The prophet Jeremiah was told by God to buy some property from his cousin Hanamel even though God had already promised him that the city would soon be overrun by the Chaldeans.  Jeremiah responded with a remarkable statement:

Ah, Lord GOD! It is you who has made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm!  Nothing is too hard for you.  [Jeremiah 32:17]

Why this response?  Was he troubled?  This sounds like a strong declaration of faith—and it certainly was—but later in the narrative Jeremiah reached the end of his prayer with a summary of uncertainty.  Though he trusted God he had no idea what God was doing!

A national disaster was unfolding.  The invading Chaldean army was besieging Jerusalem even as he wrote, an army that would soon crush the city and carry survivors off to a seventy-year exile in distant lands.  Jeremiah had already prophesied all this on God’s behalf.  So he knew this was not a good time to buy local real estate!  And he was sure—with accuracy—that his purchase would never amount to anything in his own lifetime.  So he voiced his wonder at God’s strange instructions:

What you spoke has come to pass, and behold, you see it.  Yet you, O Lord GOD, have said to me, “Buy the field for money and get witnesses”—though the city is given into the hands of the Chaldeans.  [32:24]

This was a question, not an affirmation.  In effect Jeremiah was asking, “What on earth are you doing, God?!” 

God answered by restating the prophet’s own words in the next verse:

The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh.  Is anything too hard for me?”

God went on to reaffirm his earlier warnings: “Behold, I am giving this city into the hands of the Chaldeans . . .”  Why?  Because Jerusalem and the nation “have done nothing but evil in my sight from their youth.”  Furthermore, “They have turned to me their back and not their face.”

Given this exchange between God and his prophet, here’s our own question for the day: how does God’s absolute power—the truth that nothing is “too hard” for him—relate to real world concerns?  We can explore this but first let’s notice that Jeremiah was thinking about his finances and God was thinking about Judah’s sin.  How did these differences unfold?

Let’s start with the point of the property purchase.  Jeremiah was using his finite financial resources to buy apparently worthless property.  The field was located in Anathoth, a village distant from besieged Jerusalem, so Jeremiah had no access to it.  From a human point of view Hanamel was either taking Jeremiah for a ride by selling him worthless property for some cash during the inflationary run-up of food prices in the desperate city.  Or he was making a deal with Jeremiah that ignored the prophet’s promise of a coming exile.  Or both.  So Jeremiah comes out looking like a chump and/or a false prophet.  And this was God’s plan?

Next we should ask what actually happened after Jeremiah bought the property. 

He almost certainly never got to the place.  After Jerusalem was taken by the Chaldeans he was given freedom to go wherever he wanted but he ended up in Egypt, probably under duress, with a number of survivors who fled there for refuge.  He died in Egypt.  As for Hanamel we don’t know whether he survived the collapse of the city.  But we can be sure that any money he got from Jeremiah would probably have been only marginally useful—and most likely confiscated—in his new circumstances as a prisoner and exile, if he even survived.  The old frame of reference—of owning and enjoying land and money as a basis for personal security—was no longer in play for either him or his cousin.  The catastrophe of the Chaldean invasion had changed everything.

God, on the other hand, was concerned with the catastrophe of Judah’s moral collapse.  Judah was his beloved nation yet they had abandoned him in favor of an affair with foreign Gods and the perverse values they represented.  By worshipping other god’s, while still parroting claims of allegiance to the LORD, some parents had sacrificed their children to Molech.  Some wives were dismissing Yahweh in favor of a female “Queen of heaven”.  And most people were simply living out self-concerned pragmatic values under a thin veneer of religious devotion.  God was not ready to let this ugly status quo go on.  So he allowed the evil Chaldean army to become agents of change—using evil to confront evil in order to bring about a new reality.

