Sunday School Lesson 41: I Have Made Thee This Day...an Iron Pillar

Jeremiah is one of the major prophets of the Old Testament, and has a fairly miserable experience.  He gets beaten, imprisoned, stoned, and otherwise mistreated throughout the course of his ministry but somehow remains faithful. Over the course of his life, he will prophesy against Israel and Judah, act out several parables (he's got nothing on Hosea, who was instructed to marry a prostitute, or Ezekiel, who had to lie on his side for 390 days, but still, there definitely were some awkward moments when he probably felt like the only adult in a grade-school theatrical production), and eventually ends up in Egypt, at which point his writings stop. His preaching focuses on the need for repentance to avoid the decreed babylonian captivity. He was supported in the early part of his ministry by Josiah, the King of Judah, but not by the subsequent kings, Jehoikim or Zedekiah.

Jeremiah 1:5 Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. I know this is a scripture mastery and somewhat trite through overusage, but I still think it is a powerful message.  God knew us before the formation of our physical bodies and ordained us to specific works.  Or, at least did so with some of his children.  I don't find it a stretch to assume that what he said to Jeremiah could be said to any of us with a different ordination.

Jeremiah 1:9 Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.  Isaiah had an encounter with the Lord that was focused on his mouth as well, in Isaiah 6:7, but his experience was more around the fact that he felt too sinful to see the Lord, so a seraphim took a live coal from the altar and put it on Isaiah's mouth and his iniquity was taken away and his sin purged. It reminds me of John, when he saw the angels coming at the end of the world and one of them had a little book that John was commanded to eat and once he ate it, his belly was bitter and he was commanded to prophesy.  The thing about all this that is interesting to me is the focus on the mouth.  I would think that if the Lord was to bless me with the ability to speak, I would expect the blessing to be upon my head, i.e. my intellect, rather than on my actual tongue.

Jeremiah 2:3 Israel was holiness to the Lord (emphasis added). This a sad to me. It is preceded by the statement that the Lord remembers when Israel was young and he led them through the wilderness but now they've forsaken him.

Jeremiah 2:9 Wherefore i will yet plead with you, saith the Lord, and with your children's children will I plead.  People often think of Jehovah in the Old Testament as a vengeful God, and I get that - he definitely seems to have been a little more decisive back then, swifter to take action both for and against people than we seem to experience today, but he was also a loving, tender, merciful God, who will plead with his children, and their children after them to please repent, return to him, and be happy, be healed.

Jeremiah 2:13 For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.  This one is commonly considered a Christ reference, and together with the reference in Zechariah, is the source for Christ's quotations about being the living water when he was alive.  The broken cisterns are a reference to false Gods who can provide no eternal benefit to their believers.

Jeremiah 2:19-28 Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God...but in time of their trouble they will say, Arise and save us.  But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? let them arise, if they can save the in time of thy trouble.  Arguably one of the greatest scriptures in all of the Old Testament.  How fitting and just is this?  Our own wickedness will be the executor of our punishment, we the authors, our choices the punishment.  The logic of bringing something upon yourself is not lost on the Lord, and the theme is repeated throughout this book. It is oddly divergent from the other message that is equally rampant, that of, repent and I will take you back right now.  This, to me, really strikes at the timing of our penitence.  Are we humble and seeking the Lord when we don't seem to need him  (temporally speaking) or do we wait until we are in some sort of trouble and realize how helpless we are without him?  To me, this is a statement of proximity.  If we gleefully ignore the teachings of the prophets until we're drowning and then cry out, save me, the Lord will likely say, you're nowhere near me, you've swum away from me.  If, on the other hand, we are striving daily to draw near unto him, he will likewise draw near unto us and when we cry out, as Peter did, that we are sinking, he will save us in accordance with his will and our faith.

