I don’t often write about specific works of fiction. It’s hard to
analyze a book or movie in a way that’s compelling to someone who hasn’t
read or seen it, and the find-your-audience blogging experts would say
that reducing your audience from “people who are interested in an
amateur theologian and software developer’s wandering thoughts” to
“people who are interested in those wandering thoughts and have any idea
about what novel he’s referencing” is perhaps a mistake. But the nice
thing about having a blog is that I’m free to occasionally wander
wherever I like, and I’ve been reading some good books lately, so here
we go.
Spoilers for the first two Mistborn books and “Neon Genesis
Evanglion” follow.
I recently finished the second Mistborn book, The Well
of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson. Although he’s not extremely
well known in broader culture, Sanderson is one of the biggest fantasy
authors in the world and a prolific author, with over thirty novels to
his name. The Mistborn series follows Vin, a young thief who
grew up on the streets, as she falls in with a group of rebels, helps
overthrow a tyrannical ruler, and discovers her own magical powers. As a
fantasy series, it has many of the standard fantasy tropes: an immortal
evil overlord, a carefully explained system of magical abilities,
mysterious prophecies, centuries of backstory, and unearthly
creatures.
It’s all fun and well-written, but the fantasy tropes aren’t what
kept me thinking once the book was done - rather, it’s Vin’s
relationship with a young nobleman, Elend, with whom she falls in love.
Vin and Elend could hardly be more different. She grew up on the
streets; he’s the son of the most powerful noble family in the empire.
He’s an academic; she acts on instinct. Her life forced her to focus on
practicality and survival; he’s an amateur philosopher and an idealist.
Vin can use her magical abilities to become absolutely deadly in a
fight; Elend can barely hold a sword. As the plot develops, they become
responsible for a fledgling kingdom; Vin puts her talents to use at
night, spying, keeping watch, and eliminating threats, while Elend
spends his time politicking, drafting laws, and making speeches.
As their relationship progresses, neither of them think they’re right
for the other. Elend contrasts his ivory tower philosophies with Vin’s
resourcefulness and growing magical abilities and thinks she doesn’t
need him; Vin thinks that Elend should have someone who can more
properly fit into society and that she deserves to be alone in the
shadows. The various mundane and supernatural threats that they face
continually pressure them and force them to deal with them individually,
and since neither can manage to talk openly about their concerns, the
stresses and gaps and unknowns are filled in with insecurities and
fears.
In spite of this, they come to love each other; toward the end of the
book, they’re married in a brief, spur-of-the-moment ceremony, as Vin is
getting stitched up after being wounded in her latest magic-empowered
fight. When Elend asks a mutual friend, Sazed, for advice, Sazed tells
him how to think about their differences:
At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very
different. Different in shape, different in function, different in
design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature
might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to
keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without
one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock
and key were created for the same purpose. (p. 427)
Vin has serious trust issues. Her mentally ill mother killed her
sister. Vin’s brother taught her life on the streets by telling her that
everyone, even him, would eventually leave her - and he did. To survive,
she fell in with various thieves’ gangs, where stronger members would
frequently beat, assault, or steal from weaker members such as her. (The
fact that Vin can have any kind of healthy emotional life is
perhaps as fantastical as the book’s magic, especially when centuries of
rule by an immortal evil overlord did not allow for the development of
trauma-informed therapy.) Much of her relationship with Elend, then,
involves learning to trust him, and much of the reason she falls in love
with him is that he’s unwavering in his trust of her. It’s impossible
for her to guarantee that he would never betray her - yet she finally
concludes that “she’d rather trust him and be wrong than deal with the
worry of mistrust.”
