Jeremiah 25:6-7 – Want, Worship, Works Confronted
6 Do not go after other gods to serve them and worship them, and do not provoke Me to anger with the works of your hands; and I will not harm you.’ 7 Yet you have not listened to Me,” says the Lord, “that you might provoke Me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt. Jeremiah 25:6-7, New King James Version
In “A New Heart“ Spurgeon confesses, “The Lord is angry not only against our overt act, but against the nature of which dictates the acts.“
He diagnoses to this sin-infected core in advance of the disease's impact in Jeremiah 25:6-7. The Great Physician of souls discerns the impact of what we "go after." He knows the curiosities after which our idle thoughts wander. He knows what our idle energies pursue. He knows in advance the what if's we set up as hypothetical alternatives to complete submission to and satisfaction in Him.
He knows and declares to Jeremiah how this idle speculation distills into identity-corrupting habits. We may not call them worship, slow as we are to relinquish what vague identification we have with God's covenant community, even while our hearts are far from Him.
We won't stand up and SAY that our hearts have degenerated to consider idol worship our resting norm, but He knows better. He knows it, and the sovereign proclamation of Jeremiah 25:6-7, in advance of the sin disease's first stages.
What dominates our hearts will soon dominate our hands, declares God as the Maker of both end of the continuity between. Though Spurgeon is right that the Lord is angry with the innermost nature and need not wait for the outward act, our verses show a particular displeasure with idolatry so brazen it would motivate our handiwork.
Perhaps this is because, by the time our depravity courses outward to the works of our hands He has given us so many opportunities to check ourselves and repent. He has, by this stage in the disease, to use the cadence of Jeremiah 25, risen early morning after morning to contend with us.
He has, in fact, discerns Gene Edward Veith in God at Work, restrained the evil we actually commit by means of vocation. That is, even as our theology has drifted off-center, even as what we go after is less and less directly determined by a desire to please Him, a sense of calling in our work is the rearguard residual of His glory.
In it, for a long while, we often discipline our vain imaginations and the caprices of our flesh. At work, we often genuinely serve our fellow man long after we have ceased to actively contemplate God's image readily reflected in him.
Yet, the sin disease does its work even in our work, and thus at last provokes the wrath of the One Who modeled and commissioned the blessing of work. God has deigned His sun to rise on our work and our motives day after day, perhaps, at last, turning our confessional gratitude to Him.
How long has He allowed us to see cause and effect in our jobs, the impact of subtle defects and deficiencies on an eventual shoddy outcome? Yet, this convicting continuity has not penetrated to matters of the soul. His anger is righteous altogether.
He has sent His servants the prophets to contend with us, often in the very places of our work, often in the language of our vocation, often through peers who consistently glorify God in the same calling, and yet we turn not.
His anger as expressed in Jeremiah 25:6-7 is righteous altogether. He has foreseen and foretold depravity from its seed, and yet our vision is so feeble, and willfully turn downward, that we have not been able to conceive of want, and worship, and works that actually PLEASE Him.
Thus, harm and hurt as we conceive them are left to Him. Our plodding personhood is after a while so shriveled to a sense of material output, as though man made in the image of God were now a cog in some mindless machine, that to touch and to thwart the material, the only currency we value, is His course of action.
Hurt though it does, this is love. This upheaval of our sins and predictability and productivity can be used in His grace and mercy to cause us to trace back to our root problem, want for less than Him, hardening into the habit of worshiping less than Him.
As we repent, brothers and sisters, and ask Him to renew our minds and our motives, to change what, and Whom, we go after, all subsequent results are thereby enlivened and ennobled. Encountering Him more nearly to all that He is, our habits, our preoccupations which constitute, consciously or not, our worship, begin to orbit around Him.
We take these thoughts and affections to work, and they permeate with the ring on the hammer, and the click of the keys, and the timely word of humbly given expertise. As great as was the wreck, so complete is His respiration. To God be the glory.
In “A New Heart“ Spurgeon confesses, “The Lord is angry not only against our overt act, but against the nature of which dictates the acts.“
He diagnoses to this sin-infected core in advance of the disease's impact in Jeremiah 25:6-7. The Great Physician of souls discerns the impact of what we "go after." He knows the curiosities after which our idle thoughts wander. He knows what our idle energies pursue. He knows in advance the what if's we set up as hypothetical alternatives to complete submission to and satisfaction in Him.
He knows and declares to Jeremiah how this idle speculation distills into identity-corrupting habits. We may not call them worship, slow as we are to relinquish what vague identification we have with God's covenant community, even while our hearts are far from Him.
We won't stand up and SAY that our hearts have degenerated to consider idol worship our resting norm, but He knows better. He knows it, and the sovereign proclamation of Jeremiah 25:6-7, in advance of the sin disease's first stages.
What dominates our hearts will soon dominate our hands, declares God as the Maker of both end of the continuity between. Though Spurgeon is right that the Lord is angry with the innermost nature and need not wait for the outward act, our verses show a particular displeasure with idolatry so brazen it would motivate our handiwork.
Perhaps this is because, by the time our depravity courses outward to the works of our hands He has given us so many opportunities to check ourselves and repent. He has, by this stage in the disease, to use the cadence of Jeremiah 25, risen early morning after morning to contend with us.
He has, in fact, discerns Gene Edward Veith in God at Work, restrained the evil we actually commit by means of vocation. That is, even as our theology has drifted off-center, even as what we go after is less and less directly determined by a desire to please Him, a sense of calling in our work is the rearguard residual of His glory.
In it, for a long while, we often discipline our vain imaginations and the caprices of our flesh. At work, we often genuinely serve our fellow man long after we have ceased to actively contemplate God's image readily reflected in him.
Yet, the sin disease does its work even in our work, and thus at last provokes the wrath of the One Who modeled and commissioned the blessing of work. God has deigned His sun to rise on our work and our motives day after day, perhaps, at last, turning our confessional gratitude to Him.
How long has He allowed us to see cause and effect in our jobs, the impact of subtle defects and deficiencies on an eventual shoddy outcome? Yet, this convicting continuity has not penetrated to matters of the soul. His anger is righteous altogether.
He has sent His servants the prophets to contend with us, often in the very places of our work, often in the language of our vocation, often through peers who consistently glorify God in the same calling, and yet we turn not.
His anger as expressed in Jeremiah 25:6-7 is righteous altogether. He has foreseen and foretold depravity from its seed, and yet our vision is so feeble, and willfully turn downward, that we have not been able to conceive of want, and worship, and works that actually PLEASE Him.
Thus, harm and hurt as we conceive them are left to Him. Our plodding personhood is after a while so shriveled to a sense of material output, as though man made in the image of God were now a cog in some mindless machine, that to touch and to thwart the material, the only currency we value, is His course of action.
Hurt though it does, this is love. This upheaval of our sins and predictability and productivity can be used in His grace and mercy to cause us to trace back to our root problem, want for less than Him, hardening into the habit of worshiping less than Him.
As we repent, brothers and sisters, and ask Him to renew our minds and our motives, to change what, and Whom, we go after, all subsequent results are thereby enlivened and ennobled. Encountering Him more nearly to all that He is, our habits, our preoccupations which constitute, consciously or not, our worship, begin to orbit around Him.
We take these thoughts and affections to work, and they permeate with the ring on the hammer, and the click of the keys, and the timely word of humbly given expertise. As great as was the wreck, so complete is His respiration. To God be the glory.
Comments
Post a Comment