Jeremiah 29:15-16 – Nearer Prophets

15 Because you have said, “The Lord has raised up prophets for us in Babylon”— 16 therefore thus says the Lord concerning the king who sits on the throne of David, concerning all the people who dwell in this city, and concerning your brethren who have not gone out with you into captivity— 17 thus says the Lord of hosts: Behold, I will send on them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make them like rotten figs that cannot be eaten, they are so bad. 18 And I will pursue them with the sword, with famine, and with pestilence; and I will deliver them to trouble among all the kingdoms of the earth—to be a curse, an astonishment, a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them. Jeremiah 29:15-18, New King James Version

Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker traces that the Renaissance was sparked, in part, by Petrarch's reading of ancient writers like Cicero. By this, Petrarch was confronted with how much his contemporary culture and degraded since then.

Jeremiah 29:15-16 shows the same distractible tendency in human hearts. Jeremiah foretold the exile to Babylon. He pleaded, morning after morning, with his countrymen to change their ways. Yet, those sent to Babylon have already settled in. They not only have prospered, as God through Jeremiah said they should, they have found prophets for themselves which saved them the inconvenience of listening to Jeremiah's call for submission to God Who reigns over all nations and locations.

Plutarch was so disgusted, chronicles Wright, with the decline that he took to writing letters to the ancients. We had the same chance to reengage with God through His Word, to deliberately turn aside from our fixation on novelty delivered by contemporary voices. The Bible God preserved and speaks through can check our ready and targeted tendency to find people who can feel our pain, who share the markers of our subgroup and will not challenge us with larger and more unsettling Truth.

The alternative, as God speaks it to Jeremiah in that very Word, is jarring. If we prize nearness of experience over God speaking through ages the reality that there is no shadow of turning in Him, God can demolish that idol. He can't drive us, He assures, to a place with no other familiar comfort than Himself. He likens those who purport that they can stay as they are, choosing their own channel for truth, to rotting figs, that perishable, that readily transformed from sweetness that by His grace can be a blessing into degradation and rottenness.

Either way, as Jeremiah often points out, God's honor is vindicated. Either way His message goes out. If His people live submitted lives and thrive in His blessing, they are a testimony of man's true purpose to the nations. If they don't, and if they suffer some fraction of the consequences, the nations will also notice that.

Why settle for the current topics of discussion, those momentarily viewed as wise? Why not repair to His Word, and then to those who have flourished in it from location to location, from life season to life season. The God Who prompted Jeremiah's letter to be delivered over hazardous miles has seen fit that we have tools Jeremiah could not have dreamed of to access the Bible and to access teachers who will challenge us to stay fixed to its changeless message.



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