The Call to Return

Last time, we looked at a passage in Jeremiah as an example of what truths are just waiting to be found in the lesser-well-known portions of Scripture. We saw a vivid illustration of how the Israelites committed a two-fold evil by turning away from God and by trying to replace Him with lesser things of their own making. But the story doesn’t end there.  This week, let’s take a look at the passage following last time’s verse to see what happened after God confronted the people about their sin.

In the rest of Jeremiah 2 through Jeremiah 3:5, God continues to detail how His people have done wrong and explains the punishment they deserve. But in Jeremiah 3:12, God reveals that He is not only a God of holiness and justice . . .

“Return, faithless Israel, declares the LORD.

I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful, declares the LORD;

I will not be angry forever.” (ESV)

And again, in verse 14:

                “Return, O faithless children, declares the LORD,

                                for I am your master;”

In verse 12, we see that God is merciful. Once His people have strayed, they are not without hope. They are not doomed to suffer the wrath of God forever. He shows them the way out as He lovingly calls them to return to Him. But He doesn’t only offer to withhold His wrath; He offers to provide something as well—healing.

We see this in verse 22 as God calls His people to return for a third time:

“Return, O faithless sons;

                                I will heal your faithlessness.”

He promises that if they return to Him, He will take the very betrayal they have engaged in and heal it, restoring their lives from the destruction it has left in its wake. He will take them from being faithless sons to being faithful ones.

Notice that the call to “return” implies prior existence in a place that has since been left. In other words, God is not calling the people to enter His family; they are already part of His family. He is calling them to return to the fold. The parallel scenario in our New Testament age, then, is with the Church, i.e. those who have already become part of the family of God by believing in Jesus Christ for their salvation.

There is vital encouragement here for those of us who are in Christ. Why? Because these verses show us that it is possible for a believer to stray. That doesn’t sound like a positive thing, you might be thinking. Well, the straying isn’t, but for those of us followers of Christ with perfectionist, rule-following tendencies, the ongoing struggle with sin in the Christian life can be not only disheartening but downright defeating.

The more we fail to completely put to death the sin we struggle with, the more we begin to doubt whether we’re even saved. We know in our head that it is God’s grace alone that saves us, but we also know in our head that we are called to holiness and called to a transformation that makes us more and more like Christ. So when we do or think things that are pointedly not like Christ, we fail to see the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, and we begin to question whether He lives within us at all.

I truly believe that is why God included the details about so many of His followers straying—Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Peter, just to name a few—and indeed, even these verses in Jeremiah. He knew we would need reassuring that falling into sin as a believer does not mean we are not believers and that it does not mean we have no hope of forgiveness and grace.

(Of course, we also want to avoid false assurance, i.e. believing that we’re saved when we’re really not, but there are other markers to look for in one’s life to help determine if we are truly saved. What I’m speaking to here is the phenomenon that occurs when true believers begin to doubt their salvation because they can’t seem to keep from falling to temptation in their lives.)

What these verses remind us is that the merciful God who saves us does not cease to be merciful after He saves us. Our salvation, after all, is not dependent on any merit on our part but on the gift of Jesus’ perfect record to replace our own record of wrongs. It is dependent not on who we are or what we have done, currently do, or ever will do; it’s dependent on who God is and what He has already done, is doing, and will do.

This reminder, as we see it in Jeremiah, is so needed, especially in today’s church culture, which often can hinder people from being honest about their struggles and doubts. Admittedly, our pride often keeps us from expressing concerns as well (heaven forbid we tarnish our “Christian image” by admitting weakening faith or questioning of our salvation). But I pray that the church becomes a true community, reflective of the family that it is, where people can be open and honest in their moments of crippled faith and can find encouragement from brothers and sisters who will point them back to passages in the Bible such as this one.

