Jeremiah 37 - Chronologically, this chapter follows 34:1-7. Zedekiah is installed as king by Nebuchadnezzar, and he will not listen to Jeremiah. But he does send people to ask Jeremiah to intercede with God for the people. Pharaoh’s army is on the move to Jerusalem and the Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians) will abandon the siege of the city for a time. But the Lord warns Jeremiah that the Egyptians will turn back and when they do, the Chaldeans will return to destroy the city.
While the Chaldeans are away, however, Jeremiah takes the opportunity to go and see his family—again over the issue of some inheritance. He is accused of deserting to the Chaldeans. He is arrested and beaten, left in an underground cell. Zedekiah sends for him and asks him for a word from the Lord. Jeremiah tells him again he will be handed over, but asks that he not be sent back to the cell he was in. Instead Jeremiah is placed in the Court of the Guard where he had a greater degree of freedom, can talk to people, etc. and is given a loaf of bread a day until all the bread in the city is gone.
Romans 5 - Our peace with God
is through Jesus. Through Him we
have access to God’s grace and we are able to hope realistically to see the
glory of God (5:2). It is by attaching
ourselves to the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, that we love God as we need
to love Him. Paul seems to say, however, that our
experience of redemption is at least partly something we have hoped for but do
not yet possess; but he wants us to believe that this hope is well-founded. Our
love for Him is great because he died for us, not when we were loveable and
devoted to him, but when we were lost in sin. This is unique. “Indeed, only
with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good
person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still
sinners Christ died for us” (5:7-8).
Christ is compared
with Adam:
“Sin came into the world through one man,
and his sin brought death with it. As a result, death has spread to the whole
human race because everyone has sinned. ” (5:12-13). “From the time of Adam to the time of Moses, death ruled over all human
beings, even over those who did not sin in the same way that Adam did when he
disobeyed God’s command” (5:14). I think the death Paul speaks of here is a
spiritual death. And he plainly says that the man Adam is a “figure of the one who was to come”
(5:14). The “figure” of Adam in the Genesis story is the figure of the human
who has lost the vision of humanity that the creator intended to “gift” us
with. A restoration of that “gift” is what comes to man through the grace that
flows from seeing Jesus as God poured out for us.
“So then, as the one sin condemned all
people, in the same way the one righteous act sets all people free and gives
them life” (5:18). “[J]ust as sin
ruled by means of death, so also God’s grace rules by means of righteousness,
leading us to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:21).
Paul is not easy to
understand, and I can only say about it what God has given me to see in it, and
I cannot be certain I see it all correctly. I remember that one of the things about
Jesus that made it difficult for me to “see” him as God incarnate was that as a
young, secular, revolutionary (left-winger back in the 60s), I was used to
idealizing people who had fought for justice and died, people who had
sacrificed themselves for the underdog. And there were many such people in human
history, or so I thought then. Why
was this one man held aloft as uniquely self-sacrificing and important?
This is
STILL for me a problem with those who focus entirely on Jesus’ social justice
message. He is not particularly unique on this level. But if he is God, and He has emptied Himself of power and majesty
to die for the unholy, unheroic and unworthy so as to "raise them up" in some way to
SEE themselves as worthy of awe and life eternal – THIS I can finally SEE as
something very unique, very essential.
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