Jeremiah 8:18-9:26
Have you ever thought to yourself or been told that if you are exactly in the middle of God’s will for your life, things will be easy or smooth? I think sometimes we carry that assumption around, even if we do so without thinking about it. Without doubt, there are times of blessing, plenty, grace and peace, but if we take a close look at the lives of faithful people in Scripture, such as Jeremiah, we realize that God’s plan for our lives often contains times of struggle and difficulty.
The point I want to draw from this passage comes from the passage 8:18 through 9:3. We should take note that Jeremiah is not struggling in his walk with God, or “kicking at the goads” with his calling. Rather, Jeremiah is leading a faithful life dedicated to God and His work through him. And yet it brings him an unusual amount of personal frustration.
“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick within me.”
The prophet then laments about God being gone from His people, and surprisingly enough, God answers his question. Jeremiah wonders if God is still in Zion, and God says there is a good reason it feels like He is absent-the people have turned away from Him. All too often when we pass through seasons in which it seems God is absent, we blame God for being gone. What we should be doing is asking whether we have turned away from Him in any significant way.
And then as Jeremiah continues to struggle through his people’s rebellion and God’s judgment, the first three verses of chapter 9 give us a great glimpse into the heart and mind of the weeping prophet. Contrast the first line of verse one with the first line of verse two:
“Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night…”
“Oh that I had in the desert a traveler’s lodging place, that I might leave my people.”
Jeremiah is in a place of struggle and difficulty because he is bound to his people and bound to God at the same time; he will not let go of his love and care for his culture and he will not let go of his call and vocation from God.
Pretend you have never read beyond Jeremiah 9:3; think for a moment as if you don’t know what the rest of the book holds. Will God’s prophet stay, be faithful to God’s call and hope against hope that some will listen and be saved, or will he disappear into the desert and cast his prophecies over the wall of the city from a safe distance?
Which will we choose? Do we find ourselves torn between love for our fellow human being across the street and our call to be witnesses for God? Have we given up on one or the other in the stress and strain of the conflict? The easy choice is to let one of them go-either love for our neighbor, or our dedication to God. But that is not the choice Jeremiah made.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Monday, August 15, 2005
True Repentance: Taking Shame Seriously
Jeremiah 8:4-17
In our study of Jeremiah we find ourselves in chapter 8, and in another long litany of judgments and proclamations by God. It is easy in such a book to loose sight of the details and nuances of these kinds of passages and skim over them as if they were all the same. What a closer reading finds, however, is a wealth of knowledge about human nature and the character and nature of God.
In the first three verses of our passage we learn a little more about the realities of true repentance (for a fuller passage see Jeremiah 3:6-4:4). It is just a matter of human nature, for instance, to turn away from God in our sin, recognize our mistake, and make an effort at returning to God: “When men fall, do they not rise again?” But Judah has made a habit of turning away from God, and it has become a “perpetual” activity for them. Additionally, they no longer are bothered with the notion that they have done something wrong: “no man relents of his evil saying, ‘What have I done?’” At least two things can be gleaned here about true repentance.
First, we must not only turn away from sin and rebellion, but we must turn to God and fill ourselves with the things of God. It is not enough to rid ourselves of our sins; we must actively strive to be filled with the Spirit and mind of God. Secondly, an appropriate sense of shame and regret must accompany our contrition. Later in this passage, Jeremiah notes that the people commit shameful acts and have forgotten how to blush (vs. 12).
Shame, in spite of its poor public image, is a necessary component of the human conscience. It is like a pain reflex for inappropriate behavior. Shame tells us there may be something wrong with an act, and that we should pay closer attention to the morality of our behavior. Having said that, there are two ways of getting rid of shame. First, we can rectify our behavior. Second, we can normalize shameful behavior and short-circuit the shame reflex.
We live in a shameless society-you be the judge as to which route we have taken to get there.
Have we become accustomed to things that should cause us to reflect on our sinful nature and our separation from God? Are we loosing the ability to take sin and the radical rift it causes seriously? One of the first steps in returning to God is realizing our profound need to turn away from the things which so easily entangle us.
In our study of Jeremiah we find ourselves in chapter 8, and in another long litany of judgments and proclamations by God. It is easy in such a book to loose sight of the details and nuances of these kinds of passages and skim over them as if they were all the same. What a closer reading finds, however, is a wealth of knowledge about human nature and the character and nature of God.
In the first three verses of our passage we learn a little more about the realities of true repentance (for a fuller passage see Jeremiah 3:6-4:4). It is just a matter of human nature, for instance, to turn away from God in our sin, recognize our mistake, and make an effort at returning to God: “When men fall, do they not rise again?” But Judah has made a habit of turning away from God, and it has become a “perpetual” activity for them. Additionally, they no longer are bothered with the notion that they have done something wrong: “no man relents of his evil saying, ‘What have I done?’” At least two things can be gleaned here about true repentance.