If you find yourself wearying under the relentless attacks of your Enemy, who delights in planting seeds of doubt in your hear t and mind, I pray that you have a brother or sister in Christ to lean on for strength—or rather, one that will help you lean on the strength of Christ and on the Truth of God’s Word. I pray that you cling to verses like the ones we’ve looked at today that proclaim the truth of God’s kindness. And if you are straying, I pray you will heed God’s loving, merciful call to return and, in doing so, will rest confident in the assurance that you are His and that He will never let you go.

To read the Arabic translation of this post, click here.

.لقراءة الترجمة العربية لهذا المنشور إضغط هنا

Off the Beaten Path

For those of us who have read the Bible for any number of years, it can become easy to move through passages with glazed eyes. We stay on the beaten path, making our way through chapter after chapter that we’ve read dozens of times before. Sometimes, though, we’ll be reading and will notice something that until then we’ve never really noticed. Most of the time when there are parts of Scripture that jump out at me like that, instead of being whole passages, it’s single verses or even phrases, and usually their jumping out at me is an indication that I need to pause and pull out the magnifying glass (figuratively speaking, that is).

Today, I’d like to walk through examining one such passage in the hopes that the next time you have a “huh, I’ve never noticed that before” moment, you won’t just pass it by as a novelty but will follow the trail that it opens up to you. So where are we headed? To Jeremiah 2:13. Let’s take a look:

“for my people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken me,

the fountain of living waters,

and hewed out cisterns for themselves,

broken cisterns that can hold no water.”  (ESV)

It’s a pretty basic study practice, when reading the Bible, to pay attention to lists. When things are clearly set forth in a group or numbered in some way, it helps us easily identify something to pay attention to or dig into more deeply. In this verse, right at the outset, God spells out that there are two specific ways in which His people, the Israelites, have done wrong. That is the flag that caught my attention in this verse, so let’s step off the beaten path of familiarity and see where this trail leads.

Having come across this initial statement, we should next ask what those two ways are and look to the text for the answer.  As a side note, one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given for studying the Bible is always to ask questions of the text and get the answers from the text. We should let the Bible speak for itself before we turn to commentaries or study guides. While those tools are not necessarily bad, they aren’t the living Word of God; the Bible is.  Okay, stepping off the soap box now and back on the trail. . . .

We’ve asked the question, “what are the two evils that God’s people have committed,” and we find as we read that the answer is immediately following. First, they have forsaken God. Okay, that’s pretty obviously a bad thing to do if you’re God’s chosen people.  But secondly, they have . . . “hewed out cisterns for themselves”? What is that supposed to mean? And why is that evil?

Again, we want to go back to the text. In the middle section of the verse, where God identifies the first evil, He gives a descriptive phrase about Himself—“the fountain of living waters.” So we see that the God the Israelites have forsaken is one who supplies not just something that is necessary to sustain life (water) but something that actually gives life (living water).

Here would be a good time to look up other places in the Bible where living water is referenced (think Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4). This can be done using a tool called a concordance that lists all the words in the Bible and gives the reference for every time each word is used. But for now, let’s just stick with what’s in this verse.

Once we see that God has established the water metaphor, we can better understand what the second evil actually means. The Israelites have turned away from a fountain of living water and have made a cistern instead. That is, instead of stopping at rejecting God, they go a step further and try to replace Him with things of their own making. Their souls clearly need living water, but they turn away from the One who can provide it and try to fill the void with other supplies.

This is a profoundly weighty example of “adding insult to injury.” It’s essentially saying to God, “I don’t acknowledge anything you’ve done for me; I don’t want what you have to give or to follow your lead, and on top of that I think this other thing is better than you are.” Not exactly the right thing to say to the Supreme Being that created you.

But there is more to be gleaned here. What else should we ask? How about the difference between a fountain and a cistern? A fountain is something that puts forth water, but a cistern is only something to hold water. It has to be refilled; it doesn’t supply itself.

