Jeremiah 16:5 I have withdrawn my peace from this people

Sometimes the biggest lessons in the Bible are in places you didn’t expect and therefore they’re often missed.

In the book of Jeremiah, the nation of Judah is on the verge of being destroyed by the Babylonians.  Sometimes that can be hard for a Christian to swallow, God being so angry with His people that He judges them. 

But this was hundreds of years in the making.  Some Bible teachers note that this destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. seems to have cured the Jews of idolatry. 

We could talk more about that, but then, again, we would be missing the bigger point.  As is so often the case.

In our verse above, God tells Jeremiah not to mourn or lament for these people.  And that will grab our attention, and we will miss the point of the whole thing.

Jeremiah 16:5 For thus says the Lord, “Do not enter a house of mourning, or go to lament or to show grief for them; for I have withdrawn My peace from this people,” declares the Lord, “the lovingkindness and the compassion.  [translation mine]

The people of Judah defiantly resisted the laws and Word of God and insisted on worshipping the gods of the other nations.

So what happened to them?  Not the destruction but before that.

“I have withdrawn My peace from this people,” declares the Lord, “the lovingkindness and the compassion.”

First some notes on the text.  Peace in Hebrew is the word ‘shalom,’ which is not just the absence of strife and hostility, but the positive senses of tranquility, wholeness, completeness, and fulfillment.  The words ‘lovingkindness’ and ‘compassion’ here seem to be descriptive of that shalom, like those are the parts of it that God wanted to emphasis here.

In other words, the normal state of Israel before they went out and forsook God for false gods and false religion was a condition of shalom characterized by God’s lovingkindness and compassion on them.

Do you, as a believer, think of God shining down on you His lovingkindness and compassion?  The only picture I can imagine in my mind for this is a parent or a grandparent with their young children.  They don’t love their older children any less, but they are far more reserved in showing their lovingkindness and compassion.

I think this is critical here.  Children in humans take far longer than any other living thing to achieve adulthood.  Why is that?  I think a big reason is that God wants to firmly implant in us this adult-child experience.  To God, we are always His children-children.  We like to think of ourselves as adults, but I think God still thinks of us like we think of our YOUNG children. 

Are you able to think of God as being kind to you, loving you, and being compassionate to you? 

I really believe that this is a, if not the, reason why God not only created the family structure, but I also think that apart from rare situations, like Paul the apostle, God wants us all to have that experience, on both ends.

The first time around, we are the children and hopefully we learn what it is like to know lovingkindness and compassion from our parents.  But then we get to see it from the other side when we are the parents, and we feel that lovingkindness and compassion for our children.

I have been a Christian for a very long time, and learning to see God as having lovingkindness and compassion for me has been my biggest challenge.  I suspect that many other believers have that same challenge.

 

 

 

Deuteronomy 8:3 Man does not live by bread alone

Many of us remember this verse from when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and Jesus quoted verses from the Old Testament to respond to him.  (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:13)

I’m not sure we have given enough thought, though, to what this response actually means.

Deuteronomy 8 is easily one of the most important chapters in the Old Testament, but I doubt most Christians are familiar with it.

It gives a basic overview of how God deals with His people.  There are some minor variations in the New Testament, but the pattern is pretty much the same. 

The Jews had just spent 40 years in the wilderness, because they failed to believe God when they first came to the Promised Land 40 years prior.  (actually 38 years)  Not every Jew failed to believe God, but I venture to say that we all fail today in the same way.  It doesn’t seem so drastic for us, because we did not have the experiences that Israel had.

Israel was delivered out of the land of Egypt and bondage through an amazing series of miracles.  We have not seen wonders like they did, and so it can be harder for many of us today to believe in God’s goodness and His willingness to work on our behalf.  We have to learn this the slow way.

And what is this slow way?

Deuteronomy 8:2,3 (NASB95)  ² “You shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. ³ “He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.

The first step is a humbling process.  We don’t understand how life works.  We tend to think of it as we reap what we sow, which is true in a sense, but we fail to see what a small part we play in the whole thing.  Yes, we act, but most of those actions are responses to what life gives us.  So ultimately we are responsible for our responses, but we have no control over the things we are responding to. 

So this humbling process makes us realize how much of life is out of our control. 

And this humbling process is also a testing process.  To see what is in our hearts.  Like Job, do we serve God because of the blessings we receive or might receive, or do we serve God because it is right?  That is a basic question we all have to answer.  We are never going to be able to understand God, so that means we will never understand everything that God does or everything that happens in life.  So how do we react when things go differently than planned or hoped for? 

And this leads us to our verse, the key part: “man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”

Bread, of course, stands for food, but it also stands for the material things of life. 

I think Exodus 15:22 shows a bit of what this all means.

In Exodus 14, the Jews had just been delivered out of the hands of the Egyptians.  They had seen God judge Egypt with ten mighty plagues of judgment.  They left the land of Egypt, but they were followed by the Egyptian army bent on killing them and forcing them to return to Egypt as slaves again.

God then opens the Red Sea for the Jews to cross and then closes it again on the Egyptians as they attempt to pursue them.  The Jews then celebrated with song and dance over this wild, crazy miracle of God.

They then begin their journey in the wilderness to their new land, the land God promised them. 

They go three days, and there is no water.  Then they find water, and they can’t drink it.

