Jeremiah 31:22 – Directing Wonder Toward Christ

22
How long will you gad about,
O you backsliding daughter?
For the Lord has created a new thing in the earth—
A woman shall encompass a man.” Jeremiah 31:22, New King James Version

My weeks in my first semester of my freshman year of college had a certain enforcement to them. They built up tension toward midmorning on Friday. Though the weekend was in sight from that vantage point, more prominent and problematic was my weekly test in Biology. I dreaded it all week, allowing it to color my life experience to such an extent that I calculated out loud Fall Break's marking that I was one sixteenth of the way through my college career.

This looming testing cast its shadow in spite of the fact that the results were generally satisfactory. The expectations I imposed on myself based on the comfort and enthusiasm I felt in the humanities just didn't readily translate to the exactitudes of science.

My identity settled and succumbed to the point of its lowest and latest reflection on my measure. I was, I now realize, forming my own shackles. "Not to live as a man likes," asserts Aristotle in Politics, "is the mark of a slave." Surely nothing shapes our liked or disliked lifestyle more than our thoughts. As a man thinks, decreased God's Word, so is he.

With the test behind me, and another looming, this was sixteen weeks on a treadmill of over-tolerated anxiety in my old head on young shoulders. I was drifting no less than the people of Ephraim whom God warns in Jeremiah 31:22, I was learning not to trust God with the particulars of everyday life, no matter how many times He proved Himself through me, no matter how many times He proved Himself, as in Jeremiah 31, worthy of ecstatic celebration.

Yet, one week God broke through so profoundly that I still remember more than a quarter of a century later. I was in the bathroom of my suite, looking in the mirror. As far as I recall, there was nothing in my thoughts tending toward the profound. Then the lyrics came as I had sung them off-key dozens upon dozens of times. "When we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing His praise than when we first begun."

The words NO LESS were a beacon to every corner of my heart. They drove out, at least for a while, the gloom I accommodated by degrees. One day, there would be NOTHING to dread. I knew Christ purchased for me peace which was more lasting than my sense of the lapsing weekend or summer vacation. It was a detente beyond what I had experienced before. Even I might enjoy Heaven and the New Earth with Him, even as trained as I was becoming in conflating realism and pessimism. But the words of "Amazing Grace" insisted. There was no end. There was no counting.

God lays a similar sweet epiphany for His people at the end of Jeremiah 31:22. He knows their drifting dread. He calls them on it, summons them to mental discipline and awareness which insists on faith in Him. Know where your thoughts are directed, He insists, using the metaphor of signposts and landmarks. His Word warns that as we think so we are and so charges us to take captive every thought.

Certainly His people, this writer and his 21st-century contemporaries included, have enough grist of His goodness and greatness to fuel such meditations and keep us focused on whatever is pure, and lovely, and of good report. The original audience of Jeremiah 31:22 did also. If there thoughts began to drift downward toward distraction from God's specific favor, they need to go no farther than the preceding verses in Jeremiah 31, His movement of multidimensional restoration among His people.

Even this, though, can't fully characterize His grace and mercy. He captivates their thoughts with what, and Who, is better still. As good as He has been in the present and the material, He draws their thoughts and hearts toward the transcendent, that which defies the laws He has heretofore established and within which He continues to show faithfulness. Here is something new, He entices. A woman shall encompass a man.

Without the introduction, I would find my way to pessimism disguised as rationalism. I can't. God says the sign to which He is pointing is new, so it's new. He is the Author and Definition of Newness. All my practiced eye rolls, all of my aloofness insisting that whatever it is I've seen it before, it's inapplicable here.

Yes, I know that women give birth to male babies, and that those male babies become men. That's not new, and it's common enough that I lose sight of God's rhythmic grace in this reality. I even resent it a little, as in my case my wife and I were unable to parent, save for one miscarried child in His arms in Heaven, and were never selected for an adoption.

God says, though, that this is new. What is newer, more profound, more precedent-shattering than the Incarnation and the ensuing Resurrection? Did not by this a woman encompass a man, the God Man, without human assistance? Did not by this a woman encompass all of human hopes? Did not by this a woman carry forward the groans of the first Adam and the victories of Christ as the Second Adam?

This is bigger. This is better. This beckons thoughts and affections from settling on situational blessings as have been referenced up to now in Jeremiah 31, situational blessings which, no matter how sweet, eventually become the status quo from which men are distracted and discontent. All of them, though, are a prelude, a tell, a tease in the best sense, to the real and lasting Blessing. By this, a woman encompassing a Man, humans will dwell with God, and there will be no less days to enjoy this than when we first began!

I still need such epiphanies. I still need times of looking in God's mirror rather than my own. Otherwise, as James confessed, I forget what manner of man I am. I forget the Christ price of my costly company, the meditation that ever enthused an A.W. Tozer, more analytical than myself. "Did you ever stop to think," he moves our musing in the same direction as Jeremiah 31:22, "that God is going to be as pleased to have you with Him in Heaven as you will be to be there?"