Fire in My Bones
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Fire in My Bones
Jeremiah 20:7-13
Main Idea: There is strength in honesty.
- God Is Our Strength When We’ve Lost Confidence in Our Call (20:7).
- God Is Our Strength When People Attack Us and Our Message (20:8, 10).
- God Is Our Strength When Our Call Won’t Leave Us (20:9).
- God Is Our Warrior (20:11-13)!
Sometimes brilliance manifests itself in a matter of minutes. Other times it takes a lifetime. Think of Picasso. He burst onto the art scene in his twenties and made a significant contribution, forever changing the landscape of modern art. On the other hand, consider Cézanne. He also was a brilliant artist making no less of a contribution to the world of cubist art, yet it took him a lifetime. Among his best-known works are actually some unfinished drafts. He was always working. It was never quite right. One of his subjects was asked to come back to sit a hundred times!
They were both creative. They were both effective and brilliant, but the brilliance came at a different pace. Sociologists refer to these two types of creativity as conceptual creativity and experimental creativity. Conceptual songwriters pen songs as they come to them in a few minutes. Experimental songwriters pore over multiple drafts to get it right. Often experimental creatives are tortured by the process. They know there is a song there, but it is going to take them multiple drafts to get it right. Leonard Cohen, the Canadian author of the hit song “Hallelujah,” is said to have worked on the song for years and penned around seventy verses before the final version! He could not leave the song, and the song would not leave him.[3]
Of course, Jeremiah is not a creative. He is a prophet. Jeremiah is not trying to come up with what to say. He is expressing, out loud, the message God has given him. Still, the message will not leave him, and he will not leave the message. Or, to be exact, God will not leave him alone. In this way he is more like the experimental creative than the conceptual one. He does not have one great message that he gets off his chest and then moves on. That’s not Jeremiah. Jeremiah has internalized this message, and he has to keep working it out. It won’t leave him. It tortures him. He is the epitome of the tortured prophet.
We are not always sympathetic to the tortured prophet. First of all, they are no more popular today than they were in Jeremiah’s day. When people have a message God has driven deep in their hearts and they are called to work out what God has worked in, they become annoying. Often they can’t handle it themselves. If they have poor social skills, the problem is compounded. These are the prophets that do not have a sermon; rather, they have a life message. They will spend the rest of their ministry working out what God has worked in them.
Maybe you can relate to this. Maybe as a preacher you have wanted to do something else in some other way, but God has you running in your lane, doing the one thing it seems that no one else is called to do. This passage, for you, will be a friend, a mirror, and maybe a word of encouragement.
While we won’t examine every time Jeremiah is working out his angst with his call, this is a classic example to examine. Jeremiah wants to quit his call, but his call will not quit him. He is stuck with the message. In this passage Jeremiah explains four reasons to be discouraged and one reason to be encouraged. And then there is the really messy ending.
So, why do we get discouraged with our call?
God Is Our Strength When We’ve Lost Confidence in Our Call
Jeremiah 20:7
Jeremiah is brokenhearted. It’s not that there is a hint of desperation here; it is utter desperation. It’s not that there is a small note of exaggeration but full-bore exaggeration: God has become his enemy, and everyone is ridiculing him. We could recoil at his self-pity. After all, self-pity has at its core “self.”
On the cross Jesus wondered aloud why God had forsaken him (Matt 27:46-47). This in itself is remarkable. What is even more remarkable is that Jesus is quoting Psalm 22, what we might call a “psalm of complaint.” Since Jesus was without sin, we can conclude that there is a difference between the sin of self-pity and a genuine self-awareness of the situation.
Those of us who have been in the ministry are probably hesitant to criticize Jeremiah because we understand the feeling. I remember, at one particular low point, a friend asking how I was. I replied that the ministry was struggling, people were coming against me, I didn’t feel well, but other than that everything was great.
While we all struggle, Jeremiah crosses a line that few are willing to cross when he suggests that God deceived him and was his enemy. He will change his tune below, but for now he feels as if God tricked him into this ministry. The implication is that no person of sound mind would follow such a call. In order to get him to obey the call, God pulled a bait and switch: he promised him one thing but delivered another. Yet, as noted, God had promised him a life full of challenges (Jer 1). He was promised ultimate victory preceded by immediate suffering, yet he is drawing the bitter water of disappointment from the well of emotion.