Jeremiah 3:6-11 Has thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done?...And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. And I saw when for all the causes whereby backsliding israel committed adultery...yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and played the harlot also...And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned to me with her whole heart, but feignedly...the backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah.  There's a lot that goes into that passage, but the essence is that the Lord is a lot more upset with hypocrisy than he is with up-and-up disobedience.  If  obedience is the first law of heaven, hypocrisy must be the first law of hell.  In the New Testament, Christ rarely got worked up but he seemed to take great issue with hypocrites. Revelation 3:15 talks about being either hot or cold.  Basically, pick a lane.  The Nephites were destroyed before the Lamanites in large part due to their hypocritical attitude toward the light and knowledge they had received.   What does that mean for the USA?  After being so blessed, are we going to fall the faster for our lack of commitment to being either wholly behind Christ or wholly behind Satan?  Will nations where it is acceptable to murder and steal as long as you are up front about it last longer than ours where we pretend to care but the reality is that we care only when it is politically expedient that we do so?

And, unfortunately, that's it.  I have to get this up and don't have time to go through the whole of Jeremiah.  I'll probably read it through without writing any notes about it just so I can keep on schedule. 

Sunday School Lesson 40: Enlarge the Place of thy Tent

Isaiah 54:7 For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.  In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.  This is spoken to the "desolate." If taken in isolation, it could be messianic, speaking of Christ's suffering on the cross when he asked why God had forsaken him, but the preceding verses make it clear that he is speaking to Christ's betrothed.  So is that the Jews or the Church? Is the small moment the past couple thousand years, or is it the time that each of us suffers following sin when his spirit is withdrawn from us?

Isaiah 54:13 And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children. Taken in context with the rest of the chapter, this would seem to be a societal teaching that applies to all the children in the community, but I've always looked at this one as though it could stand alone and refer to our individual families.  When we teach our children about the Lord, the peace of our children will be great.  Of course, in English, this verse could mean that All thy children will be taught BY the Lord, not ABOUT, thanks to the ambiguity of our sentence structure.  Either way, I like to think this one can apply to our children.  Being taught by the Lord might mean that they will be enlightened by his Spirit, so perhaps the ambiguous grammar is useful because it is both.  The Ukrainian says something like, All your children will become the Lord's students.  It didn't really help in understanding who would be doing the teaching the way I wanted to, because the word used for student is similar to the word used for disciple, and with disciples, the onus is on the disciple to learn and follow, not necessarily on the Lord to teach and lead.

Isaiah 54:17 No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.  I'm pretty sure the first time I heard this line and noticed it was in a reggae song, either the Fugees or Bob Marley.  It's a pretty generous promise.

Isaiah 55:2 Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.  This verse is a ponderer.  How frequently do we waste our efforts trying to acquire things that have no lasting significance? What do we focus on that is not going to bring us happiness?  If you could know beforehand that your efforts toward a particular thing were going to feel like a waste of time when you are finished, how seriously would you take it.  Yet, on the flipside, this may well refer to things like pursuing a career.  I doubt that my job is something that satisfies in a spiritual sense, but I still need to make money if I am going to support my family. Does the spiritual responsibility of supporting my family offset the spiritually unimportant elements of my job? Because at the end of the day, supplying overpriced athletic-wear to middle class citizens is probably not very spiritually important.
It could refer to our non-productive time, though, when we pursue entertainment that is the opposite of spiritually satisfying.  Even inoffensive movies and television shows are probably a complete waste of time.

Isaiah 55:3 Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.  The sure mercies of David is an interesting turn of phrase, given that David sinned and lost significant portions of his blessings. Paul indicates in Acts 13:34 that it has reference to the resurrection.  I'm not quite sold on that, because in Isaiah he says he wants to make a covenant with us dependent on our choices, which the resurrection isn't: it comes to all men the same way death does.  However, if we use David as an archetype for Christ, we have a man who was despised and rejected of men in his own family; Christ's family was the Jews, David's family included his brothers, and later his children; David fought for Israel and overcame an enemy that no one else was willing or able to combat, just as Jesus overcame Lucifer for us; and lastly, David typifies Christ through the covenants God made with him.  Thus, if David and represents Christ in this section, it is possible that the sure mercies of David are more literally conveyed as the sure mercies of Christ, which would include forgiveness of our sins, joy in this life, and an eventual estate in our Father's Kingdom.  I think Isaiah sometimes forgot whether he was speaking of David or of David's eventual descendent, Jesus Christ.  In Isaiah 9:6-7, we have the famous verse that is in Handel's Messiah, For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given...Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end; upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever.  So I am now convinced that the sure mercies of David are synonymous with the sure mercies of Christ and that we receive them by the covenant of Baptism.