Jeremiah 31:28 – Missing the Cycle

And it shall come to pass, that as I have watched over them to pluck up, to break down, to throw down, to destroy, and to afflict, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. Jeremiah 31:28, New King James Version

When my brother and I were very small, we wanted to present a gift to our mother. We yanked something small she had planted out of the ground. Over the course of the afternoon, we were convinced we could see it grow. She had to explain that nature doesn't work that way.

Even grown, even as Christians, we still need similar instruction in growth even more important than plant life. God therefore provides Jeremiah 31:28. We otherwise miss how adept He is at replanting that which has been uprooted and fostering growth which was once interrupted.

Like my brother and myself, we want to see growth immediately. When we don't, we project it out of self-will, or we get frustrated that it isn't happening at all. Lane Adams in the appropriately titled The Incredible Patience of God says fixed in such a short-cycle perspective, we keep digging up what we have planted in our strain to see results. We thus interrupt the pace at which God's growth processes in men often move.

We have also over-learned an aversion to the material and attributed it to the Giver of all good things. Jeremiah 31:28 isn't actually a metaphor of spiritual growth in place of physical growth. Jeremiah 31 speaks of God being glorified in His people's celebrating an actual, physical harvest with actual, physical dancing. We become attuned to God's expertise in spiritual growth, spiritual multiplication, and spiritual reward. Because we operate within either-or mentality with people, we transfer that to our expectations of Him.

"How did God," posits Jon Hauser, become the enemy of delight and good? He is the author of it." We are short of examples, I suspect, of how God has replanted and tenderly cared for flourishing in our lives because we are loath to think in terms of the physical, literal blessing He delights to give. To some degree, we are the former smokers who gag at the slightest hint of cigarette smoke, the former lushes who won't set foot inside a bar. We know that which once measured and mastered us, and we would not have it so again.

God reconnects, though, the physical and the spiritual. As we delight in Him, as we recognize both our physical and spiritual fruitlessness without Him, we can enjoy some of the goods of this world as demonstrations of His goodness. We can even enjoy them in process as much as in harvest because we have learned to trust that He Who shows His more fearsome aspects to demolish that stability which we trust in outside of Him can, thereafter, plant deftly, showing His heart in the deepening of the tenderest root.

As we learn to tell our God story in matters visible as well as invisible, our testimony becomes more compelling. We learn, by God's long-term patience, to discern His hand in manifold blessings both in the present and in retrospect. Lacking that holistic perspective, Jon Hauser again warns each of us, "You cannot teach people or reach people about the grace of God if you have not experienced it yourself."

 

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