While Vin’s and Elend’s relationship progresses (and armies invade
and conspiracies transpire and omens portend and so forth - this is a
fantasy novel, after all), their friend Sazed goes through struggles of
his own. He’s a Keeper - a member of an order of scholars who’ve
dedicated themselves to preserving the world’s lore during the dark age
of the evil overlord’s reign. Sazed’s specialty is religions; he’s
memorized three hundred of them, because he believes that these beliefs
and stories have value. When questioned as to how he can promote these
religions, despite their mutual contradictions, he explains that they
represent hope - hope that there is something greater than humanity,
hope that better times will come in the future. However, despite his
scholarship and wisdom, his quiet strength, and the support he offers
his friends, events in the book leave him shattered; although he
believed in hope as an abstract concept, there was nothing concrete in
any of the three hundred religions that could give him comfort.
Love, marriage, trust, hope - none of these are new topics, and all
have been dealt with by numerous philosophers, theologians, ethicists,
and self-help books. So, from one perspective, we don’t really need a
popular fantasy novel presenting its take on things. But God has given
us both emotion and reason. (As Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its
reasons which reason knows nothing of.”) And art and stories can touch
emotions in a way that propositional truths may not; art is art because
it shows something true about life, and sometimes showing is worth more
than telling. (This may be part of the reason that God himself so often
communicates through stories
and parables.)
During The Well of Ascension, Vin has the opportunity to
pursue a relationship with someone more like her, another
magic-empowered outsider, but she eventually decides to place her trust
in her key-and-lock relationship with Elend. And it is a relationship of
trust - she has to accept that, however much the street-scarred survivor
in her wants to ensure that she will never be hurt again, she cannot
guarantee that, and she loves him anyway. The trust that Vin and Elend
place in each other allows them to find strength when the abstract
belief of Sazed fails.
This all has me thinking about our relationship with God.
Christianity is, at its heart, a relationship with a Person, not a
system of belief in abstract concepts. Christians often talk about the
God-shaped hole in each of us. Blaise Pascal, again:
We may try to fill this hole with things on earth - for example, with
relationships with those just like us - rather than looking toward the
lock-and-key relationship with the Creator who seeks to relate to us.
(This of course stretches the metaphor - a key and lock are created for
each other, but God in no way depends upon us. I appreciate the poetry
of the image regardless.)
It also illustrates something of the nature of faith. We talk at
length about the importance of faith, what it means to have faith that’s
accompanied by works, the relationship between faith and doubt, why God
allows for faith rather than arranging for certainty, and so on. All of
these are good and valuable discussions, but at the simplest level,
faith is trust in a Person. Faith and doubt coexist because sin-scarred
survivors such as ourselves can never guarantee that another person
won’t hurt us - many of our doubts are fundamentally relational rather
than intellectual. (If God is real and loves me, why doesn’t he act as I
expect him to? Why am I still hurting? Why is the world still hurting?)
Faith comes when, in spite of this, we choose to trust in One who is
unwavering in his love toward us.
Thinking about Pascal’s “empty print and trace,” the God-shaped hole
that we attempt to fill with shallow relationships with each other,
reminds me of “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a 1990s Japanese anime. One of
the most popular anime ever, it tells the story of Shinji Ikari, an
asocial Japanese 14-year-old, who’s drafted along with other teenagers
to pilot giant robots in defense of Earth against invading alien
monstrosities, dubbed “angels.” He does so as a member of Nerv, a
UN-backed paramilitary group led by Shinji’s absentee father, Gendo.
“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is a short series (26 episodes, 24 minutes
each - anime is more likely than American television to tell a story and
wrap up) but dense, with psychological drama, conspiracies within
conspiracies, Jewish Kabbalah references, and critical elements of
backstory and motivation that are merely hinted at. For example, Nerv’s
motto (which is never directly referenced in the show but is visible
onscreen as part of their logo) is “God’s in his heaven, all’s right
with the world.” This quote from the 19th century poem “Pippa’s Song”
sounds inspiring, but as the series unfolds, it becomes clear that Nerv
considers God to have abandoned humanity, just as Nerv’s leader Gendo
has abandoned his son, Shinji, leaving Nerv to play God on its own.
