Download discussion questions: Jeremiah 2
One of the comments after last week’s discussion was that we seemed to get “lost in the weeds” a bit, that our conversation was somewhat scattered in many different directions. Like many Biblical passages, Genesis 1 provides starting points for a great variety of topics – creation, evolution, ecology, to name just a few. While my blog entry from the discussion may not have reflected that range of subjects, our hour together certainly did.
This week, I wanted to comment on that observation. One of the goals of this group has been to maintain a healthy tension. On the one hand, we want the freedom to explore anything we see (or think we see) in the Scripture. Every time we look at any passage, that should be our starting point. Too often Christians come to the Bible with the agenda of proving a point or winning an argument or reaffirming a doctrinal position. Bible discussions can be characterized by the attitude, “Let’s get together and tell each other what we know about the Bible.” Instead, we should approach any passage with the attitude, “Let’s get together and see what we can learn from the Bible.”
On the other hand, the practical reality of our group is that we have an hour together. It is usually impossible to exhaust even one thread or idea from a passage, much less everything the writer had to say. Instead, my goal in preparation is to provide something of a focused agenda. At the end of the hour, we will have at least a beginning understanding of part of the passage. That is the desired healthy tension – open exploration that leads to a focused conclusion. Hopefully a little direction will accomplish that without getting lost in the weeds.
With that in mind, we briefly reviewed the theme we have been pursuing during the month of May.
Four core commitments
- Worship God passionately
- Who is this God whom we are to worship passionately?
- God is a perfectly happy community of three Persons whose nature is to give who They are to others. The way They relate defines love and holiness.
- Connect with one another authentically
- Who are we that we might be able to connect authentically?
- We are gendered beings created in the image of God, designed to enter into relationship with the Trinity and with each other.
- Grow to know God deeply
- How does God’s Spirit work so we can know Him deeply?
- He is transforming us into “little Christs” by detaching us from dependence on all sources of life apart from God (broken cisterns) and attaching us to Him (the fountain of living water) in a relationship of vital dependence.
- Go show and tell the gospel boldly
- What is God’s mission for us to show and tell boldly?
- God is glorifying Himself by preparing people who live and love like Jesus did. Our part is to model and communicate the selfless joy He calls people into.
When we finally turned to the passage, we began with the question, “What does Jeremiah 2 have to do with knowing God deeply (this week’s focus)?”
Cisterns, Life, Obsessions
Assuming we have the desire to know God deeply, Jeremiah 2 provides pictures of the obstacles we face.
Our discussion noted the repeated phrase, “They did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’” first by the people in general (v. 6) and then by a variety of leaders (priests, law experts, rulers, prophets – v. 8). As one member of our group pointed out, the leaders seem to bear a special responsibility for not providing the examples the people needed.
We talked about the meaning of the failure to ask, “Where is the Lord?” One person suggested the people (and leaders) had forgotten what God had done (v. 6). Another comment was that they God simply never came to mind for them to even ask about Him. They were only interested in themselves, they made choices that ignored what God might be doing. In his book, Respectable Sins, Jerry Bridges began not with something like gossip (which I expected) but with the sin of ungodliness. He distinguishes ungodliness from unrighteousness. “A person may be a nice, respectable citizen and still be an ungodly person…. Ungodliness may be defined as living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God.”[1]
That seems to be the contention (v. 9) or charge or complaint of God against the people, living without reference to Him. And that attitude was not trivial. It was unprecedented from the western extreme of the sea (“Kittim”, or the island of Cyprus) to the eastern limits of the wilderness (“Kedar”, v. 10). [2] Living apart from God, with indifference toward Him, was enough to shock even heavenly beings (v. 12). As one person paraphrased the celestial response, “What in the world is going on?!” Even more devastating was the unparalleled action of changing gods (v. 11). Even the pagans and idol worshippers would not do what the people chosen and loved and protected by the Living God have done. One member said, “The idolaters were more faithful to what they believed than the chosen people of God.”
