Jeremiah 28:16-17 – A False Clock

 16 Therefore thus says the Lord: ‘Behold, I will cast you from the face of the earth. This year you shall die, because you have taught rebellion against the Lord.’ ”

17 So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month. Jeremiah 28:16-17, New King James Version

Bob Dylan describes much of the human condition in his song, "Restless Farewell." He realizes, "A false clock tries to tick out my time."

So Jeremiah 28:16-17 reveals. Faithful Jeremiah has insisted on the Lord's message that the exile will last 70 years, longer than the lives of many of his hearers. Though he has simultaneously conveyed the Lord's mercy that God will continue to provide for His people in a strange land, indeed that their prosperity there will be a testimony, the people continue to be open to alternative messages. Hananiah provides.

He points to Dylan's false clock. He comforts the people that the trouble will be over within two years, setting before them expectations that are humanly manageable. One can sense the collective sigh of relief, the ripple of approval as he breaks Jeremiah's yoke signifying that the Lord works through hardship which lasts longer than human bearers would choose.

Jeremiah 28:16-17 refocuses, though, on the right clock, comparatively the only one that matters. Hananiah can gather a following based on the difference between two years of correction and seventy. The difference seems alluring to comfort-seeking humans. But, at the Word of the Lord, Hananiah himself is gathered. he dies. His message is undermined, and the people who once flocked to him are offered a reminder of their distractibility from existential questions.

We need the same reminder. “Dying, that most worrisome thing,” compares Geoff Dyer in The New Yorker, “occupies less head space than the most minute things.” Unable to manage death on our terms, congenitally unwilling to face our accountability to God, we manufacture other measures. How much comfort can I get in the meantime? How much can I make of the most minute things? What charismatic spokesperson can rally my flagging soul, aware despite my efforts at willful obfuscation that it will return to and be judged by God?

"In moments of clarity, and those by the grace of God, we join John Piper's prayer in 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die. "I pray that the fog of indifference to eternal things,"would be lifted, and  that the reality of heaven and hell would become clear. I pray that the  centrality of Jesus in history would become plain, and that his death  would be seen as the most important event that ever happened. Grant  that we will be able to walk along the cliff of eternity, where the wind  blows crystal-clear with truth."  

That fog cleared by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, all other timelines are comparatively trivial. All other intermediate comforts, save faith's insistence on the comfort in the arms of Jesus, are virtually irrelevant. When we experience earthly oases which remind us of His goodness, when we get a tangible sense that He stands between us and the fullness of the punishment we deserve, we rejoice. Yet we are not home.

We are, while in this flesh, at war. The comforts of home vie for our hearts at least as much as reminders of the inconveniences of exile. How long each session lasts is comparatively trivial, for perseverance whether measured in minutes or decades is found only in Him. As William Manchester in Goodbye Darkness reminds of literal warfare, "There are no clocks on battlefields."

What we know, then, is this second. Let us, while it is called today, while it is called now, depend upon Christ alone. He is the steadfast grace by Whom we experience continuity. He is our ballast as life moves us across stormy seas to contemplate the unfamiliar. But a brief interval, and we will be before Him where Hananiah is found wanting, but where generations reckoned aliens and strangers by Earth will at last enjoy a home from which none can unsettle us.