For nearly 18 months now I have been reading and studying the book of Jeremiah. My Logos Bible Software has two commentaries open and available to me, the Hebrew text and exegetical guides are out, links to Strong’s and the BDB are also open. I have a running file 34 pages of notes that I have gathered in this past year and half. With all of these tools I typically get through 3-4 verses at a time. For those who really know me this is not a surprise. For if I’m not 4-5 layers deep into a text then I might as well be skipping through the Biblical forest on my way to Joel Osteen’s house. I am not really reading or studying the text unless I am up to my arm pits it Biblical exegetical tools and questions. But one thing is as clear as day about the life of Jeremiah—Jeremiah was a loser.
By all Earthly accounts (No super spiritualizing his life with quips of ‘he won the eternal race.’ It is a cheep cheat.) he failed in all the ways we determine success and failure in American Christianity and we can even say how we measure success in the biblical world. His call was to preach to a stiff neck rebellious people a message of repentance. They did not repent. He never climbed the temple establishment’s political power structure. His network of movers and shakers were small and grew smaller with time. When he was commissioned to tell the nation to accept the punishment God was bringing, they ignored him. In fact in Chapter 21 when defeat and ruin where immanent, they hoped coming to Jeremiah would earn them brownie points and a message of good news. It did not, and the results was one of the hardest and most bone chilling messages of the entire book. When in the end of the book he prophesied to the nations, there is no indication they even got the message let alone did anything about it. The Israelites chose to sing the proverbial “kumbaya” and hope that their status as God’s chosen would be enough to get them out of this latest jam. Jeremiah was beaten, jailed, ignored, mocked and finally exiled against his will to Egypt. He was not even allowed the courtesy of heading off with the rest of the exiles into Babylon or staying in the land he had called home for his entire life. Compared to Jonah who begrudged his calling, even betrayed his calling, Jonah could in the end say that he was the instrument of God’s successful rescue mission of Nineveh. Jeremiah could not even say that on his resume.
Adding to my sense of Jeremiah as the Bible’s greatest example of failure is Eugene Peterson’s Running With Horses. In just two hundred pages Peterson describes Jeremiah’s futile attempts to get Israel to listen to God’s voice and be the people God had called them all to be. Peterson’s book is in many ways a recounting of the depressing story of a man whose inner constitution was made of iron and bronze (as God himself describes Jeremiah) as much as his heart and body was made of flesh and blood.
It is at this point in the story where I believe Evangelicals need to embrace Jeremiah on Jeremiah’s terms. We too often look for spiritual heroes, people who overcome their personal demons, the established hierarchy, and the wickedness of their culture. We expect, even demand that God give us victories, that our spiritual leaders move from one success to a greater success. We are failing to embrace the fact, the reality that often times Yahweh faithfulness also means failing to accomplish any of those things. And as in the case of Jeremiah, Yahweh faithfulness means failing at everything.
Our culture is sick and dying. America has killed over 55 million unborn human beings, we embrace sexual perversion as an expression of our individualism, and we are increasingly inclined to embrace radical Islam over and against culturally uncouth Christianity. Rather than sounding the trumpet to form ranks in a culture war (which may already be lost), might it be that God is calling us to develop a soul of iron and bronze? What would it mean to name our churches First Church of the Losers, as opposed to Victory Assembly?
I am not saying I like this prospect. Far from rejoicing with the loser label, I dread it, hate it even. I read Jeremiah hoping that this is not my own personal calling, nor that of the Church in North America. No one wants to be a loser. No one wants to bang his or her head against a corrupt and sinful culture only to be proclaimed a loser at the end of his or her life. Jeremiah is a testimony to the reality that what God does too us is often as important, if not more important, than what he does through us. It is a difficult pill to swallow because it ultimately means we can’t guarantee hero status in the eyes of our peers or our enemies. It may just mean that the only thing we have to hold onto for our sense of worth is Christ himself and nothing more.
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