Cisterns and a Fountain
In an arid climate like the Middle East, water is a powerful image. We discussed the differences between a cistern and a fountain. What are the advantages and disadvantages?
| Cistern (Reservoir) | Fountain |
| Advantages
· Provides storage · Plan ahead · Known quantity · Controllable · Visible, know what we have · Predictable · Provides a backup · Understand how it works |
Advantages
· Fresh · Pure · Clean · Nothing required · No maintenance |
| Disadvantages
· Limited · Can run dry · Stale · Become scummy · Can break, leak · Maintenance · Contamination |
Disadvantages
· Can’t be saved · Unpredictable · Uneven flow · Uncertain location |
Ignoring God, not asking “Where is God?” in our lives, looking to other sources of life is like depending on the manmade cisterns that we trust more than a fountain. That unprecedented, shocking error can take many forms. William Law, an eighteenth-century Anglican priest said, “”If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.”[3] Whatever cistern we choose will never hold water.
In addition to the contrast between cisterns and a fountain, two other illustrations may be helpful.
Life and Death
Philippians 1:21 may be a familiar verse, often quoted mechanically. However, consider the statement as a fill-in-the-blank option:
“For to me, to live is ____________________________”
We know the answer that the Apostle Paul gave, and that we are expected to echo as good Christians: “For to me, to live is Christ.” Jesus Himself affirmed that truth in His prayer to His Father: “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent—Jesus Christ” (John 17:3).
The practical reality is that we often have other unspoken and even unrecognized answers. We have what Larry Crabb describes as false views of life and death.[4] Even if we never say or even think the words, our attitude can be that “For me to live is keeping my job.” That carries with it that getting demoted or fired is like a death. Or, “For me to live is having disciplined children.” Then for others to see my kids misbehaving is death.
The best summary I know was from a person in another group several years ago: “I need this for life to be OK,” whatever “this” is – job, relationships, reputation, financial security, the list is endless. Our source of life, our identity, our fulfilment, our satisfaction – ultimately our joy becomes dependent on something other than knowing God.
Obsession
Another description of obstacles to knowing God deeply has been helpful for me. “Self-obsession” is a good description of our efforts to manage life in order to achieve the results we want.[5] “God-obsession” is the opposite, the recognition of Lewis’s first thing, our relationship with God.
Consider these characteristics:
Self-Obsession: the conviction that I must protect myself from personal pain at all costs. My highest value becomes comfort, security, and a personal sense of well-being. I become increasingly dependent on second-things for my source of joy.
- Nothing matters more than my comfort and pain-free existence at any cost to those around me.
- Self-protection
- Managing life
- Self-justification
- Manipulating people
God-Obsession: the conviction that God is infinitely good and loving, and that seeking to know Him and to advance His purposes is the only source of lasting and genuine joy. Drawing near to God as the first thing in my life is my source of joy.
- God obsession: Nothing matters more than God’s glory at any cost to myself.
- Humility
- Service
- Self-sacrifice
Each of these descriptions (cisterns, false views of life, self-obsession) are all incredibly subtle ways of seeking joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, or identity. We seldom if ever describe ourselves as self-obsessed or looking for cisterns. But we often express ourselves in our relationships in ways that reflect those attitudes:
- Sarcastic comment to a rude store clerk to show I’m in control.
- Anger or discouragement at failure.
- Do “whatever it takes” to get the job promotion.
- Win the argument at the expense of the relationship.
- Frustration when I don’t get attention.
- If God loves me, why isn’t my life going better?
How does God’s Spirit work so we can know Him deeply?
Knowing God deeply means, at least in part, getting past the obstacles like cisterns, the things we depend on other than knowing Him deeply. That process is more than simply deciding to stop a behavior or attitude. That usually results in “sin management” or making our sin more socially acceptable by making it less obvious to others. Instead, we need to consider why we are drawn to the substitute, the broken cistern, the false sense of life, the self-obsession. Then we can begin to see what God the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives.
