Jeremiah 27:13-15 – The Fatal Illusion of Sameness

13 Why will you die, you and your people, by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence, as the Lord has spoken against the nation that will not serve the king of Babylon? 14 Therefore do not listen to the words of the prophets who speak to you, saying, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon,’ for they prophesy a lie to you; 15 for I have not sent them,” says the Lord, “yet they prophesy a lie in My name, that I may drive you out, and that you may perish, you and the prophets who prophesy to you.” Jeremiah 27:13-15, New King James Version

When a parishioner in Max Lucado's A Christmas Candle recoils at the idea of electricity, still new, should illuminate THE CHURCH, the pastor rebuts succinctly. "I believe that the church should be the FIRST place to embrace the future."

Jeremiah 27:13-15 illustrates a definitive secondary cost when God's people don't embrace the future, jolting as it may be. We are just as likely as the citizens of Judah whose insistence about the future Jeremiah tried morning by morning to wear down to assume that God's sovereign presence means sameness. We craft theology to support it. His Temple is here, protesters told Jeremiah earlier, so stability is assured. As the heirs of such a speciousness, we can assume and declare the same immunity from uprooting because we know His Word, because we give to His work, or just because we are superficially identified with Him.

Change, received by our ego's immune system initially as a threat, is actually what we were created for. Our brains, Greg Carlson discerns in Sold on Language, go where they think they will, "get the most informational bang for the attentional buck." Thus, when the denizens of Judah resist Jeremiah's message that God is going to teach them about Himself by providing for them as exiles in a new land because this would require repentance which is a slow death to the ego, they still need novelty.

They find it, if not in God Who is ever new, in different voices declaring safety in sameness. Seeing their sheep-like qualities in advance to and through Jeremiah, "Do not listen." One of His greatest gifts after Calvary may be the privilege of choosing our focus on it, its precursors, and its reverberations. When He gives ears to hear, those ears can tune into the stroke of the hammer on the spikes which held our Savior's body in place, can proceed more music there than in the succession of contemporary songs which tell us there is salvation in sameness.

By the confrontational grace which insists, "Do not listen," and makes eventual imperviousness to the world's message possible, we can embrace the losses and upheaval of the moment as tools God uses to extricate His own from being entirely defined by the culture in which we have gotten comfortable. This seeming comfort, He knows, is slow, stultifying death whether there are Babylonian conquerors in our immediate future or not. Life, real life, is in change with its continual reliance on Him.

God is the Author of life. He knows what life is. In this unpolluted vitality, Christ cried before Jerusalem, seeming so stable and yet not far from falling, because her people did not know what constituted their peace. To them, change was death. To them, in the shallow soil their hearts, they could be easily persuaded Jesus was an instigator out to disturb what little real peace they could know. They, before the Resurrection, before the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, missed the point because they did not know the fullness of Who He was.

Now that His own know the fullness of His Resurrected, revivifying authority, do we live any differently? Do we, a little wiser by His grace day by day, choose life in Him rather than in propping up and pleading for the continuity of whatever circumstances make us comfortable? Do we grope for whatever, in sameness or sharp turns, shows more of Him?