Jeremiah 26:22-23 – Bothers or Bothers?
22 Then Jehoiakim the king sent men to Egypt: Elnathan the son of Achbor, and other men who went with him to Egypt. 23 And they brought Urijah from Egypt and brought him to Jehoiakim the king, who killed him with the sword and cast his dead body into the graves of the common people. Jeremiah 26:22-23, New King James Version
"If a man is alive," observes Henry David Thoreau in Walden, "there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs."
Jeremiah 26:22-23 seems to illustrate this parity. Urijah stood and delivered God's Word in his day with a confrontational boldness that reminded those recollecting his legacy of Jeremiah. But, while Jeremiah stayed to deal with the consequences, while he risked his personal safety to live among the people whose sin he pointed out, Urijah was the ring-and-run prophet. Disjointedly, he SAID God was in control, but he LIVED a different gospel. In life choices, he displayed unmistakably that he was in charge of protecting himself.
Beloved, it isn't as though God's sovereign protection doesn't extend into Egypt, a biblical type for the world. Joseph was carried there as a slave for the eventual good, he says, of God's covenant people. With a pragmatic heart not unlike Urijah's, lofty patriarchs Abraham and Isaac succumbed to the gravitational pull of security in this world to trek to Egypt when times got tough.
The twin sense of prioritizing one's personal vulnerability AND presuming that one can protect it with a change of this or that circumstance are at work here. Yes, God delivered Abraham and Isaac in spite of their seeking well-being where the world did. For all we know, Urijah may have been betting on a similar reaction from the God whom he served. We cannot, though, Paul says in Romans, sin and assume that we do so to the greater glory of God. Some may be rescued from the folly of the world's pull, and some may not.
Ours, then, is not to discern the end of the path but to, by faith, discern the direction of our steps while it is still called today, while God may still grant time to turn around. Do we stand on the bravest moments God has granted and chip away at that testimony without backsliding subsequent steps?
Do we pull up the home movies of our acts of faith in another era for those we can wrangle into watching them? Is any merit in this display distracted from as at the moment Francis Chan's Crazy Love says something is wrong because our life choices make a lot of sense to unbelievers?
Stand, then, on the boldest displays of faith to which your Father has called you. He may call you further on yet. Does the idea of discipling in families, and workplaces as your challenging words land seem intimidating, seem likely to expose your own ongoing need for God's grace? So be it, then.
Compare, for Urijah shows us there is no safety in blending in, no safety in slinking away from the setting into which one is called. For his divided impertinence, Scripture says he was cast into the grave with the common people of Judah. How much better, then, to live with, contend with them?
Brothers and sisters, as our bodies are subject to the same rot in death, our spirits are subject to the same troubles and in need of the same constant confession of Christ's supremacy. Why not live that out in year-in-and-year-out relationships as the Lord makes them possible and counter-cultural?
In such resolve, Paul says from the New Testament perspective, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Each day, each challenge, then, deepens our eagerness to be with Christ. Yet, as with Paul, we realize that each day we wake up with the same surroundings, playing a part in the sanctification of the same stubborn people is God's choice for His glory and our good. We put, then, back in perspective our instinct for self-preservation.
Steven Ambrose helps in Band of Brothers. He voices the divided desires of his World War II soldiers, not unlike those which pull at one who is in but not of the world, invested in relationships which are at risk. "Anything was better than blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body," Ambrose writes, anything, that is, except letting down their buddies."
As with Jeremiah, and so much more with Christ, and less like Urijah day by day, we use the day's mercies to intercede, persuade, and convince without giving our hearts away to the ease we perpetually and distractedly suppose lies over the horizon.
"If a man is alive," observes Henry David Thoreau in Walden, "there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs."
Jeremiah 26:22-23 seems to illustrate this parity. Urijah stood and delivered God's Word in his day with a confrontational boldness that reminded those recollecting his legacy of Jeremiah. But, while Jeremiah stayed to deal with the consequences, while he risked his personal safety to live among the people whose sin he pointed out, Urijah was the ring-and-run prophet. Disjointedly, he SAID God was in control, but he LIVED a different gospel. In life choices, he displayed unmistakably that he was in charge of protecting himself.
Beloved, it isn't as though God's sovereign protection doesn't extend into Egypt, a biblical type for the world. Joseph was carried there as a slave for the eventual good, he says, of God's covenant people. With a pragmatic heart not unlike Urijah's, lofty patriarchs Abraham and Isaac succumbed to the gravitational pull of security in this world to trek to Egypt when times got tough.
The twin sense of prioritizing one's personal vulnerability AND presuming that one can protect it with a change of this or that circumstance are at work here. Yes, God delivered Abraham and Isaac in spite of their seeking well-being where the world did. For all we know, Urijah may have been betting on a similar reaction from the God whom he served. We cannot, though, Paul says in Romans, sin and assume that we do so to the greater glory of God. Some may be rescued from the folly of the world's pull, and some may not.
Ours, then, is not to discern the end of the path but to, by faith, discern the direction of our steps while it is still called today, while God may still grant time to turn around. Do we stand on the bravest moments God has granted and chip away at that testimony without backsliding subsequent steps?
Do we pull up the home movies of our acts of faith in another era for those we can wrangle into watching them? Is any merit in this display distracted from as at the moment Francis Chan's Crazy Love says something is wrong because our life choices make a lot of sense to unbelievers?
Stand, then, on the boldest displays of faith to which your Father has called you. He may call you further on yet. Does the idea of discipling in families, and workplaces as your challenging words land seem intimidating, seem likely to expose your own ongoing need for God's grace? So be it, then.
Compare, for Urijah shows us there is no safety in blending in, no safety in slinking away from the setting into which one is called. For his divided impertinence, Scripture says he was cast into the grave with the common people of Judah. How much better, then, to live with, contend with them?
Brothers and sisters, as our bodies are subject to the same rot in death, our spirits are subject to the same troubles and in need of the same constant confession of Christ's supremacy. Why not live that out in year-in-and-year-out relationships as the Lord makes them possible and counter-cultural?
In such resolve, Paul says from the New Testament perspective, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Each day, each challenge, then, deepens our eagerness to be with Christ. Yet, as with Paul, we realize that each day we wake up with the same surroundings, playing a part in the sanctification of the same stubborn people is God's choice for His glory and our good. We put, then, back in perspective our instinct for self-preservation.
Steven Ambrose helps in Band of Brothers. He voices the divided desires of his World War II soldiers, not unlike those which pull at one who is in but not of the world, invested in relationships which are at risk. "Anything was better than blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body," Ambrose writes, anything, that is, except letting down their buddies."
As with Jeremiah, and so much more with Christ, and less like Urijah day by day, we use the day's mercies to intercede, persuade, and convince without giving our hearts away to the ease we perpetually and distractedly suppose lies over the horizon.
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