So on top of rejecting God, the One who has chosen them out of all the people on the earth and has made available to them this living water of eternal life, they try to get their spiritual fill from something they make themselves that isn’t self-sufficient, much less able to supply anything. But it gets worse. If we keep reading we see that those cisterns they’ve made are broken ones that can’t even hold water! Basically, the replacements (“cisterns”) can’t even do their own job much less do what God does.

Now that we’ve dug into this verse some, asking questions of it to discover the meaning and to better understand the weightiness of what it is saying, we can take the step of applying it to ourselves. It’s easy to read about the Israelites’ rebellion and think how foolish they were. After all God had done for them, how could they turn on Him?

Aren’t we all prone to the same rebellion, though? We may not worship statues of our own making at high places around our city like they were doing, but we all have spat in God’s face and said, whether subconsciously or explicitly, that we want our own plan instead of His. We say we don’t need Him, but we turn around and reveal that we do by seeking fulfillment and satisfaction from other people or things. In doing so, we commit not just one evil, but two.

When we read passages like this one, then, we can use them as prompts to examine our own hearts, to recognize our own tendency to wander and to ask God for help, to marvel at God’s relentless grace, and to praise Him for the power He possesses by which He can give us eternal life through Jesus Christ. And that’s just from one verse.

I hope this example has given you the challenge and encouragement you need to go exploring in God’s Word. For when we step off the beaten path of what we know or are familiar with and follow the trails of discovery, we begin to tap the reservoirs of truth and spiritual blessings that are in the pages of Scripture for us to find. 

To read the Arabic translation of this post, click here.

لقراءة الترجمة العربية لهذا المنشور إضغط هنا.

Reading in the New Year

I’m not much for making New Year’s resolutions, but as a general, perennial goal, I usually set out to read more of the unread books on my bookshelves.  Perhaps you’re an avid reader yourself, sharing my tendency to buy books faster than they can be read. Or maybe you’re a reluctant reader, only picking up a book if you absolutely have to.

Whatever the case, it remains true that what we read profoundly shapes us as individuals. As students at Student Leadership University (SLU) are told, “In five years, you will be the same person you are today except for the places you go, the people you meet, and the books you read.” Reading helps strengthen our brains, expand our horizons, cultivate our imaginations, and develop our abilities to reason logically. It gives us the opportunity to learn what we don’t know and to be reminded of what we do. It helps us write better, speak better, and think better.  

So wherever you fall on the spectrum of readers, I hope your appreciation for reading will grow in 2018 and that you’ll challenge yourself to read more frequently, more intentionally, and more deeply this year. One 2018 Reading Challenge I’ve seen does an excellent job of guiding numerous levels of readers through a varied and interesting literary journey. But maybe you’re not up for sticking to a specific reading plan. So here are some general principles and ideas I’ve gleaned from this particular challenge, from mentors, and from life experience that can help in your quest to become a stronger reader.

Read actively.

There are several things that you can do to deepen your experience with a book and to maximize the mental benefits of reading. Perhaps the most helpful is to read with a pen in hand both to underline meaningful passages and to make notes in the margins. Yes, it’s okay to write in your books. It’s actually incredibly beneficial when it comes to comprehension and critical thinking development.

Do you strongly agree or disagree with the author? Write so in the margin. Do you have a question? Ask it with your pen. Does a particular point bring some other point to mind? Jot it down. In the absence of printed headings in chapters, can you discern an arrangement of content? Add the headings yourself for ease of future reference.

By interacting with both the text and the author, you are entering into a dialogue where you become an active participant instead of a passive sponge. And while, at first, it might seem that this practice is only suited to nonfiction, I’ve started marking my fiction books as well—particularly classic novels—for they provide just as much (if not more) opportunity to internalize profound lessons about human nature and about God.

