Today’s reading: Jeremiah 42; 1 Corinthians 1
It is easy for me to read about the Lord speaking to/through the Old Testament prophets and be jealous that they heard so clearly and directly from God, but the beginning of Jeremiah 42 is a good reminder that their experience of the Lord was not really that unlike our own.
The people that are gathered in Judah are worried that Nebuchadnezzar is going to come against them because Ishmael and his men killed Gedaliah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had appointed. Unsure what to do, they ask Jeremiah to ask the Lord what they should do, committing to follow whatever He says.
To begin with, while we will see, both at the end of this chapter, and at the beginning of tomorrow’s (if you read ahead a few verses), that the commitment to follow whatever the Lord says wasn’t actually sincere, it is a good place to be when approaching the Lord for wisdom and direction. If we have already decided what we will or won’t do before we ask the Lord for His direction, it really won’t matter if He answers us or not. This is why Jeremiah rebukes the people at the end of chapter 42, because they are immediately unwilling to consider what the Lord says. If we aren’t ready to follow the Lord’s direction when He shows us, then instead of asking for His direction, we should start by asking for humble and willing hearts to listen, and let the Holy Spirit bring us to a place of genuine willingness to go whatever way the Lord says, waiting to ask for His input until we’re ready to follow.
But that aside, when Jeremiah goes to seek the Lord on this, God doesn’t respond for ten days. Yes, God spoke directly to/through Jeremiah in a unique way compared to most of the rest of us, but that does not mean that Jeremiah got an immediate, verbal answer to every prayer.
This was the reality for the prophets. We see the times God spoke directly to them, and the ways He powerfully used them, featured prominently because the books written about them focus on those things. But, like we’ve talked about with Jeremiah before, these words from the Lord came over the course of years. It’s just like what James says of Elijah, that he was a man with a nature just like ours, and yet when he prayed, it didn’t rain for three years, and then when he prayed again, it rained. But, as straightforward as that sounds, when we see Elijah praying for rain in 1 Kings, he has to pray seven times before his prayer starts to be answered.
God entrusted His words to these men because He needed His people to hear them, but their lives of faith otherwise looked very much like our own. They had to pray persistently and wait for answers, they had to deal with fear and doubt, and there is no indication, apart from maybe Moses, that when these men prayed, they generally got the kinds of direct, verbal answers we see when God is using them in their prophetic role.
The prophets were just people, like us, who had to strive to live faithfully after the Lord, trusting in Him to keep His promises. They didn’t “have it easy” because God spoke to them at times; they still had to live by faith just like we do. They aren’t heroes of the faith because God chose to speak through them to His people, they are hero’s of the faith because they trusted Him and stayed true to Him despite experiencing the same adversities and struggles of faith we do.
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