Jeremiah 31:34 – Don't Settle for Hand-Me-Downs.

 34 No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord… Jeremiah 31:34, New King James Version

His name was Dr. Ronald Jones, and I encountered him in the University of South Carolina course "The Bible as Historical Literature." He seemed to work in previous pastoral experience as though he had transcended rather than followed the Lord to work in another vineyard. Working among the great Truths of God's Word, he managed to drop that he had come from Duke only on negotiated terms that included adding the titles he suggested to South Carolina's library. From his lofty perch, he offered us the assumptions of scholarly higher criticism. Accept these, he admonished, and you can know what the Bible writers were really telling their contemporaries about knowing God.

God had every right, of course, to reveal Himself to the imminent, the learned, the scholarly, the disciplined, and to charge them with conveying a secondary experience of theology to less worthy. He has other plans, though, according to Jeremiah 31:34. People come on His terms, not based on the assumptions of social position or previous training. They shall all know Me, God says, from the least to the greatest. Based on what Jesus taught in the New Testament, I wonder if the order in that prepositional phrase is coincidental.

The least, He said, know better what it is to depend on Him absolutely. The great find it difficult to subordinate their egos and the respect of men they crave in order to seek Him with singular devotion. The least, the poor in spirit, they will be filled by Him as they were satisfied with nothing else on Earth. He turns away the rich man Lazarus and welcomes the beggar at his gates into eternal satisfaction.

The real wonder is that neither this statement nor the whole biblical record excludes those who have been thought great among men. God works there also. Patriarchs like Abraham were rich but postponed their ultimate satisfaction until they experienced it with God in His city not built with hands. He has called the intellectually imminent, declaring it is the glory of kings to search out a matter, and allowing the truly curious to find their answers, and more questions, in Him.

Do we hear HIS call based on His renewing of our hearts, or have our assumptions hardened in place? Have we already decided among whom He will act, decided in advance to what settings He will call us and whom we will embrace as our brother and our sister in a common worship of our Heavenly Father?


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