Jeremiah 28:13-14 – The Path of Perfect Anger

13 “Go and tell Hananiah, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord: “You have broken the yokes of wood, but you have made in their place yokes of iron.” 14 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “I have put a yoke of iron on the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him. I have given him the beasts of the field also.” ’ ”Jeremiah 28:13-14, New King James Version

"He prepared a path for his anger," phrases the opening of Psalm 78:50 cogently in the New King James Version. Human anger explodes and splatters in reaction, falling far short of Aristotle's goal of being angry in the right way, at the right time, and at the right target. But God's anger is perfect, proportional, and just.

So comes the progression of Jeremiah 28:13-14. He presents His people with Jeremiah, confrontation on their own scale, in their own dialect, from among their brethren. As they ignore this specifically dosed-out mercy, God tells Jeremiah to use a prop, a sort of parable, to get their attention. Perhaps, He has been holding over his prophet as He charges his men to engage again and again, they will repent.

Perhaps the play's the thing wherewith to catch the conscience of fallen kings, the erstwhile heirs to Lord Adam and Lady Eve. He plays out, brothers and sisters, stories before us with at least as much compelling creativity as He displayed with Jeremiah. Will pick up hints to the one, great Gospel story from Shakespeare? Will we learn from television? Will we learn from friends and brethren like us in so many ways whom he sends to play out before us the cost of sin without, by His forbearance, the yoke ever touching our neck?

We are the workers in the vineyard in Christ's chilling parable. The Master of the vineyard has sent workers to remind us of our due, and we have ignored them. We have, in a sense, killed them by ignoring the image of God on men and His uses of them to call us to repent. Yet He still calls, still schemes. Like that Master, He reasons, surely they will not reject My Son. Yet we do. He is not novel now. In the darkness of our minds, we connect rejecting His prerogatives with laying claim to Earth and all its pleasures ourselves.

Thus confronted, will we continue to change the channel, break the yoke, thinking that by negating the picture of this particular consequence we allay our guilt before God? Will we continue to dismiss His variegated confrontations of our sin nature until those sanctions actually begin to touch us, to restrict us more and more heavily like a yoke of iron? How gentle and preparatory someone else's yoke of wood will seem in retrospect! Will we realize with Otto von Bismarck, only too late, "Any fool can learn from his own mistakes. We want to learn from the mistakes of others."

The consequences of practice and progressive indifference are drastic. By individuals not repenting, a whole nation fell and was uprooted. By parents not repenting, children were born in exile and closed their parents' eyes in a strange land. For those who got to come back after the 70 years of exile were completed, they wept over the destroyed Temple and over the small beginnings they must now undertake.

Even more completely, beloved, Psalm 78:50, echoed by Romans later, warns of sin's ultimate consequences. They aren't manageable, a yoke of wood to be broken as an inconvenient reminder some other impolite soul brings before us. They are mortal. The psalmist concludes what comes down to us as the end of that verse with the reminder God did not spare His people from death and actively, sovereignly gave them over to the plague."

Yes, but for God's intervention between even the lost and the plague that connects sin and death, all would perish. That He has spared the indifferent heretofore shows what Ambrose implores in On Repentance." "He waits for our tears, that He may pour forth His goodness."

That goodness calls to us at least as compellingly as looming judgment. "The vial of wrath drops," compares Mercy and Truth of God by Thomas Watson, "but the fountain of mercy runs." If He will employ a yoke of wood, then a yoke of iron, move kings and nations to vindicate His glory when we prefer ought to Him, how many variables is He moving to woo our physical hearts? How many sunrises has He resiliently raised over the just and the unjust is a beacon of His mercies which are new every morning, lunch dented by our last rejection?