Another habit to form when you read is to keep a vocabulary journal. My communication professor in college challenged my class of freshmen to do this, and while I have not been completely consistent in carrying it out, I do have a notebook filled with several scores of words. Essentially, this practice involves writing down words that you do not recognize or would not be able to define should someone ask you, looking them up in a dictionary, and writing the definition(s) with the word. To take it to the next level, you can write the sentence from the book you’re reading in which the word is used, both to provide context and to remind yourself where you originally encountered the word.

While you might think learning vocabulary words is the stuff of elementary school, there is nothing childish about intentionally expanding the scope of your language. Language is a gift; there is beauty in using precise and vivid words, and reading is perhaps the best way to bolster your arsenal of vocabulary. Doing this, of course, necessitates reading books that might contain vocabulary unfamiliar to you, which brings me to the next principle…

Read robustly.

Even those who enjoy reading might shy away from books that present a challenge—say, books over four hundred pages or those on a topic of little to no personal interest. But just as with a muscle, your reading habits must be exercised and stretched if they are to grow stronger.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting reading only books that are dull or that require you to read a paragraph three or four times before you can comprehend what it says, but I am encouraging you to read some books of that sort. Work up to them. If you’ve never read a book more than 200 pages, try reading a 300-page one before you pick up a 600-page one. If you’re not used to reading nineteenth-century language, pick a shorter book for your first exposure to it.

Some are quick to dismiss a book because the author’s writing style is different from what they are used to or what they prefer, or because the vocabulary and syntax are outdated or actually ancient. I’d encourage you not to let that attitude hinder you from experiencing the richness that is hidden in books such as these. Not all nuggets of truth are lying on the surface; like diamonds, sometimes the best things have to be worked for.  

Read variedly.

Closely tied to the previous principle is this one. Basically, change it up. Yes, you should read books that challenge you, but you also should read books that are quick, easy reads or are on topics you enjoy. Reading variedly also involves reading different genres of books, though—biographies, classic novels, theological treatises, commentaries, plays, screenplays, poetry, modern fiction, histories, memoirs, and the list goes on…

People generally gravitate toward either fiction or nonfiction, but being a well-rounded reader requires a selection that contains both. An entirely separate post could be written on the merits of fiction and those of non-fiction, but for now, I’ll simply say that as our bodies need a balanced diet of food, so our minds need a balanced diet of books. A mix of narrative and non-narrative (which isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correlation with fiction and non-fiction, by the way), gives us that balanced diet and helps us exercise different parts of our intellect.

Read physically.

I’ll try to refrain from getting on a soap-box here, but it’s so important to read a physical, tangible book on at least a semi-regular basis. Study upon study has been done on digital reading versus reading a printed book, and while there are varying conclusions as to which is “better,” it’s pretty conclusive that they are different. As this article explains, reading e-books and reading printed books engage different parts of our brains, and although it’s not necessarily bad to read from a screen, it is certainly depriving ourselves to give up paper reading altogether, because we can lose the ability to “deep read,” i.e. to enter into a text and absorb it fully.

Read diligently.

Finally, finish. However long it takes you, finish whatever books you start. Obviously, the exception to this would be if a book is so vulgar that it would be unwholesome or cause you to sin. But otherwise, don’t give up. Diligence will be most difficult when you’re practicing reading robustly, but the reward of completing a challenge is worth it. Plus, there’s the added benefit of cultivating the practice of finishing what you start in life in general.  Admittedly, there are several books on my shelves that I haven’t finished yet—key word: yet. But I certainly plan to finish them just as I try to follow through with other projects I begin.

There are, no doubt, other principles that can aid in our development of good reading habits, but I hope the above will give you a good start and encourage you to take baby steps forward from wherever you currently find yourself. If you decide you’d like to broaden your exposure and would like some recommendations, I’d be happy to suggest some titles. I’d also love to hear from you—what are some habits you’ve formed when it comes to reading? What ideas do you have for becoming a better reader this year?

As we ring in the new year, let’s read it in too. Let’s have fun in the world of books, grow our minds, and explore the gifts of language, story, and reason that God has given us.

Happy Reading!