Jeremiah 28:7-8 – The Word's Perspective Beyond the Personal

“Nevertheless hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people: The prophets who have been before me and before you of old prophesied against many countries and great kingdoms—of war and disaster and pestilence.”‭‭Jeremiah‬ 28:7-8, New King James Version

I was wallowing. I had just been removed from a job role for which I had high hopes. Just as I would counsel students or clients not to do, I was connecting this painful instance to a larger, personal pattern. It's who I am. It's the impact of my disability. I could have. I would have. I should have.

The administrator kindly and bravely delivering the news wouldn't buy in. Keeping his calm rather than piling on, he gave the wide-angle perspective of gracious analysis. He said the job I had been trying gamely to do was a difficult one. It had eaten up others without some of my particular challenges.

There was an odd encouragement in this, and much the same dynamic is at work in Jeremiah 28:7-8. Jeremiah, for once, is the calm one in the conversation. As well aware as he is of the fraught emotional dynamics in the two-sided confrontation as He has been striving with his people, as ready as he has been to obediently list their particular contemporary offenses against the glory of the God He serves, Jeremiah frames the issue as bigger than a matter of current events and failings.

This has happened before, he says. The same message has gone out from prophets who predated me, he reminds, and to hearts struggling with the same issues before yours. Heart-rending as Judah's particular failure in the shadow of the Temple and in possession of the Word has been to him, and to us in retrospect, the failure isn't especially the phenomenon of one setting.

Jeremiah backs up. His indictment is as sweeping as is the implicit hope on the other side of it. Lest we get caught up in the confrontation between Jeremiah and Judah, or even between the prophetic line and the whole kingdom of Israel, Jeremiah frames a more existential struggle.

Sidelining the egos currently involved in Jeremiah 28, the prophet pauses to note that the chasm he and his contemporary audience are staring into is the gap between God and man. This, as my compassionate former boss would put it, has eaten up other people before.

We can err in maintaining our blissful unwillingness to admit that sin's verdict applies to us in particular practices. Or, we can begin to list, and never stop. We can be so consumed with twisting our own flaws and diagnoses, our personal pattern of mistakes, that we neglect a great salvation.

Ours is a human problem requiring a human solution. God became Man. He taught that we would unlearn and relearn, but His mission was about more than education. He confronted His people that they would see the responsibility which comes along with possession of the Word, but His mission was about more than accountability and guilt. His mission reverberated beyond the streets that heard His particular indictments.

He came by His regenerative righteousness to make a people that were not a people. He came to bridge the gap even our betters could not bridge if every would have, should have, could have our condemning conscience presents went differently, we STILL would not have as steady a ground for real hope as we have in Christ.

Our hope in Him is so steady, we can even see our forebeaers with grace, a  this age of blaming previous generations sorely needs. Jeremiah says it. The same Gospel which confronts, convicts, and conforms us did the same effectual work with our ancestors. Yes, our particular sins are different. Theirs are alien and abhorrent to us. Likewise, should Christ tarry, the generations after us will pass judgment on the practices our consciences didn't scrutinize.

It is the enemy's business to obscure this pattern, to make sure we don't come to Paul's settlement in 1 Timothy 1 that our ancestors served God with a clear conscience, perhaps with the addendum that if they did not, the issue is between God and them. His servants stand or fall Before Him, not us.

Says CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape, Hell's culture-influencing forces would present each age with a partial Jesus confirming the aspects of righteousness to which we most readily and without recognized need of His righteousness cohere. Where we admire that caricature, we fail to see the holistic pattern to which Jeremiah 28:7-8 points.

Each age in turn, this verse is insist, has found true righteousness beyond its reach. The cultural particulars done well, done poorly, done in outright rebellion against the Creator, may vary. The dialects in which God engages, faithfully never leaving Himself without a witness, have also varied.

The end is the same. While we point at one another in a horizontal, human-to-human struggle, the point is to look UP in mutual need, to look up in confession, and then look up because our redemption, in Christ rather than cultural tweaks or contests of comparative righteousness, draws near. With a beat of mutual silence as temperatures and pulses rise, the Holy Spirit's work may be of a Jeremiah 28:7-8 nature, reminding us of the ancient pedigree and true goal of our struggle.