Jeremiah 31:29-30 – Identity and Accountability in Christ

 29 In those days they shall say no more:

‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes,
And the children’s teeth are set on edge.’

30 But every one shall die for his own iniquity; every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge. Jeremiah 31:29-30, New King James Version

In the nineties sitcom Evening Shade, there's a scene in which Burt Reynolds as Wood Newton tells his TV son, "A man's not a man until his father tells him he is."

August 1994 presented such an encounter for me. I was graduating from college the next day, and my parents were in town to celebrate the big event with me. In crowded Columbia, my father parked illegally on campus, and he and I were about town in my vehicle. Ever the rule-follower in my expectations of others, I fretted in adolescent fashion that they might ticket him and withhold my diploma.

He reminded me, though, that although we were in the same car, although he supported my aspirations both practically and emotionally, that we were in fact two separate people. I, two months into my 21st year and about to be a college graduate, was a man like my father was a man.

Jeremiah 31:29-30 also presents such a rite of passage in the eyes of God, the ultimate Father. Under God's Law, identity in Him was inherited and vague, an heirloom of which they didn't generally see the true value. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:15-16 that when Moses is read there is a veil over his people's hearts. In a sense, the Law is conventional wisdom passed down, prized for its continuity but not for the intimate relationship with God into which it invites and confronts.

The day is coming, prophesies God through Jeremiah, when you won't see My Word primarily as something passed down by your human fathers. The Word, written on your hearts, will convict, exhort, rebuke toward individual accountability to Me as My image-bearer, faithful or not, to the world. As soon as the scales of habit and custom fall from our eyes and we begin to feel the lift of validation, we also begin to understand the depth of our villainy for which we are personally accountable.

This is OUR ticket, its price more fearsome than any fine. We could pay with all we think we have, all we think we are and our debt would not change. We have, by such a shell game, merely shown our pretentiousness with what belongs to God. It is already His, as is our next breath, as are the synapses which fire toward our slippery self-justification. God will neither be fooled nor satisfied, He warns in advance.

Oh human, what will you do in this day, for it is the day in which we now walk? We have God's Word quickened by His Spirit. Life itself from the Heavens to the lives around us is enacted as a parable of our ultimate responsibility to God. Our days, loaned by His forbearance, are lapsing. Time, HIS time, is far spent. Excuses pointing to our parents, or further back to the flaws in our heritage over which we readily stand in judgment, these have fluttered before Him without changing the yawning balance we owe.

A Savior will intervene, though, between our realized death debt and its payment. We follow Him, Lord Jesus, in baptism, death to ourselves and our ambitions and a raising in the new life of His Resurrection. What we are before Him, IN Him, we are truly and forever. Man's conventional wisdom from generation to generation may intermittently point to His Truth. We can sift it accordingly, using our quizzical walk through culture to deepen our everlasting walk with Him. What? Why? How? Ultimately, Who? How does this point to You, Lord, either our need for You, or our fulfillment in You?

Our unchanging Rubric is the Gospel, our absolute dependence on Christ to both set and fulfill the process of justification. Once we have joined Him in willing surrender, we are joint heirs with Him in the Resurrection's rewards. Assured of this, we are then truly free to serve. Man can notice or not, sanction or not. Our ultimate service, Christian, is as a signpost to Christ.