They are seeing their total lack of control over their lives.  And they are wondering how God relates to all this.  They saw His mighty deliverance on their behalf, but now they have another problem.  Not as big maybe as being slaughtered by an army and enslaved, but big in another way.  So what is God going to do?  You might think: He delivered us before, He will do it again.  Some might think: why is this even happening, if God loves us?  Some might think: are we supposed to expect God to do everything? 

They need water.  Just like we constantly need things.  And we constantly need God’s provision.  We are accustomed to thinking that we don’t need God all that much, because, well, we have food, we have a job, we have money, but we fail to see that God is as much responsible for what we have as He is for providing things for us when we don’t have them. 

This is what Jesus and Deuteronomy meant by “everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”  It’s all in God’s hand.

You still have a job.  But only by the grace of God.  You have money in the bank.  Only by the grace of God.  Our lives don’t seem so fragile and tenuous here in the United States, but the lesson is the same.  We don’t just need God in those times when we have an apparent need, but we need God in all the times that we don’t have the apparent need, because what we have is from His hand in the first place.

Later in this same chapter, God is going to tell them: Beware.  (v.11)

Why?

Because they’re going to prosper, and they’re going to think that it was their brains and strength and skill and hard work that gave them that success.  Oh, that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t want you to use your brains, strength, skill, and hard work, but “it is [God] who is giving you power to make wealth.”  (Dt. 8:18)

There are people who give no thought to God, and they have achieved much in the eyes of the world.  They just don’t know what we know.  We can talk about them another time.  But God wants us to know how much our lives are dependent on God, every day, every minute.  That shouldn’t make us cautious but bold. 

Just remember the goal of all this humbling and testing: “that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do good for you in the end.”  (v. 16)  This word ‘end’ need not mean the end of the world, when we die, but just after the humbling and testing. 

God wants us to know His goodness in this life.  Not just by faith but by experience.  He just wants us to know the true nature and reason for the good things that we have and will have in life.

 

Numbers 6:24 The Lord Bless You

A few months ago, I shared a verse in the Bible that I believed has a little more significance than most of the others, if I may put it like that.

That verse is: O give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; for His lovingkindness endures forever.  That verse is found maybe 30 times in the Bible with slight variations, and it is linked with some significant acts of God.  In 2 Chronicles 5:13, when the priests praised God with these words, “the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”  And in 2 Chronicles 20:21, when the singers began saying: “Give thanks to the Lord,” the Lord delivered them from their enemies.

We are told to give thanks always (Ephesians 5:20), and I think it is wise to express that thanks in this way much of the time when we do that.

I have also taught about the Lord’s Prayer.  Words that many of us have memorized, that in our daily prayers, I believe it is wise for us to use those words in those prayers.

I would like to introduce another important phrase or verse.  It’s actually a blessing that God gave to Moses to give to Israel’s first high priest wherewith he would bless the people of Israel:

Numbers 6:22–27 ²² Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ²³ “Speak to Aaron and to his sons, saying, ‘Thus you shall bless the sons of Israel. You shall say to them: ²⁴ The Lord bless you, and keep you; ²⁵ The Lord make His face shine on you, and be gracious to you; ²⁶ The Lord lift up His countenance on you, and give you peace.’ ²⁷ “So they shall invoke [Lit. put] My name on the sons of Israel, and I will bless them.”

Some people will protest and say: wait.  That was given to Moses to give to Aaron the high priest to bless the people of Israel under the Old Covenant.

First of all, we are a kingdom of priests ourselves (I Peter 2:9, Revelation 1:6).  We used to be strangers of the covenants of promise, but now we have been brought near by the blood of Christ. God has made the two (Jew and Gentile) into one, creating the two into one new man, and now through Christ, we both have access to God in one Spirit to the Father (Ephesians 2:12-21).

And, secondly, we live under a new covenant which doesn’t erase the old but builds on it:  Hebrews 8:10–12 (NASB95) ¹⁰ “for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. ¹¹ “and they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen, and everyone his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all will know Me, from the least to the greatest of them. ¹² “for I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”

I know it says that God made this covenant with Israel, but that is the covenant under which we live.

This is a blessing by which we bless other people.  I would suggest we start with our own families.  It doesn’t say how often Aaron was to bless the people, but if the Lord’s Prayer was intended to be prayed at least once a day, I would say blessing other people with this blessing once a day wouldn’t be too much.

A few notes on the blessing itself:  Hebrew, like a lot of languages, has a singular and plural form of the word YOU.  In this blessing, the words YOU are all singular.  Aaron blesses all the people, but the blessings are individual.  The words ‘face’ and ‘countenance’ are the same words in Hebrew.  The word ‘peace’ is ‘shalom,’ which is not merely the absence of hostility, but wholeness, fullness, completeness, welfare, contentment, and tranquility. And the word ‘invoke’ in verse 27 is simply the word ‘put’.  We put the name of God on other people, and God will bless them.

Some will argue: are we telling God what to do? 

God told Moses to tell Aaron to bless the people, and God said He would bless them if he did. 

There is an expression in logic, a fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc.  (Lit. after this, because of this)

The point it that, because one event follows another, you can’t assume that the first caused the second.  If God says that He will bless people on whom we have put His Name, don’t quibble about whether you are telling God what to do.  If God chooses to bless people that you have blessed, just be thankful.  Think of it more as: your words of blessing on other people are not mere words.  They have power.  So use them.

Pray for other people.  Everyone you can.  And say it out loud.  Pray God’s blessing, and let God take care of the details.