Early in the series, Shinji is introduced to the concept of “the
hedgehog’s dilemma” - porcupines want to be close to each other, but
when they try to do so, they only hurt each other. This becomes a
recurring metaphor - humans seek to fill their emptiness with each
other, desperately seeking the approval of others, yet they repeatedly
hurt each other in the process.
Despite the show’s at times bizarre religious references, this theme
ends up sounding quite Christian. Without our Father (in Christian
terms, in rebellion against God), yet created for relationship and
needing love, we try to fill our emptiness with each other. In the
science-fiction anime world of “Evangelion,” this takes the form of a
conspiratorial project to psychically meld humanity’s minds together; in
real life, it can take the form of the distractions of entertainment,
pleasure, work, or it can take the form of seeking relationships with
others just like us, longing for someone we can trust and yet hurting
each other like hedgehogs, instead of trusting in our relationship with
our Father and accepting his love.
It’s the longest book of the Bible (by word count - Psalms has more
chapters, but they’re shorter - and if you split Samuel, Kings, and
Chronicles into two books each, as our English Bibles do). Jeremiah’s
ministry was long, hard, and discouraging - he began prophesying while
he was perhaps still a teenager, during the reign of King Josiah of
Judah, and prophesied through the next four kings. He saw the collapse
of the Assyrian empire, the victory of the Babylonian empire over Egypt
that cemented its status as the dominant power in the Near East, the
fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to my
Old Testament professor in college, he preached for forty years and
never saw a single convert. This is perhaps hyperbole - the book of
Jeremiah talks about a handful of connections in the priesthood and
royal court who supported him, plus his scribe Baruch - but his impact
on Judah within his day was seemingly negligible. After the fall of
Jerusalem to Babylon, he couldn’t even keep his countrymen from taking
him against his will to Egypt, in an attempt to avoid Babylonian
reprisals. He repeatedly clashed with prophets and priests and suffered
repeatedly for it - betrayed by his own family (Jer 12:6), flogged and
thrown in the stocks (Jer 20:1-2), put on trial after being nearly
killed by a mob (Jer 26:1-24), banned from visiting the temple (Jer 36:5),
falsely accused of defecting to Babylon (Jer 37:12-14), flogged and
imprisoned (Jer 37:15), thrown in a dry well to die (Jer 38:1-6),
rescued, and re-imprisoned, and only freed after the Babylonians
conquered Jerusalem.
The book of Jeremiah is also quite intimate in describing Jeremiah’s
own relationship with God. Several times throughout the book, he
complains to the Lord (Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-4; 15:10-21; 17:12-18;
18:18-23, 20:7-18). The book is complex to read; it’s a mixture of
prophecies, prayers, and narratives of Jeremiah’s life, often not in
chronological order, forcing the reader to keep the various Judahite
kings straight in their head as prophecies and stories jump back and
forth.
It contains several striking, even shocking, passages. Jeremiah’s
complaints to God. (“Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I
allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me.
Now I have become a constant laughingstock… Sometimes I think, ‘I will
make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger
anymore.’ But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of
me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in;
I cannot contain it… Cursed be the day I was born!… Why did I ever come
forth from my mother’s womb? All I experience is trouble and grief, and
I spend my days in shame” (Jer 20:7,9,14,18)). God’s denying Jeremiah of
the normal (and socially expected) activities of marriage, mourning, and
celebrating (Jer 16:1-9), as a lived parable of the desolation that was
coming to Judah. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for his
fellow Judahites (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11, 15:1), because of the depths
of their sin - when would we expect God to not want us to pray
for someone? One of the most shocking, though, is Jeremiah’s instruction
to surrender to Babylon.
Let’s put this in historical context. Israel and Judah were small
countries, positioned between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and
desert to the east, and so they formed a major trade route between the
north and south. The golden age of David and Solomon, when they were
militarily ascendant over their neighbors, enriched by trade, and
internationally esteemed, were long past; instead, they were a pawn in
struggles between Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon to the
north. By Jeremiah’s day, the kingdom of Israel had already fallen to
the Assyrians, who also very nearly conquered Judah during the reign of
Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, and now the kingdom of Judah
feared imminent destruction from Babylon.
