June 13, 2021
Jeremiah 15:8-9 Their widows are increased to me above the sand of the seas: I have brought upon them against the mother of the young men a spoiler at noonday: I have caused him to fall upon it suddenly, and terrors upon the city.
She that hath borne seven languisheth: she hath given up the ghost; her sun is gone down while it was yet day: she hath been ashamed and confounded: and the residue of them will I deliver to the sword before their enemies, saith the LORD.
The shame of this passage is tied to disappointment. Jerusalem thought she was secure. Towering walls. Strong gates. The ark of the covenant. A history of military miracles. An Egyptian trained army. But when it was all said and done, God was done with her idolatry, and she was left confounded and ashamed; disappointed that all the things she thought was working for her collapsed. Her day of self-confidence was shortened. Her strong men beaten into humiliating submission. And thousands of years later this verse still rings true. People bear the weight of overconfidence until the smoke from their burning dreams ascends; many in our day and in our church are disappointed things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to work out; they came to a doubt-dead-end; the supply of hope was drained and the inventory of resiliency bankrupted. Emptiness. Loneliness. Disbelief and shock. Setbacks and untamed, ravenous circumstances.
Jesus would stop this disappointment. But you have to choose faithfulness over secular convenience. Jesus would end the confusion in the clouds of anxiety. But you have to trust Him more than you’ve come to trust Egypt’s military, the world’s way of winning and conquering and possessing.
Don’t go back to the world when it was the world that shattered you from the start. Don’t go back to the pit and make it a home when it was in that pit you endured trapped joy and the mire of relentless sadness. Don’t go back to the sin-location where track marks were in your arm and scars dug deep into your soul. You will only be disappointed again. You will only repeat a cycle of shame again. You will only be like the proverbial lost wanderer in the jungle, who keeps circling back around to the same spot, no sense of direction, no pilot of grace out of the maze. Just trapped. Just circling in the same dangers and discouragements. Listen now…
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