First, we must not only turn away from sin and rebellion, but we must turn to God and fill ourselves with the things of God. It is not enough to rid ourselves of our sins; we must actively strive to be filled with the Spirit and mind of God. Secondly, an appropriate sense of shame and regret must accompany our contrition. Later in this passage, Jeremiah notes that the people commit shameful acts and have forgotten how to blush (vs. 12).
Shame, in spite of its poor public image, is a necessary component of the human conscience. It is like a pain reflex for inappropriate behavior. Shame tells us there may be something wrong with an act, and that we should pay closer attention to the morality of our behavior. Having said that, there are two ways of getting rid of shame. First, we can rectify our behavior. Second, we can normalize shameful behavior and short-circuit the shame reflex.
We live in a shameless society-you be the judge as to which route we have taken to get there.
Have we become accustomed to things that should cause us to reflect on our sinful nature and our separation from God? Are we loosing the ability to take sin and the radical rift it causes seriously? One of the first steps in returning to God is realizing our profound need to turn away from the things which so easily entangle us.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
I Touched Him!
1 John 1:1-4
If I were to ask you to describe an influential person you knew several years ago, or to describe a close friend you have not seen in years, where would you begin? Most of us might begin with a description of the time and setting of our friendship or encounter and some of the more salient descriptive details. We might describe where we were, what they did for a living, people’s perception of that person, their career, their family, etc.
If we were really close to them, or they made a profound impact on us personally, we might begin with our experience of the person.
In his first epistle, John does a little of both. Maybe 40-50 years after Jesus’ death there has been plenty of time for the apostles and the Church to build theology around Him and who He was. There have been decades of teaching about Christ and encountering heresies that threatened to split congregants away from the true faith. And in 1 John, the author draws on much of that in order to correct some of the problems he sees in the congregation to which he writes.
One of the burdens of 1 John is to answer questions like, “Who is Jesus?” and “How do we identify Christianity among all the competitors?” So John fills his readers ears and heads with plenty of foundational theology. Just in these first few verses we encounter the crucial realities of Jesus as eternally existent God (“from the beginning”) and fully incarnate man (“made manifest”). John points out that we, as Christians, cannot give one inch of our Christology-Jesus was fully God and fully man; He was God in the flesh reconciling the world to Himself.
But the thrust of John’s description in this opening section is his personal experience of the person Jesus Christ. Note the almost redundant usage of sensory language-heard, seen, looked, touched, seen, seen, heard. Jesus was a real person in real time touching the lives of real people.
John’s first recollection of Jesus-the first method of communication John uses-is to say, “I touched him!”
Our discipleship should be filled with experience. We should be able to draw close to Christ, knowing who He is and paying close attention to the details of our doctrine, but at the same time touching, seeing, and feeling Him.
If you were to describe to someone who Jesus is, would you be able to begin where John began?
If I were to ask you to describe an influential person you knew several years ago, or to describe a close friend you have not seen in years, where would you begin? Most of us might begin with a description of the time and setting of our friendship or encounter and some of the more salient descriptive details. We might describe where we were, what they did for a living, people’s perception of that person, their career, their family, etc.
If we were really close to them, or they made a profound impact on us personally, we might begin with our experience of the person.
In his first epistle, John does a little of both. Maybe 40-50 years after Jesus’ death there has been plenty of time for the apostles and the Church to build theology around Him and who He was. There have been decades of teaching about Christ and encountering heresies that threatened to split congregants away from the true faith. And in 1 John, the author draws on much of that in order to correct some of the problems he sees in the congregation to which he writes.
One of the burdens of 1 John is to answer questions like, “Who is Jesus?” and “How do we identify Christianity among all the competitors?” So John fills his readers ears and heads with plenty of foundational theology. Just in these first few verses we encounter the crucial realities of Jesus as eternally existent God (“from the beginning”) and fully incarnate man (“made manifest”). John points out that we, as Christians, cannot give one inch of our Christology-Jesus was fully God and fully man; He was God in the flesh reconciling the world to Himself.
But the thrust of John’s description in this opening section is his personal experience of the person Jesus Christ. Note the almost redundant usage of sensory language-heard, seen, looked, touched, seen, seen, heard. Jesus was a real person in real time touching the lives of real people.
John’s first recollection of Jesus-the first method of communication John uses-is to say, “I touched him!”
Our discipleship should be filled with experience. We should be able to draw close to Christ, knowing who He is and paying close attention to the details of our doctrine, but at the same time touching, seeing, and feeling Him.
If you were to describe to someone who Jesus is, would you be able to begin where John began?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)