Idolatry and Imagery (1 Kings 18; Jer. 7:4, Jer. 22-23)

Idolatry

Vain repetitions. A deceived king. Inhabitants of a land willingly led astray again. Fire falling from heaven. Such is the familiar yet dramatic scene in 1 Kings 18 when God sends Elijah to face off with King Ahab of Israel and the false priests of Baal. Some 200-plus years later, God calls Jeremiah to warn the people Judah about presenting the same kind of vain repetitions to Him as are offered to the false gods/idols as they worship; when God's people choose to seek and serve idols and then turn around and apply their idol-worshiping techniques to their worship of  the one true God, their desperate requests become vain and ineffective. 

In Jeremiah 7:4, God speaks specifically of the chants of the false prophets who think living in the place where God’s temple is protects them, and it is in this false security they chant: 

“This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” (AMP). This empty speaking of vain repetitions out of hearts far from God doesn’t work out so well for these who came before us just as it won't work out so well today either; Jesus speaks of the same kind of vain repetitions in Matthew 6:7-8, reminding believers not to be like the false prophets of Jerusalem that came before who used “meaningless repetition” to insure they would be heard. 

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Imagery

I am pretty sure that I fell in love with literature while reading Jeremiah from my first KJV Bible I got for Christmas my third grade year. Why did I end up in Jeremiah early on? Maybe being a newer reader trying to read Leviticus and Deuteronomy did it to me . . . Did I understand even a fraction of it? Nope! Do I understand it all now? NO!! But I find that every single time I read through the Bible and get to Jeremiah (or just read Jeremiah), new things click (as they are meant to, at just the right time and with the Spirit’s work within and with growth and familiarity in rereading the text). The rich, figurative language of Jeremiah draws me in and sometimes keeps me while I chew my cud trying to digest the sometimes seemingly endless devices and how they enrich the meaning by being there. 

Did I mention that my profession for many years has been a literature/grammar teacher? You’ve heard the expression about taking a boy off the farm but not being able to take the farm out of the boy? Well, the same applies for this old girl when it comes to taking me out of the classroom. Just because I am not there currently doesn’t mean I love learning or studying one bit less or  have suddenly quit thinking about all the things I taught for so many years on a daily basis. So,  that being said . . .

Digressions aside, my brakes go on again as I read through chapters 22-23 of Jeremiah. This particular phrase stopped me and caught my attention: “O land, land, land, hear the word of the LORD!” (22:29). This threefold apostrophe (simplistic definition: a turning and speaking to something absent or that cannot speak back, usually for emphasis) grabbed me and just wouldn’t let go. I went back to try to see the reason for the repetition in this verse, and isn’t it far too easy to become a mindless reader and need to go back?  Was repeating land three times really necessary? Why? What did I miss? So I go back.

Compare it with Jeremiah 7:4’s “the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” God seems to be throwing back in mockery the vain repetitions of the people of Judah who have trusted in everything BUT Him, such as the land in which they live, feeling the past protection of the LORD they have all but abandoned, claiming Him in name only. The deliverances of the past are promised to them conditionally, yet they cling to the promise alone and forgot its conditions. The kings given them (like the rest of the world) lead them away from their one true King.

This generation of God’s peculiar people would soon leave the land they loved more than the LORD, hurled out as captives (v. 26). They would pass through other lands on their way to their new, forced-upon-them homes in new cultures. They would long to return to the land they loved, but they would not be able to return back to it (v. 26-27). 

The imagery that comes before this three-fold apostrophe is three-fold as well: 

1. They have made “nests of cedar,” like birds in well-padded nests, believing themselves safely tucked away from harm (v. 23);
2. But misery comes upon them suddenly anyway, much like the pains come upon pregnant women whose time for birth is upon them (v. 23);
3. And like a signet ring ripped off a hand, so God will rip King Coniah (by the way, God has "nicked his name" from the longer version to this short one in disdain, says Matthew Henry) from his position and put him into the hand of another, King Nebuchadnezzar, who will have the authority that God gives him over His people who have strayed n(v. 24-25).

This land, land, land apostrophe is sobering, and other imagery following it is also three-fold about Coniah: 

1. He is a “despised, broken jar, a vessel in which no one takes pleasure” (v. 28); 
2. He is hurled out, thrown from his land like a broken jar would be thrown out into the trash heap (v. 28); 
3. He is “written down as childless” by the LORD Himself (v. 30). 

The three-fold nature of the apostrophe and its related information seems to be repeated three times . . . giving the reader that God in his sovereignty has spoken, and His word will come true, and His word will endure. However, even in the disciplining of His own children who have abandoned Him, He doesn’t leave His people without some hope, some light to come to this land. Chapter 23 looks toward the coming Messiah, “The LORD Our Righteousness (v. 6), and there is renewed hope and other mentions of the land that will one day see righteousness within it that doesn’t currently exist but only with the coming of Messiah. The land of King Coniah filled with unfaithful adulterers mourns God’s curse upon it (v. 10), the profanity and ungodliness that have overtaken the land causing its inhabitants to be thrown from one land into many lands (v. 10-15). What God has set in motion, even though they do not understand it, until He has “accomplished the thoughts and intentions of His heart,” they will not understand; when He gathers them back, when Messiah comes, they will understand clearly (v. 20). In Messiah is hope, in a returning to the Lord.

The imagery in these chapters speaks strongly of the God we serve. There is none like Him, thus we need similes and metaphors and apostrophes and personification to help us understand by seeing what we DO see and DO know, which opens the doors of understanding a little wider. 

I am thankful for the word pictures that bring understanding. The living God, the LORD of hosts, our God, does He “not fill heaven and earth?” (v. 23). Here is my take-away after seeing all this, and because he can say anything better than I can, it comes from Matthew Henry’s observation: “We know where we were born, but where we shall die we know not; it is enough that our God knows. Let it be our care that we die in Christ, then it will be well with us wherever we die, though it may be in a far country” (of Jer. 22:29-30).

Christ alone, our hope. Not idolatry. Not our land. Not anything we can do or produce or protect or maintain in our own feeble strength. Christ. Alone. Enough.

Amen.