Jeremiah 25:8-9 – The Scandal of Service
8 “Therefore thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Because you have not heard My words, 9 behold, I will send and take all the families of the north,’ says the Lord, ‘and Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, My servant, and will bring them against this land, against its inhabitants, and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations. Jeremiah 25:8-9, New King James Version
Charles Dickens's David Copperfield catches the oily Uriah in a moment of candor. ‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says Father to me, ‘and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,’ says Father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad!” "It was the first time," reflects Copperfield as narrator, "it had ever occurred to me that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed."
In Jeremiah 25:8-9, the Lord rips out root and seed of similar vice, and shows His prerogative to instead plant and reap a harvest from less cooperative soil. He is, He tells Jeremiah, removing whole families from the surroundings in which they think themselves set apart to His service.
There, they have handed down at least the forms and the scripts of getting on in His service, this nominal humility which really excuses in their eyes the kind of selfish indulgence against which Jeremiah rails. Because they are God's people by location, by a religious observance here and there, they think they can spend the rest of their lives getting on as they will according to their pride and comfort.
God shows the folly of this bifurcated thinking not only by fiat, by declaring that He will uproot that which He planted and which presumed upon tomorrow, but by contrast. Compared to those who served nominally and then claimed association with the Temple as their free pass to sin, God shows what His undiluted sovereign grace looks like. While He can uproot those families it would seem He has spent centuries cultivating to serve, He can by an act of His will call Nebuchadnezzar into service.
My servant, He calls and re-creates, and that's what Nebuchadnezzar becomes in total. He wouldn't last a day in the Heep School of Getting On By Charm. He knows nothing of dissembling and half measures.
Nebuchadnezzar lurches from megalomania to the point of having a statue built and demanding its worship on pain of death to emphatic in his declaration for the Most High after his sanity and his power are taken from him, then returned in Daniel 4.
This is God's privilege, to cultivate servants for generations, or to turn away from the pride that can insert itself little by little in such a heritage. This is God's privilege, to bring forth service in an instant from a soft heart which heretofore has been rockhard, which can lay claim to no heritage but His instant touch and the resulting rebirth.
Declares Ambrose in On the Holy Spirit, “For the Holy Spirit is not subject to any foreign power or law, but is the Arbiter of His own freedom, dividing all things according to the decision of His own will, to each, as we read, severally as He wills. [ 1 Corinthians 12: 11]
So where are we in response? As we see God turn from people who would seem to make more logical, expedient servants, having been pampered by His blessings for years or even generations, does this cause us to pause? Do we expect the blessings without service? Perhaps worse, has the concurrence of blessings and service in our experience caused our manipulative hearts to assume cause and effect, to begin to believe and even to proclaim subtly that He is in our debt? Woe be unto us.
Might we see, then, both correction and cause for rejoicing when He brings forth the fruit of service from the nearest to Nebuchadnezzar's character in our experience? When He turns the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, for He still does, may we both be glad and confess that we have taken His favor for granted.
Where we recoil, though, from His electing love and call to service as though what is granted one is deprived unjustly from us, might we see and pray for deliverance from what is simply another form of Nebuchadnezzar's vainglory. Pride dressed up with venerable religiosity is still pride.
Charles Dickens's David Copperfield catches the oily Uriah in a moment of candor. ‘Be umble, Uriah,’ says Father to me, ‘and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,’ says Father, ‘and you’ll do!’ And really it ain’t done bad!” "It was the first time," reflects Copperfield as narrator, "it had ever occurred to me that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed."
In Jeremiah 25:8-9, the Lord rips out root and seed of similar vice, and shows His prerogative to instead plant and reap a harvest from less cooperative soil. He is, He tells Jeremiah, removing whole families from the surroundings in which they think themselves set apart to His service.
There, they have handed down at least the forms and the scripts of getting on in His service, this nominal humility which really excuses in their eyes the kind of selfish indulgence against which Jeremiah rails. Because they are God's people by location, by a religious observance here and there, they think they can spend the rest of their lives getting on as they will according to their pride and comfort.
God shows the folly of this bifurcated thinking not only by fiat, by declaring that He will uproot that which He planted and which presumed upon tomorrow, but by contrast. Compared to those who served nominally and then claimed association with the Temple as their free pass to sin, God shows what His undiluted sovereign grace looks like. While He can uproot those families it would seem He has spent centuries cultivating to serve, He can by an act of His will call Nebuchadnezzar into service.
My servant, He calls and re-creates, and that's what Nebuchadnezzar becomes in total. He wouldn't last a day in the Heep School of Getting On By Charm. He knows nothing of dissembling and half measures.
Nebuchadnezzar lurches from megalomania to the point of having a statue built and demanding its worship on pain of death to emphatic in his declaration for the Most High after his sanity and his power are taken from him, then returned in Daniel 4.
This is God's privilege, to cultivate servants for generations, or to turn away from the pride that can insert itself little by little in such a heritage. This is God's privilege, to bring forth service in an instant from a soft heart which heretofore has been rockhard, which can lay claim to no heritage but His instant touch and the resulting rebirth.
Declares Ambrose in On the Holy Spirit, “For the Holy Spirit is not subject to any foreign power or law, but is the Arbiter of His own freedom, dividing all things according to the decision of His own will, to each, as we read, severally as He wills. [ 1 Corinthians 12: 11]
So where are we in response? As we see God turn from people who would seem to make more logical, expedient servants, having been pampered by His blessings for years or even generations, does this cause us to pause? Do we expect the blessings without service? Perhaps worse, has the concurrence of blessings and service in our experience caused our manipulative hearts to assume cause and effect, to begin to believe and even to proclaim subtly that He is in our debt? Woe be unto us.
Might we see, then, both correction and cause for rejoicing when He brings forth the fruit of service from the nearest to Nebuchadnezzar's character in our experience? When He turns the heart of stone into a heart of flesh, for He still does, may we both be glad and confess that we have taken His favor for granted.
Where we recoil, though, from His electing love and call to service as though what is granted one is deprived unjustly from us, might we see and pray for deliverance from what is simply another form of Nebuchadnezzar's vainglory. Pride dressed up with venerable religiosity is still pride.
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