can lose sight of the fact that, in real time, these were the best admirals on Earth, painstakingly trained, whose commission He is revoking. Trained by sitcoms, we rightfully pick up on the disdain of Jeremiah 25, but we fail to appreciate something like risk.
The lessons to God's friend Abram, the life from dead flesh which God wrought miraculously in Isaac, the exploits of the Exodus, these are woven into the life stories of these men, the exceptionalism may inculcate generation to generation into their flocks. They indeed are, as the verse proclaims, precious vessels.
Yet by His sovereign plan, they will fall and shatter. By His sovereign plan, He will abase those He has exalted in the eyes of the people. Why? In part, to show the larger lesson, to show that spiritual warfare is as real as anything Jack faced on his submarine.
His people, and maybe especially their spiritual leaders, have become too comfortable with a civilian sense of normalcy. Their enemy the devil, the New Testament will make more clear, is at war to compromise the messianic identity.
If His people forget that they are distinct by a sense of calling, sovereign grace, and His shepherds to this people in particular, His glory is at stake. He will not compromise that. Just as He has shown His grace through the stability in which He showers blessings on them in the Promised Land where every landmark conspires with the Word delivered by the shepherds to remind His people of their identity in Him, He will change settings, usurp shepherds, to reassert His honor before His people.
He will break the props, break the bonds, break the assumptions, that have debased from prompts to remember His vital Presence into kinds of objects of worship themselves. Sanctity, they will remember, is not in the location of the Temple of the Lord, as the people once protested to confrontational Jeremiah.
Sanctity is in the God of the Temple Who outlasts the Temple. He can make new reminders, both human and material. He can instill new traditions. But He will not share His glory. He will be exalted in both the raising up and the pulling down of that which represents Him in turn.
Perhaps in this at times painful process of detachment and readjustment, He points either forward or backward to the cross which John Piper calls the blazing center of His glory. For, if the Jeremiah 25:34 shepherds were precious, and I have no reason to believe God delivers that word solely with ironic disdain, how much more precious, truly, timelessly precious is His Son of whom the Father says I will make Your enemies Your footstool? He is, from everlasting to everlasting, His Father's DELIGHT!
Yet, from before the foundation of the world, He fell for His elect. His bones withstood breaking in keeping with prophecy, but He was subsumed so completely in the weight of our sin that He was sorrowful unto death. The wailing of the Good Shepherd at Gethsemane makes the howls of dislocation among the Jeremiah 25:34 spiritual leaders seem like so much playacting. Yet, even in the vignette He gives Jeremiah we begin to glimpse the whole of the Savior's sorrow and substitution.
The slaughter was fulfilled in Him. The dispersion was fulfilled in His estrangement as He cried out from the cross, forsaken. What the Father called fulfilled in Jeremiah in the sense that that sentence for that time was carried out is truly fulfilled in Christ for His own. At the cost of the last breath from His expiring body, He rasped, "It is finished!"
Our failings, then, brothers and sisters, as undershepherds of His flock are covered in Him. Indeed, we may experience correction from which those under our influence can learn. If so, it is but a sippy cup of suffering, specifically portioned out for instruction and edification.
The wrath that was due us, and those we influence, and our heirs in the faith, it has been drunk to the dregs by Christ our Savior. Our shepherding, at its superior points, in its slipshod lapses, it points to His continuous care for His own. He cannot deny Himself, nor His eternal, galactic representation in His sheep.
Roll about in the ashes,
You leaders of the flock!
For the days of your slaughter and your dispersions are fulfilled;
You shall fall like a precious vessel. Jeremiah 25:34, New King James Version
On the political drama The West Wing, personable assistant Donna Moss continues her everyperson education on behalf of the viewer unacquainted with some of the realities with which the show deals. In one instance, she is helping new watch commander Jack Reese set up his office.
She is taken with him, and she can't understand why someone so honorable would vote against her Democratic boss. She tries to differentiate between spending for vital weapons and the waste her boss would cut, say, on overpriced ashtrays for which the Pentagon pays so much more than market value.
