Covenant and Conspiracy

On January 10, 1962, the residents of the Peruvian villages of Ranrahirca and Huarascucho heard a loud crack coming from the extinct volcano, Mount Huascaran. It was a giant block of ice cracking from the mountain. This was a fair warning. Usually when they heard this sound, they had about thirty minutes to evacuate before the ice came down the mountain. This time, however, the block of ice was massive, weighing some six million tons.

It travelled down the 9.5 miles in only seven minutes. Four thousand people died (“Avalanche Kills Thousands”).

They heard the warning but did not heed it. They underestimated the power of the danger and assumed there was more time. This is Israel. For hundreds of years God has been so patient. But now they are about to enter into an exile that will make them think Egypt was not so bad. Yet, mercifully, God is giving them chance after chance to repent. Even in this darkest of warnings, he rings the note of hope (12:15-17). No one could be more patient than God in this moment. He is warning of impending danger because it is real.

When I first began to preach, a guy about my age asked me plaintively, “Are you one of those preachers who try to make you feel guilty?” I can’t recall my reaction, but I thought about it long enough to come up with an answer in the event it came up again, which it has. The answer to the question, “Are you going to make me feel guilty?” should be, “Only if you are.” Guilt is to the soul what pain is to the body. If you have a painful stress fracture in your leg, you should stop running on it. You can cause permanent damage. If you tear your rotator cuff, you need it repaired. You cannot use it without causing more damage.

One of the more controversial medical treatments in sports was Novocain or ethyl chloride spray. The spray numbs the pain of an injured player so the player can keep playing. Good so far. However, it is often hard to tell the difference between a sprain and a torn ligament. When the pain is treated but not the injury, there are consequences. The warning is heard but not heeded. The mentality of “spray ’em and play ’em” became the cause of life-altering injuries for many football players (Johnson, “Spray ‘Em, Play ‘Em”).

So when a preacher preaches, he should clearly indicate the problem. The preacher who makes people feel good when God has an entirely different opinion is liable. He is indifferent to the real needs of people. We can’t ignore the warnings.

If you will not listen to God or look to your past, then you must fear your future.

Jeremiah 11:9-23

It is not clear what exactly this conspiracy is (v. 9), but perhaps some are planning to return to false gods after this renewal under Josiah has faded.

This is tragic. Josiah has done just about everything an earthly king could do. However, he is only able to move the needle so far. The reason? You cannot legislate the heart. You can call for reform, plan reform, encourage reform, and even institute reform. Yet if the heart is still away from God, there is no hope. God is still after their hearts. Verses 10-13 and on into chapter 12 explain God’s response when his people do not share his heart.

It is so bad that God even discourages Jeremiah from praying to fix the problem (vv. 14-16). God’s mind is made up. His judgment is clear in verses 21-23: those who threatened Jeremiah would be exterminated. For Jeremiah this was a working out of his call. He had been told that if he were afraid of his audience, God would make him cower in front of them, but if he fulfilled his call, he would be invincible (1:17-19). His call was to keep preaching. He knew the fight was coming. What he may not have intended is that this war would be personal.

Tucked away in this passage about God’s judgment on a people whose heart was not his is a response from Jeremiah. There is a back-and-forth dialogue. In 11:17-20 Jeremiah responds to God’s impending judgment. What had evidently escaped Jeremiah is that there was a plot against his own life. This seems like a strong punishment for a prophet who is simply saying what God says! Yet this conspiracy against him is really a metaphor for the state of the nation of Israel. They were conspiring against Jeremiah because they were conspiring against God. And the leaders, instead of rooting out this conspiracy, perpetuated it, causing it to fester and grow and ultimately incite God’s judgment.

If you do not listen to God and you do not look to your past, then you should fear your future. This applies to us on two levels.

As a church we are, in a way, like Israel, God’s chosen people. We have not replaced God’s covenant promise with Israel, but rather we are grafted into God’s covenant promise (Rom 11). Yet, like Israel, we tend to harden our hearts, and what is going on in the heart is a conspiracy. It is in my heart and in all of our hearts. It affects me as an individual and in the collective minds of a church. Sin that is not rooted out completely from our hearts lies in wait. It will be at some moment always there waiting to take me out. There is a conspiracy inside of me.

