Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

The king and his servants who heard all these words were not afraid, and didn’t tear their garments.
Jeremiah 36:24 (emphasis added)

When you watch or read something for entertainment, do you enjoy foreshadowing? The little hints and clues that either give away the ending or when you get to the end provide an unconscious richness to that ending? It can turn a so-so plot into a great piece of entertainment. It can also take a great piece of entertainment and turn it into a two-dimensional bit of fluff that had no surprises since you figured out the ending an hour and twenty minutes ago. Foreshadowing can be good and it can be bad. When it comes from Yahweh God, it is always, ALWAYS meant for good.

Yahweh foreshadowed Jesus and His whole purpose with the entire Old Covenant. We understand the New Testament by reading the Old. There are times in both Testaments that God speaks to us or to specific individuals and gives them a glance at the future. A chance to see what is coming and alter their trajectory. He always does it for the same reason: “that they may each return from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin” (Jeremiah 36:3). Good things come from the Lord. Good words. Good deeds. Every time a negative happens, it’s father is not the Lord God Almighty. We are warned again and again to get under the covering of the Lord. To get where He can be our fortress and our refuge. When we do, we are saved. Provided for. Secure. Safe. Blessed. When we do not, we open ourselves to everything from sickness to strife to total destruction. Joy cannot be ours. Peace cannot be ours. We can create temporary mimics of those things like happiness. But the Truth evades us.

Jeremiah was a prophet of Yahweh and was instructed to write a letter. A long one that had on it “all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel, against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah even to this day” (Jeremiah 36:2). Those words were warnings. They were a laundry list of Look What’s Coming. They were a call to return to worship of the Lord in fullness of heart. To follow His Laws. They had not been doing this and the cup of the Lord’s wrath was growing. Sin had not been paid for. Sin has a price tag. There were statutes and ordinances and sacrifices set in place to protect the people from the price, but the people of Judah were not following them. They were exposed. And the time of reckoning was approaching. God was warning them yet again of the warnings He had given. Repent. Return. Be safe.

Jeremiah dictated it to his friend Baruch who wrote it on a scroll. The scroll was read in the temple in front of the people. Leaders of the people asked to hear it. When they did, they were insistent on two things. One, that it be read to the King because their leader needed to know of these warnings. Two, that Jeremiah and Baruch hide themselves. The scroll was taken and read to the king. The vital warnings of Yahweh God Most High were presented to the man who could sway the nation with a word. “Now the king was sitting in the winter house in the ninth month, and there was a fire in the brazier burning before him. When Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier” (Jeremiah 36:22-23). The leaders of the people were there. They were horrified. They begged the king not to burn the scroll. But he continued. And he ordered the arrest of Jeremiah and Baruch. Through it all, “The king and his servants who heard all these words were not afraid, and didn’t tear their garments” (Jeremiah 36:24)

The tearing of clothes was the greatest outward expression one could perform to show grief, sorrow, heartache, pain, shame, or anger. It was a signal that the emotion being felt was too great to bear. The king, when hearing of the coming events and the desire of Yahweh for genuine restitution of His people, should have torn his clothes. This was definitely the time for a costly, self-sacrificing and self-forgetful devotion to God, repenting for his own sins and the sins of his nation — one of the responsibilities of kingship. Instead, he tried to destroy it. To make it unable to be read again. To keep the words from spreading more than they had and keep things going the way that they were — or at least not in the direction of a return to God and His ways. “Therefore the LORD says concerning Jehoiakim king of Judah: “He will have no one to sit on David’s throne. His dead body will be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost” (Jeremiah 36:30). And so it was. Judah became a vassal state of Babylon, they soon rebelled, and were destroyed which began the great Exile period. Jehoiakim didn’t live to see it or his son taken in shackles to Babylon.

This story leads us to that age-old question that confronts everyone when we hear the Word: how will you respond? Jesus said “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Jesus commanded us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart and soul and mind. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbour as we love ourselves — to value them as highly as we do ourselves. Jesus said that if we kept these two things, we would keep the whole of the Law (as found in the Old Testament). Jesus was literally the fulfilment of that Law. But how to do it? We had been failing at it for thousands of years at that point. Well, Jesus doesn’t leave us hanging. In verses 16-21 He goes on: “I will pray to the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor, that he may be with you forever: the Spirit of truth, whom the world can’t receive, for it doesn’t see him and doesn’t know him. You know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more; but you will see me. Because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. One who has my commandments and keeps them, that person is one who loves me. One who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will reveal myself to him.”” When asked why He was revealing this to the disciples and not to everyone, Jesus said “If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who doesn’t love me doesn’t keep my words. The word which you hear isn’t mine, but the Father’s who sent me” (vs 23-24).