In the midst of this, Jeremiah sent messages to the surrounding
countries:
The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to give your
masters this message: “I made the earth and the people and animals on it
by my mighty power and great strength, and I give it to whomever I see
fit. I have at this time placed all these nations of yours under the
power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I have even made
all the wild animals subject to him. All nations must serve him and his
son and grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then
many nations and great kings will in turn subjugate Babylon… Things will
go better for the nation that submits to the yoke of servitude to the
king of Babylon and is subject to him. I will leave that nation in its
native land. Its people can continue to farm it and live in it. I, the
Lord, affirm it!” (Jer. 27:4-7, 11)
And to the king and people of Judah:
Submit to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon. Be subject to
him and his people. Then you will continue to live. There is no reason
why you and your people should die in war or from starvation or disease.
That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation that will not be
subject to the king of Babylon. ‘Do not listen to the prophets who are
telling you that you do not need to serve the king of Babylon. For they
are prophesying lies to you. For I, the Lord, affirm that I did not send
them.’ (Jer. 27:12-15)
From a human perspective - this doesn’t sound good. It’d be like
Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, or George W. Bush after 9/11,
saying, “Welp, they got us good; we shouldn’t suffer war or hardship or
disease in trying to fight back.” Except that analogy probably still
misses the force of Jeremiah’s words, because our independence and
existence as a nation hadn’t been meaningfully threatened since 1865.
Perhaps it would be more like a preacher in Kyiv standing up and
declaring that Vladimir Putin is God’s servant and Ukraine needed to
peacefully surrender to him, but that’s okay, because God would later
judge Putin, too. Or William Joyce, aka
Lord Haw-Haw, a fascist, Nazi propagandist, and former British
soldier who broadcast to the UK during World War 2 and was executed for
treason after its end.
It’s no wonder the authorities in Jeremiah’s day didn’t like him.
While Jeremiah was telling those in Judah and resisted Babylon that
God was going to judge them, he wrote to those Jews who had already been
carried into exile to tell them that God would take care of them:
’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they
produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and
allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and
daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the
city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the
Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper…
‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again
take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise
to you and restore you to your homeland. For I know what I have planned
for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you.
I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’ (Jer 29:5-7,
10-11)
How do we interpret such passages? Is this just an interesting bit of
Old Testament history, yet another instance of God judging a faithless
people, or is there more that we can learn? Jeremiah 29:11 is a
wonderful promise to those in exile, and God’s faithfulness to those in
exile gives us reason to trust that he has a plan to care for us today,
but yanking that verse out of context as if it were given verbatim to us
fails to do justice to how challenging Jeremiah’s instruction to his
contemporaries was and how starkly it went against the religious
understanding of his day. As we look at the political, social,
and cultural struggles of the 21st century American church, is there
anything we can apply from Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to the
pagan forces of his day and seek their prosperity, rather than
fight?
Many evangelical churches are currently struggling with questions of
whether, and to what extent, we should get involved and fight in the
political, social, and cultural issues that are dividing America. Full
disclosure: I have definite opinions - and definite concerns - about how
we’re engaging here. So there may be a temptation for me to take these
passages from Jeremiah and use them as proof texts to support my side of
the debate. But I’m no prophet - it would be as big a mistake for me to
use Jeremiah’s history as evidence that I’m right as it was for the
false prophets of Jeremiah’s day to use the history of God protecting
Israel as evidence that Jeremiah was wrong. Instead, I’d like to list
some things that we can learn from Jeremiah and encourage us to
work through how they can help us in our current challenges.
God
is often less concerned with external religion and political power than
we are.
