Jeremiah 27:10 – Divinely Directed Dissonance

9 Therefore do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers, or your sorcerers, who speak to you, saying, “You shall not serve the king of Babylon.” 10 For they prophesy a lie to you, to remove you far from your land; and I will drive you out, and you will perish. Jeremiah 27: 9-10, New King James Version

"Perhaps," supposes Melvyn Bragg in The Adventure of English as to the hearts' contents of early English settlers in North America, "it was fear of the unknown that made them reach for old familiar names."

The same phenomenon, alas, may be at work in Jeremiah 27:10. Jeremiah's prediction of impending subservience to Babylon has startled his hearers. Magnified in their minds is the weariness of being driven to such a foreign and strange place.

By recourse and reflex, they will tend to reach for the familiar, God knows in advance. He knows the pull the spiritual "authorities" they already have in place will have on them in times of crisis, irrespective of the reality that these authorities have misled them into the need for stern correction.

Much of their collective heart, it seems, would rather trust humans as false shepherds soothing them with teaching that won't require as much stretching and change than trust the mysteries of God as Good Shepherd.

If relocation becomes a reality because of shifting geopolitics, they will heed these familiar teachers and find temporary safety in Egypt they think will be less wearying. As Jesus proclaims over Jerusalem alongside His own tears, they don't know what makes up their peace.

The desired permanence of the status quo is no less an illusion for us. We will be moved. Will it be the pragmatic, piecemeal stratagems of our own maneuvering that we hope will keep us as close to the familiar as possible? Or will we admit the bankruptcy of our own discernment and had that disapproved acumen replaced graciously with a sense of worshipful wonder that God would guide His own into and through the entirely unfamiliar?

In the abstract, the choice is easy. Reflecting on the implications of the printed page, we can sing with Audio Adrenaline's "Fire Never Sleeps" "Lord, I never want to miss You as something new is being born."

But the familiar, even the scraps of it we think we can lay claim to, has a hold on us. If we can't have Judah, and the Temple, and prosperity in this world, and the semblance of God reliance at least to the extent we satisfy our flesh, we would move incrementally toward as close a facsimile as possible instead of submitting holy to walk by faith.

We would, sooner rather than later, encounter the omniscient I of Jeremiah 27:10. Behind all the shifting circumstances, behind all of the schemes to deal with them one by one and thereby to lose the true freedom and safety we crave, behind these, never placated, is God Himself. He drives us out. He in the Person of the Spirit drove His very Son into the wilderness, away from false and temporary comforts and toward reliance on Him alone.

This, Christian, is our true heritage. We live by the Word which Christ lived by. When that Word affirms God's blessing in ways visible in this world, we rejoice. When that Word bids the end of one earthly act and the clearing of the stage before another begins, we wait and walk in faith.

God is bigger and better than the circumstances of a particular set-up He has used for a time. We stifle, then, our impulse to reach for what is most near and most familiar. We cry out, instead, directly to Him. Even so, come quickly. Show us as much of Yourself as You would.