Now let’s get back to the twice referenced affirmation that nothing is too hard for God.  In Jeremiah’s statement we can be sure that he was thinking about God’s call for him to buy the property.  Most likely he was puzzling over the possibility that God might somehow grant him the chance to return to Anathoth, his hometown, to build a nice retirement house—despite the certainty of the coming exile.  Would he be an exception?  I’m guessing, of course.  But I suspect he was too!  His one certainty was that God is always in control and that’s what he affirmed.

For God’s part there seems to have been a double message.  One was that land values would eventually climb once again—that after the exile the returning Jews would once again be buying and selling land as a valued resource.  Jeremiah’s vain purchase during the siege symbolized a hopeful future, a future still under God’s ruling hand.  The Chaldeans were not greater than God; instead God controlled the Chaldeans.

But God’s greater purpose was to confront the arrogance of his people.  Nothing is too hard for God, not even changing hard hearts.  The episode of Jeremiah’s purchase is located between two divine assertions that God’s plan was to create new hearts among his people.  In 31:32 God set out the relational basis for his complaint against his people: “I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt [in Moses’ day], [yet] my covenant they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD.”  God loved his people too much to let them continue in the status quo of spiritual promiscuity.  A new covenant was coming:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.  And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  [31:33]

Then again, after affirming his faithfulness to Jeremiah while also reminding him that the reason for the exile was the gross sin of the people, God returned to his real issue: changed hearts.  Nothing is impossible for God because God is able to touch the soul at its deepest center.  But the means he used was not a happy option for those who preferred their social stability over holiness.  Jerusalem, as it stood, was a center of spiritual infidelity.  So God summarized his plan:

Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation.  I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety.  And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.  I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever . . .   [32:37-38]

Needless to say, even today nothing is too hard for God.  But many believers and professing believers may be in Jeremiah’s place: fixated on the question of present possessions.  God, on the other hand, is a lover who knows how to change hearts.  How so?  As in Jeremiah’s day, by not answering our prayers as we wish he would but by answering our deepest need—a heart that once again clings to him as its first and foremost delight.

Jeremiah Burroughs, a 17^th century Puritan pastor, spoke of contentment as a rare jewel.  It’s something experienced by some but not all.  A paradox he also noted is that for Christians true contentment will always leave us dissatisfied.  He unfolded one side of this mystery but left the other side undeveloped.  Both are important and invite some reflection. 

Burroughs anchored his main theme in the contentment that comes through a relationship with God.  A person’s heart is satisfied “by the melding of his will and desires into God’s will and desires.”  [The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, 53]  I invite you to embrace his point and to press into it.

The desires God has for us are the basis for his will.  In his creative care each of us is made for good works.  As we live these out we are both responding to and displaying his care for us: “We love because he first loved us.” [1 John 4:19]  On God’s part the epitome of this love for us is the Son’s incarnation, death, and resurrection offered as his means to restore the communion Adam abandoned in Eden.  In John 17: 4-5 Jesus prayed and celebrated this, his Father’s plan, as the basis for his own work—and the basis for God’s inherent, mutual glory.  “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.  And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”

For our part we find his particular will and desires for us to be increasingly natural and welcome because our new life in Christ draws us to share in God’s heart.  God made us, for instance, to find greater joy in giving than in receiving.  As we live freely in this new Christ-like selflessness we are never again satisfied with receiving rather than giving.  Or as we grow in serving others we find that the luxury industries that may have once drawn us—high-end hotels, cruise liners, resorts, and more—now feel like distractions from what we really want.

The point is that when our hearts are melded with God’s heart nothing that comes our way feels like a violation; instead everything is seen as a gift.  God’s love ensures us that everything is working for good, no matter what our circumstances might be.  That’s the basis for contentment: our faith in God sees his love as great enough to trump any fears.  Our prior skepticism about God’s character—what the serpent promoted in Eden—now evaporates in the joy of the empty tomb.  Christ’s work on our behalf is not simply a judicial event—our being declared righteous—but the basis for our renewed bond with God as our maker who loves us.  And in that bond we find what we were made for.