Solomon’s temple was a magnificent structure, the culmination of the
preparatory work of the exodus and tabernacle, the fulfillment of
prophecies and plans of David and Solomon, the manifestation of his
presence among his people (1 Ki 8:27-29), and a place to make God’s
glory and fame known to the surrounding nations (1 Ki 8:41-43) - yet
Nebuchadnezzar, acting as God’s servant, burned it down and looted all
of its furnishings. In fact, God was willing to quite literally burn the
entire political, national, and religious system of his people to the
ground if it allowed him to reform his people into a remnant that was
faithful to him.
True
religion needs to touch every aspect of our lives.
Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah started his ministry, started
numerous reforms to remove idolatry and refocus Judah’s religious
practices on the Lord. He removed idols, desecrated and tore down pagan
altars, repaired the temple, renewed the covenant, and organized a
national Passover celebration. Kings and Chronicles speak very highly of
him (2 Ki 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). However, Jeremiah’s struggles suggest
that these reforms were often merely surface-level - the people followed
the structures and practices of their religion without it changing their
behavior and hearts.
The Lord said to Jeremiah: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s temple
and proclaim this message: ’Listen to the Lord’s message, all you people
of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the Lord. The
Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Change the way you
have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to
continue to live in this land. Stop putting your confidence in the false
belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the Lord is here! The
temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here!” You must
change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat
one another fairly. Stop oppressing resident foreigners who live in your
land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost
their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying
allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. If you
stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this
land that I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession.
“’But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false
belief that will not deliver you. You steal. You murder. You commit
adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal.
You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known.
Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as
my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on
doing all those hateful sins! 11 Do you think this temple I have claimed
as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I
have seen for myself what you have done! says the Lord. (Jer 7:1-11)
(This kind of preaching no doubt explains why Jeremiah was eventually
prohibited from going to the temple.)
This passage is well-known to Christians because Jesus quoted it when
he cleansed the temple during the week leading up to his arrest. We
typically understand “a den of robbers” to mean simply that the people
inside the temple were robbing others, but Jeremiah’s charge is more
pointed than that: the religious practitioners were treating the temple
as a hideout or refuge in between their forays into immorality, a place
where they could find security and comfort while they lived their daily
lives however they wanted. They tried to follow the Lord and worship him
- but they also didn’t want to give up pursuing other gods.
As followers of God, our beliefs and formal religious practices are
important - but so are our choices to act with integrity, seek justice,
and avoid any idol that’s put alongside God.
Faithfulness
- successfully following God - may not look like what we think of as
success.
Contrary to the expectations of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it was the
exiles, not those who remained in the Promised Land, whom God was using
to reform his people. Jeremiah’s own ministry was long, hard, and
disappointing, with little to show for it in his day. In the view of the
religious leaders, he was dangerous and opposed to God. And yet, looking
back now, “Bible students consider Jeremiah to be one of the foremost OT
prophets. With good reason he has been called a sublime figure… Highest
praise has been given him; in fact, he has been credited with the
survival of his people after the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., a
veritable savior of the Jews” (Charles L. Feinberg, Expositor’s Bible
Commentary). More importantly, God loved him, challenged him,
encouraged him, and took care of him, even in the midst of his
complaints (Jer 15:19-21).
It’s easy for us to think that church growth, compliments from
others, popular support in elections and polls and news media, and the
like are evidence that we’re doing good, but Jeremiah’s life shows that
following God may bring none of that.
Be careful when saying
what God wants.
The book of Jeremiah describes how priests and false prophets
repeatedly opposed Jeremiah, and it names several of them: Pashhur son
of Immer, Hananiah son of Azzur, Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of
Maaseiah. However, it says very little about their motives. Maybe they
were con artists, deliberately lying for prestige or financial gain.
Maybe they were deceived by spiritual forces, like Ahab’s prophets were
(1 Ki 22:20-22). Maybe they started out intending to speak truly but
gradually twisted their message into what people wanted to hear - social
media clickbait and “doing it for the likes” create powerful incentives
today to say whatever will get the desired emotional reactions out of
your friends and followers, but the underlying temptations aren’t
new.