Jack opts for an expensive and memorable lesson. He smashes one of those ashtrays and notes for Donna's benefit that it breaks in three dull pieces. He instructs calmly that when a submarine like those on which he has served is under attack, the last thing the captain needs to worry about is flying glass. We lead a different life out there, he says, and it's a little more expensive.
Jeremiah 25:34 is the Lord's similar lesson. As with the special ashtray, He has made Israel's shepherds, Israel's spiritual leaders, for a particular role. More exacting even than the manufacturing process for the ashtrays, the work to position these spiritual leaders has been a long-term process of proving preciousness.
To understand what God has invested in and now is purposefully breaking down, another analogy to the world's navies helps. George Friedman notes in The Next Decade: What the World Will Look Like “Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.”
Now that the New Testament believer begins to understand that the fullness of God is evident in Christ, we can lose sight of the fact that, in real time, these were the best admirals on Earth, painstakingly trained, whose commission He is revoking. Trained by sitcoms, we rightfully pick up on the disdain of Jeremiah 25, but we fail to appreciate something like risk.
The lessons to God's friend Abram, the life from dead flesh which God wrought miraculously in Isaac, the exploits of the Exodus, these are woven into the life stories of these men, the exceptionalism may inculcate generation to generation into their flocks. They indeed are, as the verse proclaims, precious vessels.
Yet by His sovereign plan, they will fall and shatter. By His sovereign plan, He will abase those He has exalted in the eyes of the people. Why? In part, to show the larger lesson, to show that spiritual warfare is as real as anything Jack faced on his submarine.
His people, and maybe especially their spiritual leaders, have become too comfortable with a civilian sense of normalcy. Their enemy the devil, the New Testament will make more clear, is at war to compromise the messianic identity.
If His people forget that they are distinct by a sense of calling, sovereign grace, and His shepherds to this people in particular, His glory is at stake. He will not compromise that. Just as He has shown His grace through the stability in which He showers blessings on them in the Promised Land where every landmark conspires with the Word delivered by the shepherds to remind His people of their identity in Him, He will change settings, usurp shepherds, to reassert His honor before His people.
He will break the props, break the bonds, break the assumptions, that have debased from prompts to remember His vital Presence into kinds of objects of worship themselves. Sanctity, they will remember, is not in the location of the Temple of the Lord, as the people once protested to confrontational Jeremiah.
Sanctity is in the God of the Temple Who outlasts the Temple. He can make new reminders, both human and material. He can instill new traditions. But He will not share His glory. He will be exalted in both the raising up and the pulling down of that which represents Him in turn.
Perhaps in this at times painful process of detachment and readjustment, He points either forward or backward to the cross which John Piper calls the blazing center of His glory. For, if the Jeremiah 25:34 shepherds were precious, and I have no reason to believe God delivers that word solely with ironic disdain, how much more precious, truly, timelessly precious is His Son of whom the Father says I will make Your enemies Your footstool? He is, from everlasting to everlasting, His Father's DELIGHT!
Yet, from before the foundation of the world, He fell for His elect. His bones withstood breaking in keeping with prophecy, but He was subsumed so completely in the weight of our sin that He was sorrowful unto death. The wailing of the Good Shepherd at Gethsemane makes the howls of dislocation among the Jeremiah 25:34 spiritual leaders seem like so much playacting. Yet, even in the vignette He gives Jeremiah we begin to glimpse the whole of the Savior's sorrow and substitution.
The slaughter was fulfilled in Him. The dispersion was fulfilled in His estrangement as He cried out from the cross, forsaken. What the Father called fulfilled in Jeremiah in the sense that that sentence for that time was carried out is truly fulfilled in Christ for His own. At the cost of the last breath from His expiring body, He rasped, "It is finished!"
Our failings, then, brothers and sisters, as undershepherds of His flock are covered in Him. Indeed, we may experience correction from which those under our influence can learn. If so, it is but a sippy cup of suffering, specifically portioned out for instruction and edification.
The wrath that was due us, and those we influence, and our heirs in the faith, it has been drunk to the dregs by Christ our Savior. Our shepherding, at its superior points, in its slipshod lapses, it points to His continuous care for His own. He cannot deny Himself, nor His eternal, galactic representation in His sheep.
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