Coming Up For Air

The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), 2 which Jeremiah the prophet spoke to all the people of Judah and to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying: 3 “From the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, even to this day, this is the twenty-third year in which the word of the Lord has come to me; and I have spoken to you, rising early and speaking, but you have not listened. 4 And the Lord has sent to you all His servants the prophets, rising early and sending them, but you have not listened nor inclined your ear to hear.’ Jeremiah 25:1-4, New King James Version The New Yorker 's Joan Acocella writes of what made a particular ballet compelling, “it was old enough to seem new.” The same is the nature of the Gospel presented in Jeremiah 25:4. God has the prophet present before his jaded adversaries that the message ...

1 The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah (which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), 2 which Jeremiah the prophet spoke to all the people of Judah and to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying: 3 “From the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, even to this day, this is the twenty-third year in which the word of the Lord has come to me; and I have spoken to you, rising early and speaking, but you have not listened. Jeremiah 25:1-3, New King James Version "'O earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord," intones Charles Spurgeon in his sermon, "Human Responsibility,"' for as far as our ministry is true and untainted by error, it is God's Word, and it hath the same right and claim to your belief as if God himself should speak it from the top of Sinai, instead of speaking it through the humble ministry of the Word of God....

8 ‘And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad’—surely thus says the Lord—‘so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt. 9 I will deliver them to trouble into all the kingdoms of the earth, for their harm, to be a reproach and a byword, a taunt and a curse, in all places where I shall drive them. 10 And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence among them, till they are consumed from the land that I gave to them and their fathers.’ ”Jeremiah 24: 8-10, New King James Version Spurgeon takes the believer back to a palpable, oppressive sense of lostness in his sermon,  "A Time for Finding the Lost Sheep."  "Sometimes  there  was  a  glimmer  of  hope," he holds out, "but  that  only made your darkness more visible. As John Bunyan has it, the hell drum was beating in  your ears—you heard it from morning till...

And as the bad figs which cannot be eaten, they are so bad’—surely thus says the Lord—‘so will I give up Zedekiah the king of Judah, his princes, the residue of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt. Jeremiah 24:8, New King James Version My wife and I are just finishing a watch through a long-running series ER . Earlier in it, the patient resisted the urging of a nurse named Lydia to take clothing she needed from the resource class at the hospital maintained. Lydia persisted, "We've got some pretty rich dead people." God makes much the same deeper points to His prophet in Jeremiah 24:8. Since Jeremiah has withstood audiences with and persecution from the most powerful in his culture and God determined that he needed remediation in order to avoid being overawed by the pretensions of his age, we certainly do. Rich people die. If they are not to do so, they depend on the Lord's forbearance, knowingly or not, for their continuance. Go...

6 For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land; I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. 7 Then I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God, for they shall return to Me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:6-7, New King James Version "Revivals," insists Tim Keller in Songs of Jesus on Psalm 85:7, "always involve a fresh 'seeing' of the Gospel of grace, grasping it theologically and knowing it experientially." We can be rigidly formulaic but which comes first, generally insisting on which came first with us as the proper process of God's persuasion. For many if not most of us, the comfort of our experience was touched, chastened, restricted. We became aware how vulnerable our sense of what is normal in Earthly experience was. Then the revival of fresh seeing, by the grace of God, allowed us to treasure H...

5 “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge those who are carried away captive from Judah, whom I have sent out of this place for their own good, into the land of the Chaldeans. 6 For I will set My eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land; I will build them and not pull them down, and I will plant them and not pluck them up. Jeremiah 24:5-6, New King James Version Writes Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra of a kind of disorienting depression, "All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise." We become so convinced of our despondent narrative, he says, that it impacts how we see subsequent events. They, "proportion'd to our cause must be as great as that which makes it." Knowing the depth of this bias toward what continues to deliver the extreme emotional fix, whether positive or negative, God uses the prophet who is so often an instrument of corrections, convictions, and ev...

“Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Like these good figs, so will I acknowledge those who are carried away captive from Judah, whom I have sent out of this place for their own good, into the land of the Chaldeans. Jeremiah 24:5, New King James Version On September 1, 2017, I was uprooted. For seven years previous to that, I had been helping to match community college students with courses of study and career paths thereafter. In that seemingly ideal capacity, I brought home armloads of inspirational anecdotes. On that day, I brought home the news that the path I thought to be perpetual slammed to a conspicuous dead end. That I had the double indignity of explaining this occurrence to my friends in the private sector. Surely they thought government employment was unlosable. I had heard it characterized as a safe harbor for the unambitious, and now I did not have a safe harbor. Cringing for a series of subsequent, if unintentional, blows, I sent out the news. I got back a shower of ...