How can Jeremiah refer to the nation as the "virgin
daughter of Zion"? He, more than
any human being, knows the reality and that is the nation has been anything but
a virgin, she has prostituted herself out to the nations and their gods. Now, she is reaping the consequences of her
actions and yet now Jeremiah is tender with those who remain amidst the rubble
and the destruction. Now is not the time
to point fingers at those who suffer. He
points the finger where it belongs, the prophets who have failed to tell the
truth. There are days when I wonder what
God is saying to this nation that needs to be said. We are not the new Jerusalem but we take the
Name of the Lord from our founding documents forward to our pledge of
allegiance. We are not, in fact, one
nation under God, we deny the creator who our forefathers said was the source
of inalienable rights, we do not share a common commitment to the kingdom of
God and we are not in divine covenant with Him as Israel was. We, however, need to hear the message that if
we take His Name then we are responsible for how we reveal Him. The church needs to hear a hard word about
what it has done in His Name, the prosperity gospel that we have exported, the
culture of devaluing marriage, excusing the rape of the earth, failing to
uphold justice and to be merciful. We
need to hear the truth lest the same happen to us.
The key words, in the whole Bible, to understanding who God
is and what He wants from us, are found here.
"I desire mercy, and not sacrifice" is the key. Sacrifice is based in two things,
thanksgiving and sin. There are
sacrifices for thanksgiving, where you are so grateful to God for life and all
the material, spiritual and emotional blessings you have that you want to thank
Him by offering Him something of those blessings, a statement that He is more
important than the enjoyment of those things.
The other reason for sacrifice is to deal with sin, transgressions
against God's law. These both have
presuppositions, that there is a God, that all things come from Him, and that
He is concerned with good and evil, right and wrong, and He has the right to
judge those in us. We confess things
done and left undone are, alike, sin. God
would rather see from us mercy than sacrifice tells us that righteousness matters
more than the system of sacrifice. Yes,
sacrifice atones for sin, but on the whole He would rather have us be merciful
in the first place, like He is merciful.
Knowing God, having His character in you, is more important than
sacrifice for failure to do so. He wants
to be known and to be made known. The truth
of that revelation is critical to Him.
It is honestly impossible for us to imagine Paul's imagery
here. It isn't just envisioning
something that never has been but for which we have some analog(s), it is
something no eye has ever seen. What we
experience in this world is so degraded from the original that we can't
recreate it. Experts can take old
paintings and tapestries and restore them to their original grandeur but someone
like me, a color blind person, cannot do that work, we can't see what the
original may have been like to get back to it.
Deaf people can't imagine sound, blind people can't create realism in
artwork. What we see is so fallen we
can't recreate the original conditions of either the world around us our own
being in any meaningful way. We can long
for it, but we can't properly imagine it.
It is a good time to understand the Fall and to long for the coming of
the Kingdom of God, in our lives and in the world.
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