And maybe some of the false prophets truly believed they were
speaking God’s truth. Maybe they said God would deliver Judah from
Babylon because they rightly remembered and retold God’s promises to
take care of his people and God’s deliverance of his people in the past
- but, if so, they were forgetting that promise and protection was only
part of God’s message to his people, that holiness and
accountability also must be included, and that God’s sovereign plan
means he may have purposes and priorities broader than they could
see.
One odd dynamic of the past few years has been the number of
self-proclaimed Christian prophets who’ve confidently declared what God
was doing and would do in American national politics and the 2020
election. Many of these predictions proved false. Even in less
charismatic streams of Christianity, churches and families have been
divided by confident proclamations of which candidates and political
causes God wants us to support. We should seek to understand what God is
doing - but any beliefs about what God intends with current events and
predictions about the future should never contradict or distract from
the simple, hard work of recognizing the holiness that God wants from us
(both individually and as his people), practicing love in unity for each
other, and trusting that God will take of us and protect us through (not
necessarily from) whatever happens.
Leaders’
character matters. The sins of the past matter.
The book of Jeremiah has only one mention of Manasseh, the
grandfather of King Josiah: “I will make all the people in all the
kingdoms of the world horrified at what has happened to them because of
what Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem” (Jer
15:4). However, the books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign at
length:
He did evil in the sight of the Lord and committed the same horrible
sins practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out before the
Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had
destroyed; he set up altars for Baal and made an Asherah pole just as
King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky
and worshiped them. He built altars in the Lord’s temple, about which
the Lord had said, “Jerusalem will be my home.” In the two courtyards of
the Lord’s temple he built altars for all the stars in the sky. He
passed his son through the fire and practiced divination and omen
reading. He set up a ritual pit to conjure up underworld spirits and
appointed magicians to supervise it. He did a great amount of evil in
the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. He put an idol of Asherah
he had made in the temple, about which the Lord had said to David and to
his son Solomon, “This temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of
all the tribes of Israel, will be my permanent home”… Manasseh misled
[Israel] so that they sinned more than the nations whom the Lord had
destroyed from before the Israelites… Furthermore Manasseh killed so
many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to
end, in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight
of the Lord. (2 Ki 21:2-7, 9, 16)
As narrated by Kings and Chronicles, Manasseh was almost
single-handedly responsible for the Babylonian exile; God announced a
final judgment on Judah through his prophets during Manasseh’s reign,
and he never relented (2 Ki 21:10-15). The reforms of Manasseh’s
grandson Josiah, during Jeremiah’s youth, were valuable but brought only
a temporary reprieve (2 Ki 22:18-10). Jeremiah’s command to surrender
comes because, by then, the fall of Judah was inevitable; all that his
contemporaries could do was influence how hard and how fast the fall
would come.
As American individualists in one of the most prosperous and powerful
countries in history, we like to think ourselves responsible for our own
actions and outcomes and the masters of our own fates. There are deep,
important questions about the interplay between present responsibility
and consequences of the past (compare, for example, Deut 5:9 and Jer
15:4 to Deut 24:16 and Jer 31:29-30). But Jeremiah’s example suggests
that there may be times when, instead of fighting, we may need to accept
current events, consider the sins of our collective past (for example,
American sins of violence, greed, and racism), and repent and grow.
Even
when opposing sin and pronouncing judgment, love others and weep.
Jeremiah gave harsh proclamations against the sin and superficial
religion of Judah - and yet, in spite of that, and in spite of God’s
instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for Judah in light of the
coming judgment (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11-12), he still prayed for
them:
Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny. It
is not in their power to determine what will happen to them.
Correct us, Lord, but only in due measure. Do not punish us in
anger, or you will reduce us to nothing. (Jer 10:23-24)
And this is no rote, checklist-style prayer; Jeremiah identifies with
the people he’s proclaiming judgment against and who opposed and
persecuted him, and he weeps over them:
I wish that my head were a well full of water and my eyes were a
fountain full of tears! If they were, I could cry day and night
for those of my dear people who have been killed. (Jer 9:1)
In fact, God himself laments over the people:
I will now purify them in the fires of affliction and test them.
