Jeremiah 28:1-4 – Man's Myopia

And it happened in the same year, at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year and in the fifth month, that Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet, who was from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord in the presence of the priests and of all the people, saying, 2 “Thus speaks the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, saying: ‘I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. 3 Within two full years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. 4 And I will bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, with all the captives of Judah who went to Babylon,’ says the Lord, ‘for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.’ ”Jeremiah 28:1-4, New King James Version

"Men are prone to estimate sins, not by reference to their inherent sinfulness," follows Augustine in On Christian Doctrine, "but rather by reference to their own customs. It frequently happens," he ascertains, "that a man will think nothing blameable except what the men of his own country and time are accustomed to condemn, and nothing worthy of praise or approval except what is sanctioned by the custom of his companions."

So it is, then, that an alternative voice is allowed to rise up and contradict Jeremiah's message to his face. Hananiah offers a shortcut to sanctification. Instead of the 70 years of exile God has been proclaiming through Jeremiah, Hananiah contends that a sense of normalcy will be restored within two years, as measured by the resilient metrics of the restoration of the Temple vessels.

Hananiah's lies have a home-field advantage, as Augustine indicated. They play to the people's sense that their sins are no worse than the people's around them. They play to the popular tendency to measure sin and its consequences within human norms. Two years is enough, they placate themselves. Seventy? What could people learn from that which exceeds their own lifetime?

They lose sight of an end beyond human education and incrementally measurable cultural progress. They distract themselves from the cosmic treason which sin is against a holy God. They look, then, for more proportionate responses to what they see as slight wrongs. Hananiah springing from two generations in the prophet's business seems venerable in their eyes when they don't spend time contemplating God as Alpha and Omega, beginning and end Whose purposes are more majestic than course corrections to vindicate one culture.

"Error is a spiritual bastard," confronts Thomas Watson in The Art of Contentment. His genealogy assigns, "The devil is in his father and pride its mother." This parentage is infinitely more important than the religious credentials of the family whose heirs we choose to listen to. This parentage, the just and compounding consequences of depravity, is infinitely more important than how closely connected we are to upstanding individuals of the past generation or two.

Our predicament is that which Hananiah has forgotten. We, in fact, are Gibeonites. We are owed nothing. God's just wrath, forestalled for generations, is coming. We collude in our conniving powers for human favor to be on the right side of history. We may fool even spiritual men, as the Gibeonites fooled Joshua into arriving at an alliance, but this does not constitute righteousness before God. Such conviction, such desperation, however, may, by his grace, be used to move us toward confession of our abject need for Him.

For, after the fooled Joshua, the Gibeonites indeed found security before God by faith. Despite their history of trickery, despite their foreign family tree, they served Him generation after generation. Indeed, when King Saul turned against them, God was their defender. Hananiah has forgotten. His cheery message of short-term deliverance obscures that he is able to stand in God's Temple at all by mercy alone.

That mercy looked forward, not to the piddly payment of two years in God's penalty box but to Calvary, the declaration of fully satisfied righteousness which would make a people out of those who were not a people, Gibeonites as well as Israelites, and unite us in the steadfast declaration that we serve at His pleasure rather than by our own maneuvering.