Jeremiah 31:1 – Signs and Subtleties

“At the same time,” says the Lord, “I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be My people.” Jeremiah 31:1, New King James Version

There were times my dad would hold forth on How the World Works. He would expound on geopolitics, on macro and micro economics, and on how these principles played out in the world around us. With the acumen of an accountant's data-driven certainty, he would caution, cajole and coach that we needed to line our lives up to be on the right side of these big trends. He was in the whirlwind, and warning about its power.

Then there were times he would relate to my brother and myself where we were, snuggle with us at the beginning of even his longest days running his own practice. Valuable as his time was, and he once mentioned to another grown-up this calculating, compounding trap as his success grew, he invested it in us not just as recipients of his wisdom but as his sons. Football contained no profound life lessons he sought to propound, but he spent hours side-by-side with us inhabiting its ups and downs, both in an ongoing contest to try to predict NFL outcomes and in a video game where individual instances would be forgotten as soon as the console was powered off.

He embodied as we grew the dual glory of Father God one a very human scale. Both aspects of this glory are on display for us at the end of Jeremiah 30, and in the first verse of Jeremiah 31. Our Heavenly Father is in the whirlwind. He knows how nations work and calls an end to them. He has every right to insist that we ponder His grandest ways and grasp them to the maximum extent He makes possible. He is Wisdom and Power Personified, and He would not have His image-bearers muddle through anecdotal existence unaware.

Yet, many times, He is as evident in Paternal whispers as Professorial pontification, as evident in gestures of kindness as in strokes of kingly majesty. We don't have to choose. In fact, we don't get to choose. He is both, and He discloses Himself as both in close proximity. No sooner do we puzzle and ponder at the reverent distance He calls for in closing out Jeremiah 30 than He calls His sons and daughters near and reminds us He is the God of the kitchen table as much as the conference table.

He is the God of the rhythms in which families lie down and rise up as much as the God of the downfall and upswing of empires. The home fires don't just shed a warm light on His hobby between displays of His international, even galactic, timeless glory. He is invested in our daily details as incremental, enduring, relationship-building. By them, our skittish, stubborn hearts are reminded that we are HIS people. He identifies Himself, after all, repeatedly as Father as well as as King.

That there is no setting in which theology is not being revealed and either acknowledged or rebuffed is both exciting and humbling. At times, we would choose. Let me put on my God Reflecting garb in my strongest environment. Perhaps this is in my work where I can most easily sense His Kingdom on the advance, even little by little. Or, perhaps I'm frustrated, or disobedient, there and home is my hope. Perhaps I really sense the efficacy of the intimacies of home. Perhaps, while I watch the clock in the outside world, I'm a devoted husband and father.

It turns out one either reinforces or undermines the other. As Eugene Peterson put it memorably in The Jesus Way, "Prophets insist that God is the living center, or nothing." Need we ponder the whirlwind a while longer before we go about the routines we otherwise think sanctify us? Or, like Elijah, do we need to move from beholding the whirlwind to see God's character demonstrated in daily, domestic routines? He Who heard the murmurs against Him in Israel's tents likewise hears and draws intimacy deepening toward Himself. We are His people as we reflect on specific instances of His personal provision and protection for ourselves and our families.

Jerome, one of the church fathers, won't let us divide or decide, exclusively engage or exclude. He writes, “For as we admire the Creator not only as the framer of heaven and earth, of sun and ocean, of elephants, camels, horses, oxen, pards, bears, and lions; but also as the maker of the most tiny creatures, ants, gnats, flies, worms, and the like, whose shapes we know better than their names, and as in all alike we revere the same creative skill; so the mind that is given to Christ shows the same earnestness in things of small as of great importance, knowing that it must render an account of every idle word.”

Christ's seamless earnestness, then, Christian, is ours. Every threshold we cross, every new chapter we enter, gives us another opportunity to reflect His glory and depend on His grace.