The wickedness of my dear people has left me no choice. What else
can I do? (Jer 9:7)
It’s easy to fall into us-versus-them thinking - any of our
opponents, anyone doing wrong, are first and foremost enemies to be
defeated, agents of evil, rather than fellow humans with whom we live in
community. Jeremiah risked his life opposing evil, but he also
recognized his ties to his people, and he never stopped loving. God
opposes and judges evil, but he never stops loving.
There is always hope.
Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, God instructed him to buy a field in his
hometown of Anathoth. This was just a year or two before Jerusalem fell
to Babylon; Jerusalem was already under siege at the time, and Jeremiah
was under arrest for his conflicts with Judah’s leadership. Jeremiah
explains the reason for buying the field: “For the Lord of Heaven’s
Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will
again be bought in this land’” (Jer 32:15).
Investing in real estate at a time like this would seem highly
questionable; it would be like our Kyiv preacher saying that Putin is
God’s servant and that Ukraine should surrender to him, but then while
in prison proceeding to invest in property in the war-ravaged Mariupol
in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. After the land purchase, God
speaks to Jeremiah, promising that, in spite of his judgment for
centuries of Israelite sin,
I will bring them back to this place and allow them to live here in
safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give
them a single-minded purpose to live in a way that always shows respect
for me. They will want to do that for their own good and the good of the
children who descend from them. I will make a lasting covenant with them
that I will never stop doing good to them. I will fill their hearts and
minds with respect for me so that they will never again turn away from
me. I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and
wholeheartedly plant them firmly in the land. (Jer 32:37-41)
Much of our contemporary rhetoric and dialogue about American
politics and the church in America has an almost apocalyptic flavor: if
this election doesn’t go the way we think it should, or this cultural
trend or that political agenda isn’t reversed, our country and churches
are doomed. This rhetoric seems overblown (it’s not the first time we’ve
feared an outcome of an election), but it may actually be the case; Judah in
Jeremiah’s day was doomed. But God remains faithful to his promises; the
gates of hell will not prevail against his church; he is still our God,
and we are still his people.
God’s
presence and deliverance may not look like we expect.
Everyone in Jerusalem had no doubt grown up hearing of the Lord’s
miraculous deliverance from the Assyrian invasion, during the reign of
King Hezekiah, when God killed 185,000 of their soldiers overnight (1 Ki
19). This may have contributed to their confidence that they should
fight against the Babylonian invasion - but that was not God’s plan.
And yet, God remained faithful to his people, preserving and
purifying them and calling them back to him, at a time when many nations
and tribes dissolved and were absorbed into conquering empires. And
countless believers since then have drawn comfort from God’s promise to
the exiles: “I know what I have planned for you… I have plans to prosper
you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with
hope” (Jer 29:11).
Jeremiah himself had no doubt grown up hearing of prophets like
Elijah, who opposed idolatry and immorality with fire from heaven and
supernatural strength and miraculous victories, untouchable by any human
opposition - but that was not God’s plan for Jeremiah.
And yet, in spite of the persecution and hardships, God was with
Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I chose you.
Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet
to the nations” (Jer 1:5). “I, the Lord, hereby promise to make you as
strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will
be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the
kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and all the people of the
land. They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you,
for I will be with you to rescue you” (Jer 1:18-19).
It’s easy, and natural, to look for God in the miraculous, in
clear-cut confrontations of good and evil, in displays of power, in
victory. But God often chooses to act through human circumstances,
through loss, by being with us through defeat rather than guaranteeing
temporal victory, by proving his faithfulness and comfort in spite of
the bad, rather than simply removing the bad.
At Easter, God himself “surrendered” to evil, taking upon himself the
worst evil that humanity could deal out, rather than simply wielding
power against it as he did in the days of Hezekiah and Elijah. And, in
doing so, he defeated evil and death for all time, showing once again
his love and faithfulness.
