Jeremiah 29:4 – Centering on Cause

4 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon… Jeremiah 29:4, New King James Version

Spurgeon calls out to God in his sermon "Faith in Perfection," "Forsake me not in my sorrows, lest I murmur against him. Forsake me not in the day of my repentance, lest I lose the hope of pardon, and fall into despair."

Jeremiah 29:4 shows with compelling succinctness how far from forsaken we are in such states. In His message to and through Jeremiah, God not only calls His people away from the Bog of Despond. This in itself would be more mercy than we deserve. If His call to His people were, from a distance between His holy bliss and the despair we have brought upon ourselves as surely as the citizens of Judah deserve exile, this were enough to prove His character.

Yet, in two side-by-side phrases but preamble to His actual message, God teaches holy resilience. He shows the darkened minds of his people, darker by practiced indifference to Him how to think again. He models the words of resolve that come from a heart which is on the mend by grace.

The first phrase in description of his people's predicament is passive. They, we, WERE carried away. There is no agency. Looking back, we tell ourselves, we tell Him, we tell the watching nations that we are buffeted by random circumstance. We buy in to and further the existentialism as ubiquitous as air around us. We dodge blame, but we also evade hope.

The first phrasing is not untrue. God is not a man that he should lie. His people were carried away captive. But note the clarity, the power, in His second pass over there, and our common situation. I… HAVE… CAUSED pulsates through the rest of His description. His people are not random recipients. They are deliberate, if dilatory, disciples. What happens, beloved, happens by His hand.

Note that this time there are place names. In the first capturing of bewildered, depressive outpouring, origin and destination are vague. His people, once knowing they were the apple of His eye, are unmoored, adrift. God lets this linger a breath, just long enough to have its effect and to allow Jeremiah's hearers to identify with it.

Then God not only signs His work as the cause of His people's circumstances, He puts them in context. This is where you came from, He says with Parental assurance, and this is where you are going. Dizziness, dissonance in your experience does not equate to disorientation in Mine. I know right where you are on My sanctification timeline.

Lack we, brothers and sisters, the precise FROM and TO repeatedly told to the people of Judah, and repeated here by grace? Fret not, for our ultimate TO is on that far celestial shoreline, and our welcome is as sure as our destination. If there are intervening waves, He owns and names them to His purposes, as able to calm them with a word as He was in the boat with the disciples.

Thus reminded by the exquisite therapy of the Wonderful, Counselor, we word our way on the waves differently. Rich Mullins helps us when we can't see the shoreline, insisting to himself and to us in "My Deliverer Is Coming," "I will never doubt His promise, though I doubt my heart, I doubt my eyes."

If we violate this resolve, if doubt occurs to us, let us not embed it more deeply in our hearts by speaking as though we were forsaken. Even our words have been bought. Even they can serve a redeemed purpose and remind us that what comes to us comes to us by the hand of a loving God.

Even within the enforced pith of a four-minute song, just as within the brief comparison of Jeremiah 29:4, neither God's business nor the Christian's is to ignore the reality of despair. Rather, we cry out from it by faith, believing that even its gripping signals can remind us we were created for more than we are now experiencing. needtobreathe rallies us in "Be Here Long." "Though my heart may BE in pieces, my eyes are still fixed on You."

For, in Jeremiah 29:4, we have One Who understands out griefs, bears them, and yet with unique God Man empathy, calls us beyond them. Even when bold action, or even a sense of normal agency, seems beyond us, by His power and His example, we can change how we think. The speech that flows from the renewing of our minds can declare Him as Cause, now and forever more.