Even Warriors Fall (Jer. 2, 4, 10)

The focus at school this year has been to live like a warrior. Pray like a warrior. Teach like a warrior. Play like a warrior. Serve like a warrior. Maybe you’ve seen it looking something like this after a victory with a visual in the form of a picture and hash tag: #fightlikeawarrior.

Personally, I love the unifying nature of a good motif running through literature, and I can’t help but feel the same way about the one attached to everything related to my school this year. You feel it though, don’t you? The but running through the last statement I wrote.

But even warriors fall. That’s what I was thinking as I sat in church yesterday. The thought ran across my mind fleetingly that warriors get defeated in a war—at least the warriors on one side of the battle do. If there is a war, two parties are fighting because peace is unattainable, and short of an armistice, one side is going to be declared a winner and the other a loser. When there is a war, there are always casualties, losers. People die. Cities are destroyed. Life changes irrevocably for one or both parties. Life for the defeated will never be the same, but life for the victor won’t either. There is always a cost, and someone has to pay it.

This may seem a little heavy, but the good news is that Jesus has paid the cost for us in this war in which we live daily. IF we have accepted His gift, we have the ability to fight like a true warrior with HIS strength in the battles of this life in anticipation for the victory already won (and the celebration of it, which we call heaven). There is a spiritual battle all around us, and it is so easy to forget from day to day that a real battle wages.

The people of Judah in the Old Testament forgot about the battle raging around them unseen and turned the power of the invisible God. They changed gods and “changed their glory for that which does not profit” (NASB, Jer. 2:11). They tried to create their own way and only made “broken cisterns that could hold no water” (Jer. 2:13). They became “shrewd to do evil, but to do good” they did not know (Jer. 4:22b). Warren Wiersbe says of this people that they, “Sacrificed the permanent for the immediate.” They accepted the delusion of the comfort of the visible—things tangible they thought would deliver them, things looking much like the world around them, which God had told them not to get caught up in. But they did. And they lost. They lost the power of God, who fought battles on their behalf, telling them to be still and let Him fight for them. The lost the truth, and ultimately, that generation lost the battle and paid the cost—total destruction of their nation, time spent in captivity, or death.

However, there was one who never lost focus. Jeremiah understood that “a man’s way is not in himself, nor is it in a man who walks to direct his steps” (Jer. 10:23). He asked for God to correct him with justice instead of anger lest he be destroyed, too, along with his nation. He also asked that God pour out His wrath on the nations that would devour his country and lay waste to his city. Jeremiah understood the covenant relationship with his God, and he understood that he wasn’t a strong enough warrior to defeat the enemy—only God could do that for him. Unlike the rest of the nation, Jeremiah understood that if he sought after God, God would let him find Him (Jer. 29:13), so Jeremiah did so, like a true warrior, without expecting things to be easy; and they were not.

It is easy to get caught up in the things of the world, the work, the cares, the fun . . . to be like everyone else and forget that being a warrior means daily conditioning, daily orders, daily communication, daily fighting. Yes, warriors rest, too, but they are always ready to fight. They’re prepared day in and day out.

My prayer for us all is that we learn to fight like God’s warrior.