He is transforming us into “little Christs” by detaching us from dependence on all sources of life apart from God (broken cisterns) and attaching us to Him (the fountain of living water) in a relationship of vital dependence.[6]
Our part is asking God through His Spirit and through other believers to help us see our broken cisterns, our false sense of life, our self-obsession. We need other people speaking into our lives (“connecting authentically”) to help us see those blind spots. We need to learn to listen to each other, not offer a quick fix or the verse of the day. We need to patiently begin to understand the battle we each face between self-obsession and God-obsession. We need a holy curiosity to look for where and how the Holy Spirit is working in another person (or in me). Our role is not to fix the other person or to resolve their problems or to offer superficial comfort. Our goal is to see (and maybe participate in) what God is doing to replace broken cisterns with His flowing fountain of living water.
Expulsive Power
The Puritan Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) offered an important insight. We really cannot simply give up cisterns or abandon our false sense of life or not be obsessed with ourselves. We do not simply create a spiritual vacuum to eliminate the problem.
We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it; and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted; and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection, is by the expulsive power of a new one.[7]
The point Chalmers was making with the title and with the sermon, was that the love of the world was so strongly rooted in our hearts, the allurements of the world so well-suited to our natural desires and propensities, that the only possible way that that love would ever be banished from our hearts would be if another, stronger, purer, more tenacious love should come into our hearts and drive the other love out.[8]
Chalmers argued that the human soul must have an object of affection.[9] Being convinced of the destructive nature of the cistern we depend on or the illusion we have about life is not enough. We need something much better to fill the vacuum left when we try to eliminate the self-obsession in our lives.
In a word, if the way to disengage the heart from the positive love of one great and ascendant object, is to fasten it in positive love to another, then it is not by exposing the worthlessness of the former, but by addressing to the mental eye the worth and excellence of the latter, that all old things are to be done away and all things are to become new.[10]
As the Holy Spirit disengages our heart from broken cisterns and a false view of life it is a growing God-obsession that will provide the replacement affection.
We know of no other way by which to keep the love of the world out of our heart, than to keep in our hearts the love of God – and no other way by which to keep our hearts in the love of God, than building ourselves up on our most holy faith.[11]
David’s words in Psalm 27:4 suggest his approach to keeping his heart in the love of God:
One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the Lord
And to meditate in His temple.
Gazing on the beauty is seeing more of who God is and what He is like. That can happen through studying the Bible, in fellowship with other believers, reading theology or biography or fantasy that shows more of God’s delightfulness. That increasing delight in God nurtures the “new affection,” to see how God is the fountain, the true life, the One worthy of our obsession.
[1] Jerry Bridges, Respectable Sins (Colorado Springs, Colorado: NavPress, 2007), 53-54.
[2] John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary Old Testament (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 644.
[3] Quoted by C. S. Lewis, “A Slip of the Tongue” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1980), Kindle Edition location 1757, p. 191.
[4] Larry Crabb, “Spiritually Forming Conversations” (audio recording, NewWay Ministries, 2006 ) Part 3, approximately 15:40. http://www.newwayministries.org/
[5] Larry Crabb, “Spiritually Forming Conversations” (audio recording, NewWay Ministries, 2006 ) Part 3, approximately 11:20. http://www.newwayministries.org/
[6] Adapted from Larry Crabb, “Seven Questions God Answers” (audio recording, NewWay Ministries, 2006 ) Part 3, approximately 15:40. http://www.newwayministries.org/
[7] Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Curiosmith, 2012) Kindle Electronic Edition: Location 153;
online version at https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/Chalmers,%20Thomas%20-%20The%20Exlpulsive%20Power%20of%20a%20New%20Af.pdf retrieved May 17, 2018.
[8] Robert Rayburn, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” Third Millenium Ministries
http://thirdmill.org/magazine/article.asp/link/http:%5E%5Ethirdmill.org%5Earticles%5Erob_rayburn%5Erob_rayburn.TheExpulsivePowerofaNewAffection.html/at/The%20Expulsive%20Power%20of%20a%20New%20Affection retrieved May 17, 2018.
[9] Douglas Wilson, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,”
https://dougwils.com/the-church/s16-theology/the-expulsive-power-of-a-new-affection.html retrieved May 17, 2018.
[10] Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Curiosmith, 2012) Kindle Electronic Edition: Location 146.
[11] Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Curiosmith, 2012) Kindle Electronic Edition: Location 280.