Church In Exile - Jeremiah 29:1-14 page 1

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Encounter me around Christmas and you'll probably think my favourite character in Dickens' A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge. Why? Because I'm very picky about Christmas carols. I have a particular thing about Away in a manger. Most of it I have no problem with, but there are a couple of lines that drive me mad:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.

Rubbish! Jesus was fully human - of course he would have cried! This is more a British fiction of stiff upper lip, big boys don't cry nonsense! As one theologian, Robert Webber, puts it, "Pinch Jesus and what does he say? The theologically correct answer is, 'Ouch!'."

All of which tells you that I get pretty fussy when it comes to the words of hymns and worship songs. A particular bête noir of mine is Robin Mark's Days Of Elijah. The line I have an issue with is, 

These are the days of your servant, David,
Rebuilding a temple of praise.

Totally unbiblical! King David was expressly forbidden by God from building the temple in Jerusalem, because he was a man of war with blood on his hands. So people singing this song without a good knowledge of their Bibles will take an error into their minds.

But I have a more profound problem with Days Of Elijah than that. I would like to believe we are in the kind of days of Elijah that Robin Mark describes, where we are anticipating soon the coming of Jesus, but for me we're not so much in the days of Elijah as the days of Jeremiah. I'd love to believe we are in the midst of some kind of spiritual revival, but we aren't - or we aren't yet.

No, I think this letter of Jeremiah to the exiles provides a closer parallel to where the Christian Church in the West is today. Jeremiah was writing to the first group of Jewish exiles who had been carried off from Judah to Babylon in 597 BC. (There would be a second, more comprehensive deportation eleven years later.)

So too we find ourselves inhabiting a strange land, whose values are far from ours. We may long for change, for a reversal, for a revival, and so just as it was appealing for the exiles to hear the words of the false prophets saying everything would be OK very soon, so we may have to hear what God said to them:

Yes, this is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Do not let the prophets and diviners among you deceive you. Do not listen to the dreams you encourage them to have. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them, declares the LORD.
[verses 8-9]

We need to cope before our 'seventy years are completed'. How do we 'live in exile', before God brings a spiritual awakening and a widespread re-embracing of Jesus Christ in our culture?

'Exile ministry' involves many things; here are four from the passage.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.