The apostle Paul, for instance, found his own purpose in telling non-Jews that they have equal access to Christ, even if they don’t share in Jewish conversion rituals: Jews and Gentiles can be one in Christ!  With that truth came Paul’s certainty that a reconciliation of Jewish and non-Jewish Christians was worth dying for.  Given that confidence he carried a major gift to the believers in Jerusalem from the Gentile churches he had founded or aided.  On the way to Jerusalem he was warned more than once that the gesture would backfire—that he would be arrested and imprisoned.  Even though he realized that prospect was real it didn’t stop him.

So it was, after his arrest on the Temple mount in Jerusalem, that Paul ended up in chains in a Roman prison.  His expression of love was met by hatred.  His freedom to minister ended in an open-ended imprisonment.  But listen to his heart express contentment, despite the context of a jail: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice.”  Why?  He answers,

I have learned in whatever situation I am in to be content.  I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound in any and every circumstance.  I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger; abundance and need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me.  [Philippians 4:11-13]

Paul was not a Stoic striving to achieve apatheia here!  Rather he was certain that God’s love had equipped him for the good work of reaching out even to those who were ready to kill him.  It was love that moved him, the love birthed by his new life in Christ.  It was the same sort of love that caused the Father to send the Son, his one and only Son, to die for us.  And the sort of love that led the Son to the cross in light of the joy that stood beyond death.  And the love that the Spirit now pours out into the hearts of those who called to follow Christ.

But what of the other side of our paradox?  Given this sacrificial devotion in a contented heart, how is there room for dissatisfaction?  The answer is found in strong marriages.  To love deeply is to be reoriented away from selfishness by a heartfelt devotion to another.  The one beloved is captivating to the lover.  So in meeting Christ we find a person so full and rich that we are content: we have all we need in him.  We are reassured that his care for us is even greater than the self-obsessed love we once knew.  Our skepticism about God’s love caused us to collapse into a sense of inadequacy—of feeling naked—but in Christ we find ourselves newly settled-in-soul even when our circumstances may be precarious.  That doesn’t matter as long as we know we matter to God.

So the dissatisfaction comes in our now having access to a Person whose love is greater than our ability to experience love.  Paul summed this up in his paradoxical prayer that God would strengthen us by his Spirit in our inner being,

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.  [Ephesians 3:17-19 ESV]

 It is not that we are unable to experience that love, but that we will never exhaust it.  God’s fullness is rich with satisfaction, while always drawing us deeper with a holy dissatisfaction that asks for still more.  Content, yet hungry.  The paradox is no mystery.  It speaks of our finite experience of an infinite God.  How, then, do we go forward from here?  May we all, with our Puritan friend Jeremiah Burroughs, continue to taste and see that the LORD is good.  We will never have enough, but we will always be content.

As I’m traveling myself I recruited Mark Nicklas, a pastor in Beaverton, Oregon, and good friend to share from his own heart for God. As you will read here, we once shared in a 4-month Bible read-through together, sharing with me the pleasure I always find there.  I’m pleased to have him fill the post while I need to defer my own writing activities.  His comments have been part of the Spreading Goodness conversation so many readers will know him already.  Welcome, Mark!

At 38,000 feet over the North Sea, I am settling in for the long flight back to Portland from Amsterdam.  Ron has long been asking me contribute to the blog, but until now, whenever I tried to write it felt forced.  I am feeling inspired today and it’s a long flight, so I hope that I can bring some meaningful word to Ron’s readers in what I will share.

I want to talk about voices.  I don’t think I am unusual in saying that I hear voices.  The fact is, I’ve always heard voices – lots of them.  The churning of thoughts and ideas within is a cacophony of voices.   They come from outside, from inside and from somewhere else.  There is a steady stream of them competing for my attention, often coming from points of confusion no different than my own. 