These words were being said during the last supper. Only a few people were hearing them. And they were among the last words of Jesus before the crucifixion. This was the last message. The last chance to get it through to the disciples. This was important stuff. Love. Obedience because of love, not love to be obedient. The idea that love enables and births obedience is so foreign to us. We think of obedience as a rule thing. Don’t do this, fines and tickets, police knocking on your door, lightning bolts from heaven, stern looks from conservative parents, etc. Obedience is about being willing to obey or to be subservient to the restraint or command of authority. In the context of love, that means our love for God is our being subservient to the restraint of His love. Our love submits to His love. His love is perfect and inhabits a specific space. It is life-giving and the source of all life in the universe. Sin has no part in it. Fear has no part in it. There is no darkness in it at all. It is perfect love.

If we love Him, we will put our love under His love. Our desires into His desires. We will want to be like Him. To love as He loves. To be as He is. To do what He does. Jesus covers that too in the same last chance speech: ““I am the true vine, and my Father is the farmer. Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, he takes away. Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already pruned clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I in you. As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in me. I am the vine. You are the branches. He who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:1-5). Our love for God cannot be separated from our need to abide in Jesus. Like with every single other thing of any worth, if it isn’t done in Jesus it won’t succeed. Because if it isn’t done in Jesus, it is done by the flesh. The flesh will always follow the pattern of the world it is made from and will not do things by faith. Anything not of faith, is sin (Romans 14:23). Why? Because faith is about loving God which is selfless and anything not about loving God is selfish. Selfishness is sin.

We can be confronted by the Law of Moses. We can be confronted by a principle of the Pauline letters. We can be admonished and encouraged to behaviour by Peter or John or James. But it is all inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is all teaching to lead us. Guidance. Which is one of the major jobs of the Holy Spirit. To guide us. It can be with a verse or it can be with a nudge in our spirit, but guidance is guidance. We are being confronted with the will of the Lord. We can respond with selfishness or we can respond with love. We can hold the opinions of the Lord with reverence or we can hold them like we hold human opinion: malleable and inconstant. The Lord is not a man that He can lie (Numbers 23:19). The Lord’s opinions aren’t views or judgments that may or may not be based on facts. The Lord’s opinions are a formal expression of judgment or advice by an expert in the legal reasons and principles upon which His legal judgment is based.

That is what it all comes down to. Are we going to do what He says is right? It doesn’t matter what our opinion is on it. If we love Him, our minds will change. If you’ve ever had a child, you had dreams for it before it came out. You acknowledged its existence and you started dreaming about it. Once it came out, things changed. As it grew, some of those dreams became reality. But others took the place of yours. The child’s interests became yours. Yours became the child’s. It wasn’t a one-way street. It was a fluid dialogue within the framework of your family’s moral structure. There were some we do this, we don’t do that’s on the ride. But as long as a given interest didn’t violate your family morals, you participated and encouraged. It’s what parenting is. It’s what living with another human is. Why would it be different when dealing with the being we are created in the image of?

If we love the Lord, we will reverence what He says. Both the words that come from His mouth and the standards that He says are. He isn’t setting a bar at a given height. He is reporting where the bar is. It wasn’t set in place by God’s hands. It was set in place by God’s nature. He is Righteous. His Righteousness is Righteous. It is the standard of living. It is the moral framework of the universe. We may be having a free-will party here on this ball of mud, dirt leading dirt into dirtier dirt; but it doesn’t change the truth. In Jesus we have the opportunity to not only see the truth, but walk in it. We have the chance to leave the darkness and dance in the light. But it takes reverence. It takes sacrifice. It takes Jesus.

What will you do? Will you have peace and love the Lord? Or will you burn up the message and carry on in darkness? The choice is, was, and always will be yours.

Daily Affirmation of God’s Love: John 15:14-15

He is Light. He is Love. He formed the mountains, hung the suns, set the rotations and the axial tilts of planets. He set the low-frequency oscillations in the magnetic field of planets oscillating so that we could hear them ‘sing’. He knows everything there is to know. He is wisdom incarnate. He taught them revelations of scripture. Healed disease, sickness, and broken bodies. He restored people, raised the dead, and created much from little. He walked on water and stood glorified. But on this last night of celebration, He called them friends. Friends. Companions. This is what He calls us. The Creator of the universe declares His love toward us by proclaiming a bond of connection that goes above bloodline, race, creed, and culture. Not to get something from us, but to get something to us. Opening the tomb so that we can get in. Giving us free will so that we can recognise He didn’t have to. Inviting a dialogue so He can lovingly tweak our direction. He is the solution that lies above all our systems. The gentle reminder that all of our complexity is just so much human thinking. That all of our vaunted freedoms are all so much personal choice. That our most in-depth technical textbooks are preschool primers in the ways of the way things work. To open the gates of heaven to us so that we can come in singing and dancing to see Him. The Loving Parent. The trusted guide. Merciful and mighty. Loving and kind. Friends. What a thing to be called. And what love it takes to call us that.

Your Daily Confession of God’s love to YOU:

Today God loves that I _______.