Jeremiah 31:5 – Work as Worship

You shall yet plant vines on the mountains of Samaria;
The planters shall plant and eat them as ordinary food. Jeremiah 31:5, New King James Version

A veteran coach watched a pitching prospect getting in his work between games in a slipshod fashion. Michael Lewis in Moneyball records, he was too young to realize he was becoming what he pretended to be.

Jeremiah 31:5 presents the same sort of warning even in a call to celebration. The verse opens our eyes, as with Jeremiah's original audience, to the sweeping scope of God's remaking. He rebuilds what has been torn down as part of His people's deserved chastening. There's more. He remakes hearts, that those who once mourned, either at being caught or offending God's glory, they will celebrate publicly with tambourines and dance.

But, however exuberant the worship, the pragmatic among us will reserve something of our levity with the knowledge that people must work. Conscious of how ready we are to reckon with the Genesis 3 sweat of our brow which work now demands, to maximize this and mope about it, God reminds us in Jeremiah 31:5 that He will remake work as well. 

There will come a day, He reveals, when the earth will be so fertile that His servants will grow grapes on the ordinarily thin soil of the mountains. The harvest, He entices, will be so bountiful that His people won't have to wait for wine as a substitute for unpalatable water. THIS harvest will be so good that people can eat the grapes as ordinary food.

Now to the pitcher's mindset. In the bullpen session that is life on a fallen Earth, are we working with the big game in mind? Moving to God's agricultural metaphor to Jeremiah, the planting, and pruning, and harvesting we do with all of Earth's current limits, with all the sweat of our brow we experience in work and ministry as they are currently constituted, are we undertaking them as worship, conscious that when God lifts limits, when God pours out grace in the ways described in Jeremiah 31:5, many of the things we did under the current order, we will still do, only with results in which grace is dramatically and readily more evident.

Are we treating earthly life, also bought by Christ along with our eternity with Him, as my friend Neal puts it pointedly, as God's waiting room? Or, are we conscious, sober-minded yet giddy, that even among the earthly forms, even among the earthly frustrations, we are by the sovereign grace of God becoming like Christ. We are putting on that which we will be for ages upon ages.

I have no doubt that they'll be a reorientation in Heaven and on the New Earth to which Jeremiah 31:5 likely points most specifically, but why wait to begin looking and working with that perspective? God says he already placed eternity in the hearts of men. 

 Every work we undertake, then, can be a sowing toward that ultimate, inexorable harvest. Every morsel we eat, like the grain of the ox symbolizing, says Paul, the sustenance to which God entitles the worker in His service, or the grapes of Jeremiah 31:5 consumed contemporary to the harvest, these can be miniature celebrations preparing our hearts for the ultimate one.

We work well, we work as worship, because we work toward more than a payday. We work well, we work as worship because we work toward more than the end of an earthly harvest season. We work to train hearts to rejoice in it because our God inhabits it, because He blesses it, and crowns it as only the compounding of grace can do. He rewards in ways moths can't eat, and rust can't ruin, and thieves can't steal. Toward that day, brothers and sisters, when our faith will be made sight, when we will know Him as debtor to no man, let us work heartily, even in work's humble and repetitive motions, as unto Him.