Jeremiah 27:11 – Under New Management

11 But the nations that bring their necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will let them remain in their own land,’ says the Lord, ‘and they shall till it and dwell in it.’ ” ’ ”Jeremiah 27:11, New King James Version

"Meaning is not something you stumble across," insists John Gardner quoted in Stretch: How to Future-Proof Your Career, "like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build in your life. You build it on your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of your experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you."

Many of us are waiting to stumble across meaning in some exotic encounter. We are waiting to be sent somewhere, and there, amid new surroundings, new ingredients to find that we are becoming new. We are waiting to be acted upon.

Jeremiah 27:11 suggests differently, and with human-centered language surprisingly similar to that of Gardner. Through Jeremiah, God comprehensive call to the nations is to to put their collective necks under Nebuchadnezzar's yoke right where they are. God challenges that in submitting to God's purposes through this conqueror Judah's farmers can break new ground in the hardness of their hearts right where they are.

Newness, it seems, is here to be found in victory over one's will rather than in a new locale. For, this is what the neck represents, as when God tells Moses that he leads a stiff-necked people. As we realize the limitations that our stubborn reactions place upon us and resolve to submit that God can use even unpleasant aspects of our current surroundings, He can make new out of the old.

He need not transport us somewhere else to put us under new management. If we, by His grace, train our hearts to see Him in both His over-familiar Creation and in the succession of flawed humans He puts in charge of it and in charge of us, we buy this process already have our faith passport punched.

God is so sure of His work He declares it under multiple degrees of difficulty in Jeremiah 27:11, using the principle of Eastern storytelling Matthew Sink connects as greater to less. If I can bring about My purposes under these circumstances, God teaches, he can do it anywhere.

Here, His test is using "the nations," a polyglot lot with varying exposure to Him. Acts will stay in the New Testament that He has never left anyone entirely without a witness, but He is also choosing to overlook blatant idolatry which would seem to make these unpromising test cases. Nevertheless, God insists that He can show His goodness here. If consistently among these wide-ranging variables, then how certainly among His people?

Likewise, God is showing His authority through Nebuchadnezzar. Working from the greater to the less, this is an assertion in itself. If He can work through a man who, until God intervenes, seeks the gratification of his own ego rather than the good of his people or the glory of God, how much more will God show of Himself under what we would see as more ideal conditions, with a leader, say, with some reverence for His Word at some awareness of being made in His image and placed for His purposes?

There is even a degree of challenge to God's Jeremiah 27:11 work in what would seem to be its grace. They moved to a new and strange place would force men to recalculate, to reconsider beliefs, practices, and associations. Yet, God says He will accomplish real newness for these farmers in the same place in which they felt comfortable resisting Him. Wake up in the same setting, but if the will changes, all is new. Undertake the habits of the same profession, but if the will changes such that we see these rhythms as part of the glory of God and a grateful response to it, all is new.

What is, to use Steven Johnson's loaded phrase, the adjacent possible for us? What is the yoke before us, the restrictive, humbling, sometimes seemingly secular habit to which we are called to submit, but by which God pledges Himself to make even the familiar new again? Christian, unpleasant as this seems, He has already done so much more.

We come from nations erring and resisting Him in various ways, yet He has already proven able to make a people who were not a people. He has already proven able to use leaders from pharaohs, to Cyrus, to, yes,, Nebuchadnezzar. Should we doubt that He can use submission to today's yoke and today's holders of power to grant us a perspective which would behold Him more gloriously? His work is not limited to certain precincts. In Him, as Phil Wickham declares in his song "Wide Awake," "the holy place invades the human soul."

Nowhere is this proven more elegantly and eloquently, of course, then in the subtle splendor of the Incarnation. Christ came near in every sense. He lived among a humble, conquered people. He assembled stories out of the lives of farmers not unlike those in Jeremiah 27:11, reasserting the usefulness of common circumstances, in the hand of God, to be put to uncommon purposes. In Him, people will be drawn from "the nations" to adore Him together. Even kings as imposing as Nebuchadnezzar will worship His true splendor.