Jeremiah 29:21-23 – Vigilance Against the Short-Cycle "Gospel

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning Ahab the son of Kolaiah, and Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah, who prophesy a lie to you in My name: Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he shall slay them before your eyes. And because of them a curse shall be taken up by all the captivity of Judah who are in Babylon, saying, “The LORD make you like Zedekiah and Ahab, whom the king of Babylon roasted in the fire”; because they have done disgraceful things in Israel, have committed adultery with their neighbors’ wives, and have spoken lying words in My name, which I have not commanded them. Indeed I know, and am a witness, says the LORD.”‭‭ Jeremiah 29:21-23, New King James Version

"Like all people at all times," William Manchester writes of his subjects in Europe's Middle Ages in The World Lit Only by Fire, "they were confronted each day by the present which always arrives in a promiscuous rush, with the significant, the trivial, the profound, and fatuous all tangled together."

Manchester's loaded adjective "promiscuous" is particularly helpful as we consider the same trap in Jeremiah 29:21-23. The trend of false prophecy, as we have seen in Jeremiah 28, is to insist that the goodness of God MUST be expressed in a shortened exile. Within two years, the message went, the vessels of the Temple will be back in their place. Jeremiah's warning that the people should prepare for seventy years of correction was an overreaction, the welcomed conventional wisdom went.

Should we be surprised, then, that the practice of the false prophets went along with their preaching? Should we be surprised that as false prophets proclaimed a short-cycle "gospel" closure to instant satisfaction that their lifestyle choices would flow from where their hope is? Two of these prophets, then, are revealed as compounding the sin of misused influence by committing adultery. While undermining God's authority to control and announce what will happen with His people in the current generation, they are also defacing marriage, which the New Testament will reveal to be a picture of Christ and the Church.

"The politician," Gordon S. Wood in Vineyard of Liberty reminds us, "dwells in the everlasting now." There will always be those who purport to spiritual leadership who are part politician, who know what people want to hear and who are committed to delivering it. Hardship will last much longer, they are ready to proclaim. God owes us deliverance, indulgence. We need not stretch and change, seek His grace and His face to re-center.

Blessedly, God is more stubborn and more present than this seemingly evergreen succession of charlatans. Where His Truth is contradicted, He is active. He identifies with Israel even when it is but a conquered province and with His eternally spotless Church even when her compromised state seems more evident. Even when prophetic status is a jumbled, noisy contention of the true and the false, He so controls circumstances and attention that He can inhabit the discourse of the common people, as when they remind each other of the fate of the faithless Zedekiah and Ahab. As Acts will proclaim centuries later, looking back, He has never left Himself without a witness.

As alluring as the shortest possible route to comfort is, He places His witness between his people and buying into it completely. For the Christian, indeed, He places the cross is an everlasting testament to the reality that holiness often comes through suffering rather than through circumventing it. If we suffer with Him, assures inspired Paul in Romans 8, we shall also be like Him.

When those in influence present a different message with their words or with their lives, we know better. We can listen beneath their louder, more lavish testimony, for the Word of the Christ Who, though rich, for our sakes became poor.

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