Jeremiah 31:14 – Satiated Souls in Service

13
“Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance,
And the young men and the old, together;
For I will turn their mourning to joy,
Will comfort them,
And make them rejoice rather than sorrow.
14
I will satiate the soul of the priests with abundance,
And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the Lord.” Jeremiah 31:13-14, New King James Version

Bill brought a former history teacher's fascinated thoroughness to the teaching of God's Word. His sense of the background of Nineveh's which Jonah faced and his adeptness at connecting the sailors' questions to the prophet to the same pigeonholing of identity we attempt today still stick with me 30 years later. Thus prepared to invite the youth Sunday school class in front of him into life's deeper things, he wasn't quite prepared for my persistent prayer request.

I wanted the Braves to win. That was the channel in my heart I wanted God to overflow at about the age of 12. They were terrible, and I was convinced He could make them less so. At first, Bill resisted diplomatically. Gradually, though, he began to warm up to the idea. He began to see, perhaps, faith in formation that would eventually raise its sites to other obstacles then baseball games. He began to greet these requests with a smile rather than a smirk beneath disciplined disguise.

The Lord shares the same pervasive graciousness in Jeremiah 31:14. There is one level of revealing His goodness which can move the virgin, the inexperienced, perhaps the volubly emotional, to dance in worship. There is another level of revealing His goodness which can bring the young and the old to worship together, overcome the wounds of time which the older inevitably acquire, the pride of place which can keep up a reserve even in the face of revelation. These are on display in Jeremiah 31:13 as the Lord says He will induce the virgin, the young, the old alike to exuberant joy in Him.

The degree of difficulty, at least according to human understanding, goes up considerably as we move into the next verse. This one deals with the priest, the professional in the things of God, the studiously spiritual. It's his job to oversee all this merriment, to apply it, and, very often according to the human assumptions which accrete with time and status, not to get too swept up in it. Somebody has to be the leader, after all. Somebody has to generate the life lessons which connect present events to the Word and the next world.

But God will brook no such demarcation. He says He will satiate the soul of the priests not with the lessons that can be drawn out to keep him and his flock marching grimly forward until finally in Heaven. He says He will satiate the soul of the priests, the detached, the somewhat academic, those ready to draw on the bright lines between the eternal and the every day, satiate their souls with His abundance. His goodness will be so evident in so many respects, apparently, that even they will join in the community's grateful dance.

What will it take to melt our hearts thusly? Surrounded by demonstrations of God's goodness in sunrises and harvests which warm the present AND point toward a future with Him for the Christian, will we hold out as the naysayers, the cautionary brakes on a pervasive spirit of celebration to show how sophisticated we are? 

Or, will we trust the Holy Spirit to sanctify and apply in His time and through His often bourgeois means? Will the harvests, physical and spiritual, we have seen in His service as His royal priesthood actually dull us by their very consistency to a here-we-go-again faux sophistication from which we will actually need to be led by those newer and warmer in wonder?

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