Jeremiah 4 – If Israel wants to
return to the Lord, she has but to do it.
But they must “remove the
foreskins of [their] hearts [take the tough cover off their hearts” (4:4).
Today’s English Version, which I like for the simplicity of its language, has
nothing like this in its translation – I don’t understand why. It says, “Keep
your covenant with my, your Lord, and dedicate yourselves to me, you people of
Judah and Jerusalem.”
The
Lord is going to bring disaster on the people of Judah from the north; a “lion . . . a destroyer of nations has set
out. He is coming to destroy Judah. The cities of Judah will be left in ruins,
and no one will live in them” (4:7). Jeremiah engages in some Mosaic
arm-twisting with God, accusing Him of having deceived the people with His
promises of peace (4:10), but this is not what is going to happen.
The
drama of this section lies in the coexistence of two simultaneous realities—the
destruction, which is coming on Judah because of the hardness of their
hearts and their years of unfaithfulness.
But the other is just as real; it is the terrible angst that fills the
heart of the prophet, who must convey the harsh message of God to his people
but at the same time feels somewhere in his heart that God has been unfaithful to the promise of peace made over and over
again to the people. The prophet is an intermediary, the voice of God to His
people AND the voice of the people to God. The excruciating tension these two
jobs bring to the prophet are captured well in this chapter:
“The
pain! I can’t bear the pain! My heart! My heart is beating wildly! I can’t keep quiet; I hear the trumpets and the shouts of
battle. . . . How long must I see the battle raging and hear the blasts of
trumpets? The Lord says, ‘My people are stupid; they don’t know me. They are
like foolish children; they have no understanding. They are experts at doing
what is evil, but failures at doing what is good” (4:19-22).
1 Corinthians 9 – Paul insists that
he is “an apostle.” He has seen the risen Lord; this church in Corinth is his
work “in the Lord.” People who
work for the gospel have a right to be supported, but Paul does not claim
it. In an exercise of the same
“communitarian” ideal mentioned previously, he does not exercise this right
because he thinks it might create obstacles to some he is attempting to reach.
He is also still dealing with the boasting question—the boasting or
self-inflation of those in the community who think their grasp of the gospel
gives them a certain status or aura—grasping
the gospel, embodying the gospel, representing it in any way puts a burden on
you to serve it, not boast about it. His “freedom” in the gospel makes him
want to be its slave, and that means he must try to be all things to all men—he
must try to communicate the truth of the gospel to all manner of men so as to
“win” them. We are after an
imperishable crown, not an earthly one.
No comments:
Post a Comment