Jeremiah 31:4 – Virgins Again

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Again I will build you, and you shall be rebuilt,
O virgin of Israel!
You shall again be adorned with your tambourines,
And shall go forth in the dances of those who rejoice. Jeremiah 31:4, New King James Version

Morning is my go time. A light sleeper in the latter stages of the night, I hit the floor with ambition, all the more focused because I know this energy will fizzle. My will to achieve is all the more combustible because I know it's got to move limbs stubborn with cerebral palsy, first across the floor, then locked onto the bed frame, pulling me upwards with biceps and chest muscles that come the closest to having been spared by CP, and then throwing me back in the wheelchair.

The process regularly takes somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-seven minutes. Aware of that range with an objectivity that shows my father's accounting genes aren't entirely absent from his history major son, the contrast, the waste, between how long the battle takes and how long my mental insistence on efficiency for the morning think it SHOULD take rankles me with impatience every time. Here we go again. I'm Paul in Romans 7. What I want to do, I don't quite get done.

Duty calls There is input to be processed. The New York Times Audio Digest opens my intellectual window on the world, broadening my view beyond what I can see on all fours pulling myself across the bedroom. Even the New York Times Audio Digest guy I listen to at three and a half times normal speed. It's the efficiency I owe the world, owe myself as restitution for the delays of yesterday, or a deposit toward the delays of disability today.

Breakfast is fast and similar, a bar quickly opened and quickly chewed. Input, input, input for the mind is the order of my day. Processing it is what I owe the Lord and the world. The needs of the body platonically get in the way. Cue the cycle between coffee to bring focus and energy and its side effects to sinuses and lower which tend to detract from that.

I've got writing to do, again. The input and output slide through arteries partly blocked with accumulated routine and disappointment that this routine isn't efficient enough and hasn't gotten the results I've wanted. "Maybe today," is as much driving metronome as faith-filled aspiration.

The clock is ticking, but the sunrise, the real one, dazzles. It climbs over the berm outside the large window beside which I do my writing. The berm is still majestically dark, making the sunrise's emerging radiance all the more a contrast, all the more impossible to ignore.

I've seen it before, and before, and before. Every time minutes tick off just like they did when I was chewing, or crawling, but minutes, forestalled, can wait. By the grace of God, He in His mercy which He likens to the sunrise continues to perpetually thaw a comparatively small but persistent place of rapture in my calculating heart. He has been insisting on my youth and awe in the presence of the sunrise since I WAS physically young, since I represented them on paper as best I could with a semicircle sun set off with one-line birds, unsophisticated and all the more sincerely celebratory because of it.

 Jeremiah 31:4 isn't just next on the morning's to do list, a return from epiphany to efficiency. It IS a Divine insistence on the former, younger, more fungible spirit, ever replacing the jaded, been-there,-done-that heart that hardens within us otherwise. God made the most of destruction to coerce His people's attention. Looming, then loud, the lamentable, the outward downfall of Jerusalem traces the spiraling hopes of the people within. Yet, a contrite heart God says He won't despise. Were spiritual bloodwork possible, I'm betting many of the antigens it would show would still be those of regret over the loss of outward security and prestige, perhaps respectable amounts of regret over the cost of one's own sin, and scant traces of brokenness over the offense to God's holiness, but He Who looks on men's heart doesn't dwell there.

He blows on the coals of their gray cold hopes. In fact, the respectable domestic metaphor of the fireplace won't hold His heart for His people. Inhabiting life's routines, indeed He does say, I will build you and you shall be rebuilt. We can work with that, but OUR hearts would stop with picturing Him as the Architect reconstructing what He has knocked over. Read on. There is enthusiasm. There is ardor. There is romance. God's nearly scandalous sense of reconstruction doesn't just follow a blueprint, giving people the forms they knew before. His heart for regeneration is of a stop-and-be-agog-at-the-sunrise depth, at the very least.

In my eyes, says God is the only judge of purity Who matters, You are virgins again. Virgins again, two words which awkwardly grafted together by humans' hopeful reason provoke nothing but dry derision with forlorn regret beneath it. Yet God in His sweeping, sovereign, creative power to make all things new doesn't stop with just things. His newness permeates, invigorates, to the depths of hearts in hopes, to the excited quickening to His first touch He calls virginal. In Him, we can once again know our first love like the first time.

In this newness isn't just the business of the boudoir, or the prayer closet. These are His as He grants new hearts and new eyes to behold Him as worshipfully lovely in private moments. We still hold back a little at their threshold. Part of us calls for locking the door to the ecstasies and acting like grownups outside of them. Finish the verse, friends. Newness in Him impacts what the world sees. He gives tambourines, instruments, tools, that we might use them as part of our celebration of Him, just as rapturous as our private moments together. He calls us adorned, transformed outwardly as well as inwardly, GOING FORTH in the dances of those who rejoice. The head, the heart, the journal, the prayer closet. These can't contain how new we are in Him.

Tim Keller says our worship, renewed, is our testimony, but he knows that word, at best, has been segregated to part of our routine. His call, and God's as Jeremiah 31:4 realization spills over into every area of our lives, is for complete transformation. "Ethical behavior without joy-filled worship," he can joins in God's Wisdom For Navigating Life, "or exuberant praise without whole-life  obedience, both of these are counterfeit Christianities."

For, as long as was God's process engineering long cautioned exile, in preserving His's people's identity through it, in working favor into the heart of a pagan monarch that they would return home with the resources and optimism to start again, as majestic as this movement is, it is but it pantomime compared to Calvary. There, friend, the Godhead showed both the futility of our best routines to reach righteousness, and their fulfillment in the perfect sacrifice of Christ. Not far from there, as the Son was raised up on the third day and accepted, ascended into Heaven thereafter, Christ goes before us in righteousness.

Christ gives us reason for rapturous celebration deeper, wilder than Israel's returning exiles ever knew. In Him, be virgins again. In Him, make every implement your tambourine to shake out your encompassing gratitude. Goforth, brothers and sisters, into a world in which He has preserved some to know Him as the true Celebration.