“Welcome.” I said, as warmly as I knew how. Extending my right hand, as I have seen done many times before by others, I continued, “Thank you for coming. The family is in on the left.” JonMark and I received nods of appreciation and support as we did our work of welcome that day. And as friends and families made their way through the entry way, and then on to the left, they found Jennifer and, eventually her sister, Jamie, waiting.
I tell this story because it can be an interesting experience, offering hope, offering the gospel, offering words of honesty, to people who may not know that they want or that they need it in that moment. And also, it is not that those words are unwelcome. . . it is just in moments of heightened emotion and suffering, sometimes we can forget that we need to hear the Lord.
And while some might be tempted to think that the message of our Biblical authors is not applicable to the suffering and struggles of our day, just as we might think that what they went through has so little to do with how we feel today as we struggle to be the faithful people of God, Jeremiah experienced this feeling as well. He intimately felt this way.
For God spoke to him. God revealed himself to his servant.
Yet in the beginning of chapter 20, the prophet is beaten and put in stocks. His public suffering is made worse because it takes place in “the house of the Lord” (Jeremiah 20:2). The Lord God calls him to preach, to evangelize, but what do you say when the people who you are sent to do not yet know that they need to hear what God has placed upon you heart? How do you offer them a word when you are so beat, so broken, so wounded in the moment?
I can imagine tears in Jeremiah’s heart and on his face as he pondered that question himself—a question that we wrestle with ourselves. What could faithfulness look like to him?
He would leave the safety of his home and go out into the community once again and share the very same message that brought the ridicule, the separation, the abuse… even if he did not have the words as he started.
Move 1- honest beginning
Our text begins with honesty. Regardless of the translation you read; it’s in there. As verse 7 begins the prophet is with the Lord.
We do not know if these words are spoken out loud or if they are a silent desperate prayer that lives in his heart; something seeping out when no one is around. Truthfully it does not matter. The words are honest. “You have deceived me. . . and I was deceived.”
I selected this translation today because of that stinging word. “Deceived.” While other translations say ‘enticed’ or ‘persuaded me,’ this rendering captures the full emotional struggle of the prophet. For there is a large gap between those words.
Jeremiah’s prayer stings of hurt and a feeling of being let go of by God; of being too far from the hand of God to be safe. And in Jeremiah’s life, and the very moment that he is dealing with, this prayer testifies on its own that the prophet has reasons to think and feel this way. If we walked up to him, we might affirm his feelings. And he honestly looks at God in this moment and uses strong language. Deceived… not enticed… and certainly persuaded.
I wonder when was the last time that you said that you felt God deceived you? When was the last time you used a similar sense of strong language before God?
You knew that God sent you in one direction, called you, empowered you, but as you arrived in the moment, it was only a moment that you could best describe as painful, and in a place that you should locate God, the Lord felt absent.
Move 2- Not deceived.
But Jeremiah’s apparent deception. . . it is not exactly what we might think. For in Hebrew the context of the verb determines its full meaning and its implication.
In this case, the ‘deception’ serves a greater purpose in the Lord and in Jeremiah’s relationship with God. And we are most certainly NOT boot-strapping ourselves to a blessing. His suffering is not about be a badge of honor that he can hold up against others as a sign that he is more holy or more worthy.
As we read verse 7 in English, we might draw a conclusion that puts Jeremiah, and his faith and trust in God, on shaky ground. A first reading seems to support that the prophet has trusted God only to be let down; only to be beaten, put in stocks, and ridiculed.
But instead of just holding onto that conclusion solely, look deeper into the text with me. Let’s move further into the text. Go with me to verse 11. “But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior.”
In the previous four verses Jeremiah states that the people have tried to tempt him to either tone down his preaching or stop proclaiming the word of the Lord all together. And yet the prophet has remained faithful to his mission and message, as best as he can, that God gave him. Most certainly this would be hard. And of course, there would be tears involved both internally and externally. While Jeremiah dwelt in the stocks, and after he was ridiculed, and as he dealt with feelings of isolation from his community, Jeremiah remembers that God is with him.
If that is hard for him, I wonder how hard it can be for you and for me?
There is a burning fire in the prophet as verse 9 says.
Jeremiah knows that God hears his prayers, his calling in chapter 1 would affirm this, and further that God is with him all the back before he was even born. The expression that Jeremiah gives us for this level of confidence is in the form of: The dread warrior. The person of God himself.
This would be like Jeremiah using God’s personal name himself. But of course, that would be challenging for any Hebrew. So, in verse 11, in a way that only Jeremiah could, he says, “In moments such as this, when I could doubt, Yahweh is my personal champion.” For our purposes, He is not Bethesda’s champion, he is my personal champion! What a confession to make!
Jeremiah is not deceived away from faith, but in his very moment of suffering, in his very moment where his faith could fall apart, Jeremiah stands stronger in that faith than we might think that he could. He is not enticed away; he is not persuaded to believe that God has heard someone else’s prayer. God heard his prayer in his most desperate moment when his very soul broke.
And in that moment, the prophet confesses who his champion is, who he places his faith him, who he trusts, and in verse 13, who he will sing praises to. He confesses that when his heart is broken and tears are his food, in the words of verse 11, Jeremiah says that he will sing praises to the God who is ever with him and did not leave him even as the evidence seems a bit shaky in that moment.
Move 3- the question
This leads us then to the moment of question and challenge for ourselves and back to my initial story as an example of how this moment takes shape in our very lives.
For while you may not have been in a valley like Jeremiah was in chapter 20 having been beaten and placed in stocks and ridiculed, and you may not have stood beside a loved one was last week and heard that soul cry tear at you, you know people, you work with people, you live beside people, who are living in that space every, single, day.
You know people who either have very little faith or who might define their faith as terribly fragile because their feel deceived by the Lord—as you might have thought Jeremiah was.
Their prayer, their confession, could take on the same shape as the prophet’s. People who stand before us and say that in their moment of need, when they reached out to God, hope was lost and their prayers felt like they were going up to nowhere. No one was listening.
They asked the question, much like I believe Jeremiah might have asked as the stocks rested down upon him: “Lord, why should I go? Why should I continue to preach? To be faithful? Why, Lord!!!”
It is in that moment that we return once again to the words of verse 11. For the Lord is the presence that goes with us, and we will not be overcome. The Lord, in the words of verse 12, sees our hearts and minds and therefore is committed to us even if we think that we are terribly alone.
And so, again, we sing, as best as we can, even if it is a mumble that God is delivering us. And we teach others to do the same.
Conclusion
For Jeremiah’s life tells us, as a testimony that there is always space to hope, reason to hope, reason to share God’s message, IF, and AS, we stay close to God. God is always there to draw us back to his side, even if in that moment our hearts feel broken. For He is with us.
DM
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