Voices on the outside are easy enough to distinguish.  Audible and attached to people, they comment, coax, console, comfort, confuse, confront, combat (apologies, though I will leave it in – it is the preacher’s curse – until the last two of these, I swear the alliteration was unintentional).  The media wants to inform me, advertisers want to entice me, friends want to influence me, some even want to control me.  There is never an end to the voices on the outside.  Being audible, they are easier to resist, but their steady drumbeat does get inside until it too can take a place among the voices on the inside.   

The voices on the inside have the greater influence.  These tend to sound like me.  They are accumulated from a life of internal conversations.   And though I wish it weren’t so, these can often be the hardest voices to hear – they can be accusing, discouraging, cursing, suspicious and insecure.  More than I want to admit, they breed an internal discontent that I would not want anyone else to ever see, leaving me with confused motives and conflicting desires.  Even my parent’s voices find place in the things I mull over – left over phrases from long ago, encouraging here and admonishing there.   

There are other voices as well.  One set of these has a common theme – these are like voices on the inside, but seem to be from somewhere else.  They play on the insecurities and fears that hide inside from a lifetime lived in a broken world.  These voices rile up the things inside and can leave me despairing and hopeless.  They mock things that are innocent – accusing such thoughts as naïve.  They treat healthy altruism with cynicism, telling me to choose safe fearful responses rather than courageous and beautiful ones.  But there is another amazing Voice…

In the Old Testament, shortly after the fall, Cain has a conversation with God.  There is clarity – Cain knows to whom he is speaking and he listens to the voice of God.  He doesn’t listen or trust, but he does hear.  Was he any different than we are today?  I believe that the voice of God is not so far away as some would propose.  I further believe that He is always speaking to us, but that we have made room for louder voices and have forgotten what He sounds like.  I hadn’t always listened to His voice, though as I’ve come to know it, I swear it was always there. In my own life, when I responded to His voice, I found myself hearing a voice that was very, very familiar; a voice I had learned to ignore.

Before I started writing this article, waiting at the gate to leave, I was listening to a song called Missed the Boat by Modest Mouse.  Acknowledging that my interpretation could be a little off (the artist gets more say in this than the hearer, though I think I have this one right), it is a song that laments the writer’s involvement in religion.  The title suggests that while he and others in his church community were trying to fake spirituality, they were missing the boat on life.  The chorus of the song celebrates his emancipation from a belief system that focuses on rewards after death – the “end gong” – while missing “life’s sweet bells.” 

Having come to Christ later in life, I can appreciate where he is coming from.  If the voice of God were absent from faith, then adhering to it becomes an exercise in mind-over-will and faith an exercise in the suspense of reality.  The religious experience of the songwriter, Isaac Brock, was devoid of real hearing, and so he rightfully challenges what it was based upon.  In one particularly poignant phrase, after talking about how “our ideas held no water but we used ‘em like a dam,” he says this:

We were certainly uncertain; at least I’m pretty sure I am

Well we didn’t need the water, but we just built that good God dam

Oh and I know this for myself, I assume as much for other people

The voice of the artist captured something that I hear Christians say all the time, though not nearly so transparently.  He is uncertain, he rejects the need for God (something that in his life was never confirmed by a direct revelation), and so he reduces belief in a good God as something that is used to hold back the tide of the kinds of ideas we fear.  There was nothing real in his faith experience, which he assumes about others.

The past week in Holland I met a number of young people preparing to be missionaries.  Surprisingly, they sounded similar to Isaac Brock.  Quite a few of them were confused; they were listening to all the internal voices and not hearing God’s voice, though they were desperate for it.  So far God has been silent.  I wondered how many of them would walk away with the same sense of discouragement as the songwriter with the belief that God is ultimately a silent God – or no God. 

