Jeremiah 31:26 – To Contend and to Rest

After this I awoke and looked around, and my sleep was sweet to me. Jeremiah 31:26, New King James Version

My Grandma was a warrior woman for God in the true Hebrew meaning of the word virtue in Proverbs 31. She once dove into a well to rescue her toddler, and she was no less all in in prayer. In the latter stages of her glory-to-glory walk on Earth, someone brought her use of the death of one of her grandchildren. She took it to heart, wondering aloud why her precious Jesus would allow this tragedy while He saw fit that she should linger and battle cancer. I'll pray about it, she said, and she did, on the spot. On the same spot, she emerged from prayer as tranquil and as radiant in Him as ever.

She knew the One in whom Jeremiah believed and was persuaded that He is able to keep that which she committed unto Him until that day when she saw Him face-to-face. She knew the taste from the well of that prophet's peace as announced in Jeremiah 31:26.

As with Grandma, Jeremiah has a spongy, impressionable spirit. He takes his people's troubles to heart. Both he and Grandma are moved to action on behalf of those God gives them to care about. In Jeremiah's case, just in what comes down to us as the thirty-first chapter of his book, he has seen his flock's capacity to exuberantly rejoice in God and to drift from celebrating His goodness to a backsliding indifference.

Outrage being as compelling as it is, especially when, according to the flesh, that at which we are outraged at least partially invalidates one's ministry, we ought to expect to see its lasting effects. It's clouds ought to glower over our sense of God's goodness for a long while. We ought to be able to conjure up Bible verses attributing our lasting bitterness and gloom to an offended sense of God's majesty, and to use that theological justification to kick every dog for the next 24 hours.

Grandma, and more importantly Jeremiah 31:26, check such petulance. These examples, steeped in the whole counsel of God's Word as they had seen it play out before them and in their lives personally, have a quick contentment and a ready reset. They have watched God's steady faithfulness unspool right alongside man's faithlessness. They are students of both, and surprised by neither.

In The Magician's Nephew, through his majestic Christ figure Aslan, CS Lewis helps us find resilience that isn't wholly subsumed in the dramas of discontent. Even near the dawn of Creation in that narrative, Aslan confides a certain chagrin that the which has injected evil in the land only hours old. He solemnly projects a future showdown with her most costly to himself to address Narnia's degradation. But, he resolves with equipoise that before that drama unfolds, Narnia should enjoy a bright morning.

This is the warrior's perspective, akin the physical discipline Eric Haney describes among the special forces in Inside Delta Force that allows an elite soldier to drop into deep sleep when the opportunity presents. The spiritual commandos among us are more aware than we are of the depth of human drama and our depraved part in it. Palpably aware of the strength Christ has exerted heretofore in our rescue and the certainty of His finishing the redemption narrative with a flourish, they paradoxically enjoy sweeter sleep. They have an ingrained discipline of resting in God and of letting us know in an entirely selfless way that they do. Their lives are an invitation before us to do the same.

The results to rest is an indispensable preparatory discipline. If we do not rest in Christ, we cannot stand with him in the sense to which Spurgeon calls us in the Morning and Evening. Our standing is an extension, a public declaration, of our rest. 

 

"Faith," differentiates Spurgeon, "listens neither to Presumption, nor to Despair, nor to Cowardice, nor to Precipitancy, but it hears God say, Stand still," and immovable as a rock it stands. 'Stand still;-keep the posture of an upright man, ready for action, expecting further orders, cheerfully and patiently awaiting the directing voice."

Our protests dismissing preparatory rest would be funny if they were not so taxing to our well-being and so marring of our witness. We care too much, we insist. More than Jeremiah, whom God groups lovingly with his prophetic predecessors in rising morning by morning to contend with his people? Is our sometimes self-imposed sleeplessness, worry coated with a thin veneer of biblical phrasing, proof of more holiness than Christ's sleeping in the storm, confident in His Father's provision and protection?

Even should the Father penetrate our petulance and actually give us particularly sweet sleep in Him in spite of the dramas we behold and internalize, what flag do we fly? Does such a gift, such a countercultural renewal, make it into our elevator speech the next morning? Or, do we fear that if we announce the sweetness of the rest the Lord grants, we will be thought less than serious? Let us, rather, live in short cycles and allow what the Holy Spirit brings to people's remembrance to weave the lasting impression to Christ's glory.

Elijah rested, and we think him the no less emboldened confronter of kings. Our legacy, as indeed our next intercession or meditation that lasts through the watches of the night, is in His hands. When we, instead, find rest and refreshment readily available, let us not be so prideful as to refrain from it or withhold giving God glory concerning it..