Coming Up For Air

5 Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man And makes flesh his strength, Whose heart departs from the Lord. "That's the cause of a lot of chains – people wanting to be accepted," reveals Nate Hentoff in a 1964 article in The New Yorker preserved in the magazine's dedicated anthology, "people not wanting to be alone." I like the image of a chain to describe the desperation for social acceptance, especially as we consider the end of God's warning in Jeremiah 17:5. Chains, Jacob Marley warns us in A Christmas Carol , are forged a link at a time in our daily interactions. By these, God's insists astride time and individuals' swirling emotions, hearts depart from the Lord. Consider how oppressive the feeling of estrangement will be for the people to whom God speaks. They once got their sense of assurance from proximity to the Temple. They used this to argue with Jeremiah for their own righteousness, to help them ignore the validity in...

5 Thus says the Lord: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man And makes flesh his strength. Whose heart departs from the Lord . In Ken Burns's Baseball documentary, Gov. Mario Cuomo is a regular sage. He likes baseball, he says, because it rewards a togetherness at which people are not ordinarily very good. He extols the sacrifice for the good of the team which, he says, dates back to the book of Jeremiah. Seeing through different political and philosophical lenses than he does, I read a different book of Jeremiah. I see a prophet decrying individualism to the point of treachery that has become the norm around him. Lying is rampant, he says. Adultery is rampant. Lack of trust has become a national defense issue, he also lists in Jeremiah 9, because soldiers can't trust each other to stand in mutual defense. Fair enough, Gov. Cuomo. Our mutual readings of the book of Jeremiah can allow for the COST of atomism which pits every man for himself. This makes the placement of ...

3 O My mountain in the field, I will give as plunder your wealth, all your treasures, And your high places of sin within all your borders. 4 And you, even yourself, Shall let go of your heritage which I gave you; And I will cause you to serve your enemies In the land which you do not know; For you have kindled a fire in My anger which shall burn forever.” "Renunciation is a piercing virtue," admits Emily Dickinson in Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way . It is so sharp, in fact, that in Jeremiah 17:3-4 it turns the Father Who made and owns all things to lament. Perhaps for this purpose the Lord of the universe identifies especially with Israel and Jerusalem, so that He can say with meaning, eliciting something not unlike pathos, that He gives His mountain in the field as plunder. We can feel genuine pain in the immortal, impervious as He likewise severs the bond between the people on whom He has put His Name before the nations and the land He has given them for a thousand gen...

1 “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; With the point of a diamond it is engraved On the tablet of their heart, And on the horns of your altars, 2 While their children remember Their altars and their wooden images By the green trees on the high hills. "Children will imitate their fathers in their vices," laments Spurgeon looking at the legacy of his title subject in the sermon "Manasseh," seldom in their repentance; if parents sin, their children will follow them, without much doubt; but when they repent and turn to God, it is not easy to lead a child back in the way which it has once forsaken." So it is that opening Jeremiah 17, God presents one of the most frightful exhibits of His people's depravity, the faith of their children. The opening metaphor He gives Jeremiah's attention-getting enough, indelible sin written with a pit of iron, engraved with the point of a diamond. It's frightful tally, but for His intervention, is not going a...

19 O Lord, my strength and my fortress, My refuge in the day of affliction, The Gentiles shall come to You From the ends of the earth and say, “Surely our fathers have inherited lies, Worthlessness and unprofitable things.” 20 Will a man make gods for himself, Which are not gods? Pat Conroy narrates in Beach Music , "I like writing about strange cities and cuisines because it keeps me at arms length from the subjects that are too close to me." He's on to something, something CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape also points to, hoping that we will continue to push the virtuous life outward into the abstract and meaningless and thereby miss the opportunities to walk by faith in the relationships directly around us. That's what makes the dynamic of Jeremiah 16:18-19 so interesting. Leading up to this conclusion to the book's sixteenth chapter, we have seen the prophet relieved of hope of immediate repentance. We have seen him rescued from any tendency toward outr...

16 “Behold, I will send for many fishermen,” says the Lord, “and they shall fish them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. 17 For My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes. 18 And first I will repay double for their iniquity and their sin, because they have defiled My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.” "Until we feel some measure of dread about God's future wrath," suspects John Piper in 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die , "we will probably not grasp the sweetness with which the early church savored the saving work of Christ in the future." The same dynamic seems to be at work in the hairpin turns required to explore God's character and expand our notions of it in Jeremiah 16. Piper's words resonate especially as God lingers on H...

14 “Therefore behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “that it shall no more be said, ‘The Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,’ 15 but, ‘The Lord lives who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where He had driven them.’ For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers. David Zwirner admits to The New Yorker 's Dana Goodyear that the controversy Jordan Wolfson stirs up is effective. "Annoyingness is an interesting strategy in art-making." Jeremiah 16:14-15 emblazons that principle on unforgettable display. For, if the annoying but largely harmless idiosyncrasies of an artist can draw people to his work as Goodyear suggests, the art God makes out of the dark hues of human depravity and His contrasting light is all the more captivating. The Divine Dramatist has spent considerable time tamping down expectations. He has told Jeremiah how hopeless the culture is in w...