It is the same problem I am seeing in the church in America.  Churches, ever pursuing cultural relevance, search the cultures philosophies and discoveries and bring them to the pulpit – a place that should be for prophetic preaching of God’s Word.  I have been through worship services where enthusiastic messages could be reduced to psychology, or motivation, or utilitarian 3-steps-to-something speeches.  Where is spirit-led revelation from God’s Word?  In an informal survey of young people, in addition to discontent with the church (especially those who have grown up in it) I find a low regard for the Word of God.  They simply are not reading it – or worse yet, they have turned it into a kind of self-help text book – reading small amounts and trying to make meaningful applications to their daily struggles.  They want to hear from God, but they don’t consider time in His Word as important.  They are wandering thirsty in the rain.

Reading God’s word helps us to hear what He sounds like.  Reading a lot of God’s word daily gives us a sense of His presence – we begin to hear His voice and to know what He sounds like.  He is clear.  He is close.  He is compelling.  I will be forever grateful to Ron for taking me through a 4-month read-through of the Bible.  I have since taken others through the same thing and am watching them as they begin to hear the Spirit as Counselor.  So… to quote Ron… make this the day.

I preached a sermon on 1 Corinthians 7 today, calling it “Marriage Matters.” The double entendre was intended. Paul addressed matters of marriage that Christians need to embrace; and the text reminds us that marriage is wonderfully important. The chapter also illuminates the weak status of marriages both in and outside the church throughout human history. Paul wrote about marriages because they point us to God’s ultimate gift: himself.

What I’ll offer here in light of Paul’s lessons to the Corinthians is not the standard fare found among Christians today. Why not? Because the Christian community has been divided since the early centuries into at least three parallel and somewhat overlapped, but fundamentally opposed traditions. The main groups are the rationalists, the mystics, and the lovers. Let me introduce each very briefly before I embrace and say more about the third, the strand of lovers. Each portrayal can only be suggestive in a miniscule way, yet I hope to note their separate trajectories so that readers may recognize and trace them at their leisure.

The Rationalists

The rationalists look mainly to the Greek tradition dominated by Aristotle, with Plato treated as a useful but less reliable teacher. They see life as a complex web of cause-and-effect relations that can be analyzed, labeled, and placed in categories. Call it the “billiard ball” theory of life as we are seen to be something like individual billiard cues called on to apply logic in striking as many of the billiard balls on the table of life as possible. Acute logic offers foresight in seeing how varied categories and events of life are explained and controlled—in effect, how to strike our targets effectively. Every encounter offers a chance to pocket a ball or two in order to run the table of our unique circumstances. Those who know the angles, who have the best touch, and who can anticipate secondary impacts, are dominant.

Rationalists gravitate to places where the most balls are bunched—mainly in the academy and the business world—and they are very successful in the tangible aspects of life. As one of their prophets, Boethius (d. 526), explained, a person is “the individual substance of a rational nature.” We are, then, objective, thinking instruments seeking to control our space in life. There are many of us and our mutual encounters are complex and can be mutually disruptive, even a bit threatening. God offers us principles of wisdom for deciding how best to navigate life with as much success as possible—to strike others while not being struck ourselves (that is, to be causes rather than effects).

The Mystics

The mystics, on the other hand, rely on the Greek tradition of Plato as later expressed by Plotinus (d. 270), and then baptized into Christianity by Dionysius, the pseudo-Areopagite (6th c.). In this view of life everything centers on God as the indivisible “One” in whom all true forms or ideas reside. Everything outside God consists in mere shadows of the ultimate, absolute and overwhelming ideas in the One. Yet the One offers a dual cycle of emanation and return—with his mind and soul extending sequentially outward into the shadowlands of dependent reality before returning back into the One. As I read of this version of God I picture a two-tongued solar flare leaping out of the Sun before both fall back again to the great globe of light. When Dionysius adapted this version of God to Christianity we find the Father as the One; and the Son and Spirit are his twin emanations who process forth and then return into the indivisible unity of the One. And the notion of oneness is critical—in “One” there is no “other” present to offer any basis for dialogue or conversation. The One, instead, offers pure, unadulterated experience—with no discourse.

