The priest comes out to let him go the following day. And Jeremiah, with calm dignity, walks away without a word. . .
. . . No, scratch that. He gives the Priest a new nickname – Danger Everywhere!!! – and informs him that the coming battle, all his friends would die, but he’d live on, to be dragged into exile where he would live out the rest of his miserable life.
O-kay, that’s a bit daring.
Or is it?
It actually comes from God, and Jeremiah isn’t all that thrilled about it. We read in verses 7-10 how Jeremiah complains to God about the words that he’s required to say. In all he does, the prophet simply is unable to stop himself speaking God’s word!
The irony of this is that prophecy is a gift that I once craved. I wanted to be the person who walked up to strangers and told them that God Has A Message For You!
Here we see the dark side. You may have God’s words – but you need to SPEAK God’s words, whether you want to or not.
And the thing is, in a sinful world, God’s words can get you into an awful lot of trouble.
Once again, we see the freedom of Jeremiah’s relationship with God in that he feels that he can say ANYTHING to God. When I was growing up, I would probably have been reprimanded by my mother for being irreverent if I was sarcastic towards God. Yet check out verse 13 – either Jeremiah is breaking the mood for one verse and then getting back into his tirade, or he’s actually being sarcastic IN A PRAYER!
But Jeremiah is not finished. He continues, cursing the very day he was born.
There’s an internet meme at the moment – “Ever get so angry?” What you do is you take a photograph out of context that appears to show someone doing something extremely amazing, and put the context “Ever get so angry that you prodded a bear with a stick?” or “Ever get so angry that you kicked a Russian cop?” or whatever.
Here Jeremiah could be a part of that. . . .
And yet – God doesn’t destroy Jeremiah (and there’s another 32 chapters of this to go!). We’ll find out how God responds tomorrow, but it’s not the instant kill one might expect.
Meanwhile, what lessons can we learn from this?
I’ve already talked about Jeremiah’s openness with God, so we’ll give that one a rest. I think maybe the best way to describe this is to simply say “Be careful what you wish for.”
Many people want to be used powerfully by God. We may even ask to be a part of the miraculous stuff that God does. Yet I wonder if we’d be so keen on volunteering to be in the plan if we really knew what it entailed. If you had the chance of doing what Jeremiah was doing – involuntarily pulling a wedgie on various powerful leaders – I’m not sure most of us would be happy about that.
More than that, we need to be aware that sometimes God will ask us to do things that are really uncomfortable. He means us to CHANGE the world. And that might mean discomfort for us.
The good news is that God loves us, and wants the best for us.
So what? I hear you thinking. Well, so if God asks you to do something, the WORST CASE SCENARIO is for you to face trouble temporally, then be exalted when God comes into His kingdom.
That means that it’s worth doing whatever and saying whatever God asks.
No comments:
Post a Comment