Jeremiah 30:15 – Goading toward Godly Sorrow

15
Why do you cry about your affliction?
Your sorrow is incurable.
Because of the multitude of your iniquities,
Because your sins have increased,
I have done these things to you. Jeremiah 30:15, New King James Version

"Crying is all right in its way while it lasts," writes CS Lewis in The Silver Chair. "But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do."

Thus God in Jeremiah 30:15 insists that we make the most of our times of tears. His pointed question is as to their source. Why are you crying? What is causing the dissonance between where you want to be and where you are?

Our motivations for crying are as ambiguous as the heart from which they flow. Jerry Bridges confesses in The Pursuit of Holiness, "Even our tears of repentance need to be washed in the blood of the Lamb." We need to be told in no uncertain terms, as God conveys through Jeremiah, that whatever emotional catharsis we may experience, whatever impression we may make on other people as to our soft hearts as related by the tears on our faces, they don't solve the problem. Our sorrow, apart from repentance flowing from a new heart, and this granted by God, is incurable.

The stormy experience in times of tears foists forward the opportunity to work through and to shed our excuses along with the output of our lacrimal glands. This is the bottom-line diagnosis toward which God goads His people. 

 Sin increases suffering, He says. In Romans, God will equate through Paul that the wages of sin is death. Washing our faces from our teary output gives us a chance to look in the mirror. Our sins make more and more obvious the gap between us and God's holiness which only He can bridge. Are we, we must ask ourselves, crying for removal of the consequences we deserve, or are we crying out for the interposition of God's holy undeserved grace?

True rest, true solace, comes only as we realize and confess the absolute sovereignty of God. We anchor into a sure foundation only as we stop blaming other people, or temporary circumstances, and insist on declaring to our storming heart and to the distractible world that God is the Source of our experience.
"What would You have me learn, Lord?", is the steadying response as intense emotions alert us that something is amiss. Am I grieving for me because I got caught, or am I grieving for the glory of God that I as his human image-bearer fail to reflect?

As we begin to discern the difference, the devil isn't without recourse. He would have us, then, it's our personal epiphany into indifference toward that which concerns our fellow man, says CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape. Surely THEY aren't sorry for the right reasons. Surely THEY won't process through to give God glory in the end.

Yet, even as disciplined a man as Paul in as intellectual an exercise as the epistle to the Romans calls us to weep with those who weep as part of the same unity by which we are also called to be of the same mind toward one another, that setting our minds on high things but associating with the humble and refraining from being wise in our own opinion. (Romans 12:14-16) If we get the idea that emotional vulnerability with those even more duplicitous than we are is risky, we are right.

David used his time on the margins of Israelite society, a time between being called to be king and actually being king, leading those on the margins of society. He suffered in common with them in 1 Samuel 30 as families were captured while the band was on a raid. David and the aggrieved who were with him, describes 1 Samuel 30:4 poignantly, wept until they could weep no more. But then we get to the WHY of Jeremiah 30:15 as the great separator.

Wrung out from there tears, David's men reverted to the emotional wiring of their banditry and sought to kill David. In their throbbing hearts, David was the nearest reachable stand-in for the injustice of a fallen world, and they were going to lash out.

David, who cried with them willingly, even as their leader showing himself to be moved, showed that tears before men were more than a passing phase. HE strengthened himself in the Lord. So can we, as we ask the Holy Spirit to search our hearts for secret faults, (Psalm 19:12) for the idolatry or grace-granted true repentance behind the emotional displays that come so differently from different people in different circumstances.

For, as mixed as our motivations were and are, as readily as they can cause our human relationships to go awry, the Christian has Christ's righteousness, including His pure tears. He wept for Lazarus. He wept for Jerusalem. He was the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief. He experienced these eddies of emotion, yet sinned not. As we experience them through Him, and ask His Spirit to interpret them and do His work through them, we will emerge like Christ, not in outward form only, but in softness of heart.