The mystics are those who, in seeking God, long to enter into union with the One. What kind of union? Who knows! And that’s the point: no one can ever speak of the Unspeakable One. Any true union will, by the nature of the One who is encountered, be ineffable. Distinctions are swallowed up by indistinguishable “apophatic” unity. This sets out the basis for attaining spirituality to be non-materialistic, and non-content-based passivity—or a “quietism”. The main stages of this are an ascent that begins with denial: purgation. Next, as the senses and mind are purged of disruptive thoughts or movements, comes the prospect of inward illuminations—I picture a surfer catching the wave of the Spirit as it flows back into the One; and then (hopefully) union with the One.

Have I lost you by now? Hang with me, please! I know that most of us never encounter these historical distinctions conceptually, but I promise you that they underlie and shape our experience of Christianity today, depending on which strand we embrace. Let me review each at a reduced level: we can distinguish the rationalists as dealing with complexity and the mystics with simplicity. One trajectory is overtly anthropocentric—with the focus on our thinking and choosing—and the other is covertly anthropocentric—with a focus on achieving a personal experience of the One. One trail takes us into the classrooms of the scholastics in the academy and calls us to memorize God’s attributes; the other into the cells and mazes of the monastery and the quietist disciplines and mind-stilling repetitions of liturgy.

The Lovers

The lovers are the biblical strand who met at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and clarified the Triune relationality of God in the face of challenges being brought to the faith by Arius who insisted on God’s absolute oneness. This group was heavily influenced by the Platonic strand at first but began to break free from it as they examined the relationship of the Father and the Son. They realized that, biblically, God has always existed as the Father-Son-and-Spirit God “from before the world was created”, and that the union of God is rooted in his eternal communion—“my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” The notion Arius held was that the Father is the source of deity, with the Son coming later in order to create the world. God, in effect, created the world through the Son as his sub-creator. This was treated as nonsense from the devil whose ambition is to portray a self-absorbed version of God—namely what Satan wanted to be himself. The different expressions of oneness offered by both Aristotle and Plato were of this ilk, even if they differed over complexity and simplicity.

The core reality of the Father-Son-and-Spirit God is that he is eternally bonded by a shared mutual delight and glory. This is what John meant when he wrote, “God is love.” And this is where marriage came on the scene and why marriage matters. Marriage is the human expression of God’s triune oneness. So when God spoke, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” he was using the paradigm of his own Triune reality—the dyad of an indivisible “I-and-other” bonded by the eternal presence of the communicating Spirit whose business it is to search the inmost being of both the Father and the Son and to exchange or “pour out” the love of each to the other in an eternal reciprocity of creative delight. Marriage, then, is the human version of the divine relationship in a human union: of the two who are one, by the bonding presence of the Spirit in each.

This, too, explains Paul’s call to the Corinthians to recognize that, by the Spirit, we are also united to the Son whose Spirit it is that comes to our spirit in a marital union:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! … For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 1 Corinthians 6:15-17

And, elsewhere, we see that it was rooted in the greater purpose of marriage: to bind us who are united to Christ together as the collective “bride of Christ.”

For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery: I am saying that this verse refers ultimately to Christ and the church. Ephesians 5:29-32

The reality was understood by Martin Luther. It was held by John Calvin. Yet most Lutherans today have joined the Rationalists. And so have most of the Calvinists. Yet we can be sure that the lovers are those whom God really loves. Why? Because it is his love poured out into our hearts by his Spirit. [Romans 5:5]

So marriage matters. And the greatest matter of marriage is not in this life—the point I preached in today’s sermon—and a devoted follower of Christ is free to remain single. The point of life is to live as a holy and blameless member of the body of Christ, united to him by his Spirit as his eternal bride, bonded to him by his love which we freely reciprocate.  As God’s lovers we have the proper path and the better portion!