Jeremiah has lost confidence in his call, and now he tells us why.
God Is Our Strength When People Attack Us and Our Message
Jeremiah 20:8, 10
Here again is full-on exaggeration. It could be paraphrased this way:
Every time I speak, I call for complete destruction of the nation because God’s word, through me, brings me to disgrace!
Look, everyone is saying, “His message is so negative about all the terror. Really, he is a verbal terrorist! Someone needs to call him in. We have to find a way to take him out.”
Before we ridicule his penchant for exaggeration, we must appreciate his dilemma. Jeremiah’s calling is to call a people back to God, a people who have demonstrated they will never repent. There is no conceivable way the people will repent. What’s more, there is no way God will alter the demands of his holiness. He can be nothing less than the perfectly loving Father. So what is Jeremiah to do? Well, he is to obey and keep preaching. But why? Because Jeremiah’s voice is a verbal life preserver. Imagine someone drowning. A flotation device is right beside her; she just needs to grab it. However, she is carrying a suitcase full of bricks. Her last bit of stamina allows her the opportunity to consider her fate. She can drop the weight and grab the life preserver. Even though she chooses not to, the life preserver stands witness against her. She would only have to let go of one, grab the other, and be saved.
Ultimately, waves of judgment will cover God’s people. Nations will conquer and plunder them. As the rising tide takes them under, Jeremiah’s voice just floats there like an unwanted life preserver—an unused monument to mercy. God is not silent. He is never passive. He is reaching out to his people, calling them to repent.
This is why the call is so difficult. Jeremiah is the mediator between two parties who will not compromise.
It’s also difficult because he cannot do anything else.
God Is Our Strength When Our Call Won’t Leave Us
Jeremiah 20:9
Jeremiah considers keeping his mouth closed. His logic is, while I can’t keep God from speaking to me, I don’t have to speak for him. It doesn’t work. Impression without expression leads to depression. The message of God, once inside the prophet, is so potent it eats away at him until and unless he works out what God has worked in. He can’t suppress it. He’s like a trumpet without a mute. There is no mortal governor capable of keeping the message down; it just bellows out. It’s like a fire in his bones.
Jeremiah is stuck. He is a prophet. By definition he has an unpopular message. You’ve heard the phrase popular preacher or well-loved pastor, but we don’t usually use the phrase popular prophet. Even if there is such a thing, the words sound discordant. God raises a prophet up because there is a problem to address. The call is not popular, and it is equally unshakable. Jeremiah can no more cease to be a prophet than he can change his age. It’s in his DNA. Literally. Remember, in 1:5 God called Jeremiah with the words,
I chose you before I formed you in the womb;
I set you apart before you were born.
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.
As the sinew was coalescing on Jeremiah’s bones, God knew that those fingers would point down to man and up to God, that the feet would take him to stand where few were willing to stand, and that the vocal cords would arrest the attention of the nations. God made him for this reason. And for this reason he cannot escape.
So Jeremiah feels that God has deceived him, that his message will never be received, and that he was trapped with no way of escape. An unpopular prophet, an unwanted message, and an unalterable call: he is called and stuck.
Yet there is some good news. There is a reason we should be encouraged: God fights for us.
God Is Our Warrior!
Jeremiah 20:11-13
This is not the fourth point of the sermon. It does not fit with the other three. This is the contrast. We have an unpopular prophet with an unwanted message and an unalterable call, but we have an unstoppable Warrior who fights for us. How glorious!
Jeremiah says all this in one breath: “Well, I feel like God tricked me, I hate what I am doing, and I don’t even want to do it, but in the midst of that, God is going to scare my enemies out of their minds! He is a dread warrior.” He knows he is unpopular, he knows he does not want to do it, he knows he is hated, but he knows God is going to defend him. What a wonderful concept! Look at the imagery here:
- The Lord is with me as a terrifying warrior.
- My persecutors
- will fall,
- can’t overcome me,
- will be ashamed,
- will not succeed, and
- will have eternal dishonor.
Then he prays that God’s vengeance will be on them because—get this—he has committed his cause to God.
What an emotional ride! The mental picture evokes Jeremiah on a windswept hillside cliff with his fists toward heaven. He is telling God that he does not want to do this. Jeremiah is so unpopular, but he is trapped and must be a prophet. As he talks to God, he counsels himself. He realizes the irrationality of telling God off. So two massive things happen: he acknowledges that God is the ultimate Judge, so he asks this Judge not only to try his case but to defend him as well. He goes from resenting God to trusting God in one breath.
