Jeremiah 31:34 – Interposed Iniquity

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. For I will forgive their iniquity… Jeremiah 31:34, New King James Version

My friend Chuck took the bold step of denying his fears control over his course of action. He went to minister in a fearsome prison setting. He could sense effectiveness, but not peace. His own prison of pornography addiction still confined him. He recalls, "I could feel God's love flowing through me to other people, but I couldn't really feel it for myself."

Thus the continuity, then, as God's fiat in Jeremiah 31:34 unfolds. As we know Him intimately rather than secondarily through someone else's experiences, brother or neighbor, conviction and misery is real. They cannot see within our hearts. Even where they may catch glimpses of that which binds us, like David who refrains from truly discipling his son Amnon toward repentance for the ravages of lust perhaps because the king is guilty of it himself, the Spirit's convicting acuity is perfect.

God's weight on the conscience is exacting. Admits James KA Smith in On the Road with Augustine, "The alienation is real. The sense of frustration, futility, of never arriving, never feeling settled with ourselves – these are not figments of the imagination to be papered over with pious assertions of homecoming." Only He Who flawlessly and relentlessly convicts can offer meaningful absolution and His spotless righteousness in its place. Only He knows how thoroughly the experience of new identity in Him is connected with assurance that one is forgiven. Only then can we experience the fullness of the abiding love we declare.

Even once He has imparted to us His righteousness in moment and millennia both, condemnation's habits beckon while we are still in the mortal frame which has betrayed us so often. Spurgeon overhears this tense dialogue in his sermon "Look Unto Jesus."

"But I know you say, 'My doubt is not of his general mercy, nor of his power to forgive, but of his willingness to forgive me.' Now I beseech you, by him that liveth and was dead, do not this morning look into your own heart in order to find an answer to that difficulty; do not now sit down and look at your sins; they have brought you into the danger—they cannot bring you out of it." Concurs John Piper in 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die, "Sin damns us with guilt, and it enslaves us to lovelessness."

We take this lingering whisper of condemnation, then, as a reminder to draw insistently close to Christ. As His Word in Jeremiah 31:34 so inexorably connects newness of identity with specific forgiveness, so we as His crave it, claim it, and wield it against future enemy attacks which have now been blunted. "No one ought to be content," he invites in Morning and Evening, "whilst there is any such thing as an 'if about his having tasted that the Lord is gracious. A jealous and holy distrust of self may give rise to the question even in the believer's heart"

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