Jeremiah 30:16-17 – The Lagging Self-Loathing

16
‘Therefore all those who devour you shall be devoured;
And all your adversaries, every one of them, shall go into captivity;
Those who plunder you shall become plunder,
And all who prey upon you I will make a prey.
17
For I will restore health to you
And heal you of your wounds,’ says the Lord,
‘Because they called you an outcast saying:
“This is Zion;
No one seeks her.” Jeremiah 30:16-17, New King James Version

"Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat," writes Roger Kahn in Boys of Summer, "confirms our worst image of ourselves. We are not effective, after all, not truly competent, not manly in crisis. We may dismiss a coach, but we cannot elude blame. We have failed. Everyone knows we have failed. We know it ourselves. We stand naked, before an unflattering mirror, hearing hard laughter that includes our own."

We see the principle at work in Jeremiah 30:16-17. Defeats themselves can be reversed. Even at a national, cultural level, events can change. Former victors can be vanquished. Yet, God knows our self-reproach is sticky. The coach, those people or circumstances which once dominated us, even in ways God used for His corrective glory, may be removed, but it takes a deeper act of His sovereign grace to erase the lingering, limiting aspects of their pronouncements over us.

Thus, God promises not just circumstantial restoration and recompense, but the healing of Jeremiah 30:17. Men, in our bluster and bravado, may speak of MERE psychological wounds, of sticks and stones breaking our bones, but words never hurting us, but God, gracious and knowing, does not. For, our speech which, when roused in faith can move mountains, can also by leaden habit keep our focus upon them.

God knows and addresses the script we continue to run long after the particular trauma is over. He Who operates at a level lofty enough to dictate that once dominant nations fall quiets the clamor, as it were, to hear what a kind of PTSD still says to us.

He cares, beloved, when we give a kind of ironic, preserving caress to the words of our enemies, and especially the devil as the accuser of the brethren, and continue to resuscitate them. Once unsought, unlovely, forsaken, we are always thus, but for God's specific intervention. These emotions, though unpleasant and scripturally untrue of the restored participant in His covenant, are so powerful that we continue to invite them into our thinking.

So it is, Christian, that the Father sent Christ to seek and to save the lost, to invalidate forever the outmoded idea that we are unsought. His ringing, clarion call bounces off the mountains and chases away the self-verdict we thought would last forever. If sought by Him, forever lovely, and as His spotless bride, the Church, and not some probationary shadow of what we once were and could have been, what do man's former aspersions matter?

We bring our memories, then, before the resonant verdict of the cross and the empty tomb. We class ourselves with Peter, one-time failures who sought to reconstitute flimsy meeting in what we fished for but who have now been specifically summoned by our resurrected Master. That's the Word we hear and rehearse. That's the relished, renewed heart from which we feed His sheep. As our minds and hearts have been renewed by His healing, we speak over those with whom He has given us influence the reality of welcomed heir in place of outcast.

Identity forever changed, no circumstance in which He chooses to train His own in His likeness will define us any longer. We may lose in life, but we are free to lose in the estimations of men that we may gain Christ's great reward. Compared to the fickle freedoms indulgent men experience on Earth, the disciplines under which the Christian is placed may seem like the captivity we knew of old, but they are lovingly administered means to greater, the greatest freedom.

We would monitor our habits, and especially the inward verdicts of our flawed conscience, because we would have none master us save Christ. What He says is finished is finished. As a man thinks, so is he. We go forward therefore in the renewing of our minds, seeing our every circumstance as a manifestation of His wise and faith-building love.