Life as a preacher has its ups and downs. It’s good to know that one of the seminal prophets in history—someone God tapped to speak the truth and someone God hardwired in the womb for prophetic ministry—could, in one breath, resent God and trust him. What’s more, the God we serve chose to allow this to be in the pages of Scripture. Nothing glossed over there.
By the way, there is an important lesson here: God is the opposite of passive-aggressive. He’s always in your face!
- When Adam sinned, God sought Adam (Gen 3).
- When Ahaz used passive-aggressive excuses for ignoring God, Isaiah prophesied that the God whom Ahaz ignored would be Immanuel, God with us (Isa 7:14).
- Jesus seeks the lost like a shepherd would a sheep, like a woman would a coin, and like a father would a son (Luke 15).
God is always active. God is never passive. It’s just all out there.
If Jeremiah were to journal this privately then tear it out and throw it away, something would be lost. This passage is not whispered, it is screamed. With the same voice that called for repentance, the custom-made prophet yells out to God. In the end he was not just complaining; he was counseling himself. He would have made a horrible counseling client if he did not tell the truth. So he did. His angst led him to the truth that God was going to take care of everything.
When we discuss our unwanted call, we have an unstoppable warrior. There is strength in honesty. But the strength is not ours, it is his. He is on the other side of honesty. The question is, Are we willing enough to follow him there? It’s as scary as it is real.
Pastor Ronn Dunn would often use the illustration of God unplugging us. What he meant is that we have all these valued sources of life, like an electric wall outlet overloaded with a dozen different plugs. When we are overloaded with idols, idols from which we think we are drawing strength, God has a tendency to unplug them. One by one. When he unplugs one, you at first freak out, then you realize you can live without it.
Life is the process of God’s getting more of me. From God’s perspective, he is yanking all the other things out so I can see that he is all I need. What a glorious God we serve! Jeremiah is totally unplugged. He tells God as much. And in doing so, he acknowledges God and is now free. He commits it to the dread warrior.
Conclusion
One would think that after such a compelling message, the prophet would tie this up in a neat bow and move on. After all, this passage follows the up-down trajectory we all want: situation, rising tension, and release of tension. He has a problem, he knows God is the solution, so the problem is solved. But then again, this is Jeremiah. So the end is not the end—he adds a somber lament—and that’s perfectly fine.
Those of us who believe the gospel see it everywhere. We see the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in the child who expresses faith in Christ. From that young life, God gives new life. We see the gospel in the horrid souls tortured by the consequences of sin who, when giving their lives to Christ, find new life. Death followed by resurrection. So it’s somewhat natural, I suppose, that we would want to see that everywhere, even when it does not ultimately exist. This is what theologians call an “overrealized eschatology,” meaning that, while all the promises of the gospel are given to us, the ultimate expression of the gospel, God’s victory over sin and the devil, will not come until some time later. Revelation 19 is as real as if it were right now, but it’s not real right now. Jesus is the warrior Messiah, but the execution of his enemies is stayed at the moment. They have more time to be saved; we have more time to live in a lost world. The one entails the other.
All that to say, the messiness of Jeremiah is, in this way, comforting. He has this full-blown expression of trust and confidence in God, yet he is confident that it’s not over.
The messy ending is encouraging, but that’s not its function. Jeremiah is not thinking of how to encourage us thousands of years later. This is not a greeting card; it’s a journal entry. He is not pretending authenticity so he can relate to us; it’s simply that raw. And in his honesty he really is encouraging. Even in the midst of difficulty, God is our dread warrior. He fights for us.
Reflect and Discuss
- In what way is God our warrior? How does he fight for us?
- Is it true that we must work out what God is working in us?
- Have you ever wanted to quit your calling but God wouldn’t call it quits on you?
- Jeremiah explains four reasons to be discouraged and one reason to be encouraged. Name them.
- What type of resistance should Christians expect from those outside the body of Christ?
- Why were the Old Testament prophets unpopular? Why did people reject their message?
- How does Jeremiah go from resenting God to trusting God?
- Does God exercise active love or passive aggression toward believers?
- What does this passage teach about the incessant need to trust in God generally and trust in our calling specifically?
- In what way is there strength in honesty?