This is Paul’s point in Romans 7. There are things he wants to do, but he does not. There are things he does not want to do, but he does. This leaves him to throw his hands up and say, “What a wretched man I am!” (Rom 7:24). Paul is in a horrible state. He is internally conflicted. He wants to do one thing, but he consistently does another thing. It’s as if this is driving him mad! Yet, oddly, he is as spiritually and psychologically healthy as he can be.

Paul is spiritually healthy because he is awakened to the reality that he has two natures inside of him. He has the Holy Spirit, who is compelling him to do what is right. Yet the works of the flesh are also present with him because he is still in the flesh (Gal 5). This was true for Paul. It’s true for me. His spiritual health was determined by the fact that he realized this. He knew what was going on inside of him. He knew that inside of him was a conspiracy. His own flesh was conspiring against his own soul to take him out and leave him completely empty. It is a war fought every day. And since a war is going on, it’s good to know about it! Christians who are not aware of the war are naïve; they cannot fight the conspiracy that is brewing inside them.

Paul is, if we could venture there for a moment, psychologically healthy as well. As a layman to the field of psychology, I could at least observe that one’s psychological health can be observed by how self-aware one is. If you believe you are Abraham Lincoln, then you are not mentally healthy. There is a disconnect between your self-perception and reality.

The healthiest Christians have a little angst to them. They are tempered; they are broken; they are conflicted. Some of us preachers, music worship leaders, and church leaders posture that this is a wrong approach because Jesus wants you to be happy. The idea that Jesus wants you to be happy has everything going for it except the witness of Scripture. The great figures of the early church struggled with suffering; they, to put a fine point on it, struggled with their own autonomy. They wanted, like we all want, independence from God. Yet God wants us dependent. He is the vine; we are the branches (John 15).

This is why the rules in the new kingdom are clear. Our brokenness, in this case our sinful nature and the acts of sin we commit, should drive us to mourning, and that desperation over sin should drive us to meekness. From this bottoming out we are now useful. This is the trajectory of the beatitudes—the beatitudes being the new value system of the new kingdom.

So the believer who understands that his greatest enemy is within him understands reality. The breezy faith of the uninitiated believer, floating from one positive religious experience to the next with no suffering and no battle scars, is not as spiritually healthy. He has the outward signs of health but not the inward signs. Spiritual health does not come from acting healthy. Spiritual health comes when we realize that our sin nature produces death inside of us; we then realize that our sin was crucified with Christ and we are reborn in his new life. Christ does not promise a wispy Christianity. He promises that his new life implanted within ours stands ready to do battle with our flesh. A war rages. And the sin and death will ultimately be overcome by the resurrection and life. Grace over guilt.

Perhaps you come to this passage and you have not yet entered the fight. You think neutrality is the way to go. “I will not enter the war, and therefore I will not get hurt.” You are firmly committed to taking no position on Jesus, no position on his church, no position on his death and resurrection. Could I say with all humility that those who do not take a position on Jesus have in fact taken a hard position? Those who are of the notion that to have any certainty is wrongheaded have the least grasp of reality. If there was a first-century Jewish peasant who claimed to be God (and there was), if he did rise from the dead validating his claims (which he did), and if he did begin the most historically significant movement ever (which he did), then to be neutral is, if I may say it, willful rejection of Christ. We might wrangle with that language. “I am not willfully rejecting Christ!” Yet the alternative is not good. If this is not willful rejection, it is the psychologically unhealthy position of not perceiving the obvious! So this is not to suggest that all people who are not Christians are psychologically unhealthy, but just to suggest that neutrality on the person of Christ is not a logically tenable position. Jesus’s presence calls for love or hate, clarity or confusion, life or death, and a thousand other ways we could express the choices he presents, but neutrality on who he is is not an option. To say it bluntly, if you are not aware of the conspiracy, then you are part of it.

So, what do we do? We listen to the covenant, we remember our past, and we fear a future of disobedience. In other words, we fight the conspiracy with the covenant. God’s promises are not weak, but often they are not claimed. Fight the conspiracy with the covenant.