Jeremiah 26:10-11 – My Wounds, or Christ's Worth?
10 When the princes of Judah heard these things, they came up from the king’s house to the house of the Lord and sat down in the entry of the New Gate of the Lord’s house. 11 And the priests and the prophets spoke to the princes and all the people, saying, “This man deserves to die! For he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your ears.” Jeremiah 26:10-11, New King James Version
"In television, as in politics," connects Kasey S. Pipes in the Nixon conclusion After the Fall, "a person explaining is a person losing."
In Jeremiah 26:10-11, we see the loss in more scarring terms that immediate competitive disadvantage. Yes, strictly speaking, the party who has to turn his or her attention to justifying past actions rather than inspiring toward future goals is losing. But here, and in every like, sad reenactment, the loss is more grievous.
The attention of fallen man in particular is so fleeting. The consideration of spiritual things is so awkward, so fatiguing for him. It would not happen but for the grace of God. When it does, biblically there is a particular urgency. While it is called today, pleads James earnestly. He who has ears to hear, preaches Jesus.
What a wretched disaster, then, when the princes of the culture are drawn to what is happening in the spiritual estate, the people follow in their wake! What they find among those of us who are spiritual is no more healthy than in the culture at large. We bite and devour such that, as here, we actually seek to enlist the powers of the culture to validate our recitation of the argument.
Paul was similarly vexed in the New Testament that those he influenced, being prepared, he says, to judge the angels, went to the world to resolve their disputes. They drug each other to court. Caught up in insisting on competitive advantage over one another, they lost sight of the ultimate prize that is Christ and His capacity to make up for whatever was lost should we submit that His honor is more important than our victory.
What's the remedy? It's not to leave unaddressed the kinds of vital spiritual differences that are at stake in Jeremiah 26:10-11. That is to buy a kind of generic civil religion before the influencers of the culture are ever enlisted.
The remedy is, beloved, to keep God's rightness before our eyes, and to expect Him to bring to our attention areas in which our thought and practice differs from His perfection. Wounding as it is to our pride, He may even use somebody with Jeremiah's lack of tact to do it. He may, as Paul was led to do with Peter in Acts, see fit to point out our errors in public.
In such a situation, or preparing our hearts for such a situation, Jeremy Camp is right in his song, "All the Time." He prays, "Words are wasted when I don't speak of all Your wonders within our reach." Confronted, we can worship. Convicted, we can worship.
Called to tear down layers of cultural assumptions in forthright language which strikes our "loyal" ears as treasonous, we can worship. There is greater honor at stake than ours. There is greater honor at stake than our patriotism.
Thus resolved before the air smells of spiritual gunpowder, we can discern the sweetness of God's scent and insist on it even when we are told by a brave brother that we stink. With His glory ever on our horizon, the painful look-around to see what people notice the relatively momentary humiliation of our correction will not be all-consuming. We will not, as Spurgeon says in his sermon "The Snare and the Fowler," "amuse the devil and indulge the combative principles of certain religionists who like nothing better than quarreling."
Seeing the advance of God's reputation as the golden thread of history's continuity, it will be this to which we revert when confronted, this the ointment we seek when scraped by disputes. We will, knowing the welcome awaiting us in the Presence, go even with those who accuse us in His Name to seek the restoration of the individual parties and of the cordial union which pleases Him like oil running down Aaron's beard.
"In television, as in politics," connects Kasey S. Pipes in the Nixon conclusion After the Fall, "a person explaining is a person losing."
In Jeremiah 26:10-11, we see the loss in more scarring terms that immediate competitive disadvantage. Yes, strictly speaking, the party who has to turn his or her attention to justifying past actions rather than inspiring toward future goals is losing. But here, and in every like, sad reenactment, the loss is more grievous.
The attention of fallen man in particular is so fleeting. The consideration of spiritual things is so awkward, so fatiguing for him. It would not happen but for the grace of God. When it does, biblically there is a particular urgency. While it is called today, pleads James earnestly. He who has ears to hear, preaches Jesus.
What a wretched disaster, then, when the princes of the culture are drawn to what is happening in the spiritual estate, the people follow in their wake! What they find among those of us who are spiritual is no more healthy than in the culture at large. We bite and devour such that, as here, we actually seek to enlist the powers of the culture to validate our recitation of the argument.
Paul was similarly vexed in the New Testament that those he influenced, being prepared, he says, to judge the angels, went to the world to resolve their disputes. They drug each other to court. Caught up in insisting on competitive advantage over one another, they lost sight of the ultimate prize that is Christ and His capacity to make up for whatever was lost should we submit that His honor is more important than our victory.
What's the remedy? It's not to leave unaddressed the kinds of vital spiritual differences that are at stake in Jeremiah 26:10-11. That is to buy a kind of generic civil religion before the influencers of the culture are ever enlisted.
The remedy is, beloved, to keep God's rightness before our eyes, and to expect Him to bring to our attention areas in which our thought and practice differs from His perfection. Wounding as it is to our pride, He may even use somebody with Jeremiah's lack of tact to do it. He may, as Paul was led to do with Peter in Acts, see fit to point out our errors in public.
In such a situation, or preparing our hearts for such a situation, Jeremy Camp is right in his song, "All the Time." He prays, "Words are wasted when I don't speak of all Your wonders within our reach." Confronted, we can worship. Convicted, we can worship.
Called to tear down layers of cultural assumptions in forthright language which strikes our "loyal" ears as treasonous, we can worship. There is greater honor at stake than ours. There is greater honor at stake than our patriotism.
Thus resolved before the air smells of spiritual gunpowder, we can discern the sweetness of God's scent and insist on it even when we are told by a brave brother that we stink. With His glory ever on our horizon, the painful look-around to see what people notice the relatively momentary humiliation of our correction will not be all-consuming. We will not, as Spurgeon says in his sermon "The Snare and the Fowler," "amuse the devil and indulge the combative principles of certain religionists who like nothing better than quarreling."
Seeing the advance of God's reputation as the golden thread of history's continuity, it will be this to which we revert when confronted, this the ointment we seek when scraped by disputes. We will, knowing the welcome awaiting us in the Presence, go even with those who accuse us in His Name to seek the restoration of the individual parties and of the cordial union which pleases Him like oil running down Aaron's beard.
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