Jeremiah 30:22 – The Relational as Practice for the Theological

21
Their nobles shall be from among them,
And their governor shall come from their midst;
Then I will cause him to draw near,
And he shall approach Me;
For who is this who pledged his heart to approach Me?’ says the Lord.
22
‘You shall be My people,
And I will be your God.’ ”Jeremiah 30:21-22, New King James Version

It was an adolescent May that stirred optimism even in this old head on young shoulders. Characteristically, I took my emerging thoughts to a computer screen rather than a live human. I had just returned home from a study session for the AP US History test, and my feelings about life were somewhere near voluble.

Yes, this was my subject. Thirty years later, I still imbibe for fun what some might consider a dubious duty. At about the same time a peer more academically accomplished overall than myself commenting on my relish for the relevant US history anecdote and asked if I had taken the test already. I hadn't. I just really connected with the subject and especially with the enthusiastic, almost casual, writing in the American Pageant textbook.

But what I was experiencing on that particular evening went beyond my usual comfort in connecting with the book. That night, I ventured outside my head and heart, tiptoed past the cultural sentries particularly influential with me which constantly warned against "peer pressure." I worked, I speculated, I laughed with my classmates at the teacher's house, all toward a common objective I readily embraced.

In the days just before blogs, I confided my thoughts to a Microsoft Works document now lost to history unless the Lord decides to resurrect it. I told myself, and apparently my future self, that I had a lot to learn and not so much to fear from people like those I had just been around. I resolved, perhaps at once bravely and naïvely, to be a little more open to what they could teach and encourage in me.

Retrospectively, I can hear the snobbery, the qualified letting down of my guard only to people I thought were in my smart set, only to people who valued ideas and were willing to discipline their baser influences to display their mastery of those ideas, only to people who could find the funny in what others undertook with dry and dreading discipline.

It was a start, though, a chute poking up in what had been mostly dry ground. It was Jeremiah 30:21 leading its way ever so tentatively into Jeremiah 30:22 realizations. In verse 21, God says through Jeremiah that He will draw out the people's hearts through leaders like themselves.

After bringing noon through the self-inflicted trauma of the exile, the experience of being strangers in a strange land and following orders from fear of further reprisals, He will give them nobles in whom it will be easy to recognize common interest, a governor from among even those with an intercessory heart. The governor will go to God for HIS people, much as God originally designed the role of the high priest, carrying designations for each of the tribes to the Lord.

As our peer pressure and people-and-popularity-as-God alarms go off, as we are tempted to borrow deeper into holiness in solitude and, maybe, tip over into holiness AS solitude, God's stream of thought and grace carries us forward to other ends, HIS holistic ends. In His mind, in His expressive heart, genuine, less guarded community with peers we fear a little less, peers in whom we begin to see His image, this, by grace, is the thaw of the heart that starts before it knows more of the incandescent warmth of intimacy with HIM.

Fearful, skittish, resentful people, by beginning to see yourselves as part of a collective redemption project, He says, by seeing the patterns of My work in other lives as evidence of comfort rather than caprice, by this, You will begin to know me. By this, bridges verse 22, You will come to know me intimately and insistently. I will be YOUR God, and You will be MY people.

God is still about that coaxing, cajoling work. He still works in our peers, convincing us, as the veteran operative wife did the initiate in the military television show The Unit, that whatever our THIS is, this isn't our special circumstances. As in Pilgrim's Progress, our Great-Heart, our mentor, is just far enough ahead on the journey we are on to remind us we are not alone. It takes bravery, as it did with Christian in that marvelous literary gift to Christendom, to call out to the people ahead, recognizing the risk and the reward that God intends.

The forecast from the hearts of men flatly guarantees 100% likelihood that they will let down our loftiest hopes. Nobody will fulfill Jeremiah 30:21 like Christ, woo our hearts as He proves, again, that He has been tempted in all points as we are, that He has been beset by, and has bested, all the things we grapple with as Christians that His proven righteousness should be ours.

Nobody is going to intercede as purely and perfectly before the Father as He and His Spirit do, but His small-scale likenesses in the men and women around us will be encouraging if we embrace them, engage with them, and by our life's work equip them to radiate His glory as beacons on higher and higher hills.