JEREMIAH'S STORY

In the Bible, there are two books associated with the prophet Jeremiah. One bears his name and is the second-longest book in the Old Testament. Unlike some of the other Old Testament books, it's not a simple story told chronologically from beginning to end. Instead, it kind of skips all over the place. It has poems. It has narratives. It has speeches. If you try just to sit down and read it, you may not be able to figure out the storyline. But if you dig a bit deeper, you'll see that it serves almost as a handbook for following God and remaining faithful through difficult seasons of life.

The second book is Lamentations, and it is just that — a collection of laments and poetic expressions of grief and sadness. Tradition holds that it was written by Jeremiah. Though many scholars no longer believe this to be true, most do believe it was written around the same time and under the same circumstances as those Jeremiah lived through and wrote about. It also is a raw and authentic expression of what disappointment, sadness, and despair feel like.

You may be wondering what was so bad about Jeremiah's life that he had to write a whole book of laments. Well, let me tell you a bit about the time in which he lived.

Jeremiah lived during a particularly volatile and ultimately tragic period in the history of the Jewish people. We will explore those circumstances in a moment, but for now it's enough to say that Jeremiah had a tough job, at a tough time, doing a tough task, with a tough group of people. The work didn't pan out as he thought it would, and he made a fair share of mistakes. Yet through it all, he found a way to stay connected with God, to overcome disappointments that weren't under his control, and to fight through the mistakes that were. It's fair to say that Jeremiah lived in a dark time, when it seemed that the forces of evil were carrying the day. It was a personally trying time, as Jeremiah's own faith wavered and his faithfulness often fell short.

I suspect that some of us can relate. Over the course of our lives, we inevitably hit such seasons, times when our own faithfulness flees and our belief in God waivers (or disappears altogether). We experience events that we can't control and that threaten to take us down. Like Jeremiah, we contribute to some of those seasons through our own mistakes, stupid decisions, and personal failures. But we aren't alone, and those seasons, real as they are, don't have to dictate the course of our lives. They didn't define Jeremiah. They don't have to define us.

We will encounter challenges. We will be dealt disappointments. We will make mistakes. And through our own shortcomings, or perhaps through no fault of our own, life will not always work out. Sometimes it will downright suck. We can't do anything about that. It will happen. But we get to decide how to face those moments and what to do when they hit us. We get to decide if our low points will be our last points, or if we will allow God to use those moments to reshape and remold us.

After all, it's not if you fail, but when. We will all be there. It's how we handle it that will define us.

Circumstances

Have you ever gone to a counselor, therapist, pastor, or good friend to talk about a problem in your life? If not, you should try it! If you have, then think about where a conversation like that usually begins. Where do you start? Do you jump right into the issue?

Well, I can tell you, because I sit down and talk with people all the time. No, you don't jump right in. Instead, you start off with something like this: "Well, Matt, first let me give you some background."

Have you ever done that? Whether it's having coffee with a friend or meeting with a mentor for advice, usually we set up the conversation by offering some background on the situation. We all have "background." By the way, I have noticed that usually the background phase of the conversation can last fifty-five minutes of an hour-long meeting. In the last few minutes, people finally get around to what's going on.

Why is background important? Because at any given moment, at any given time, so much of our lives is shaped and influenced by forces outside our control. The culture in which we are born, our family of origin, the decisions of those around us. We encounter natural disasters and health problems. Tragedies befall us, and friends let us down. People we depend on take off, disappoint us, or die. The economy tanks, our landlord goes bankrupt, our company gets bought, our job is eliminated, or the car we just bought gets sideswiped. I mean, there's an endless list of things that can happen to us at any time. Some of these things are day-to-day or week-to-week occurrences, while some of them are broader and more expansive cultural, political, social, or geographic realities.

Here is what's most important about circumstances. For the most part, we cannot control them. These are things that happen to us, around us, even within us. They are not things that happen because of us. That isn't to say that we don't bear responsibility for certain realities in our lives. But it is to say that much of what defines us and shapes us is outside of our direct control. As human beings, we can bemoan our circumstances, get mad about them, and try to control them. Or we can view them as catalysts for something new and search for ways God might be using them to shape and mold us.

Circumstances happen. How we respond to disappointing, disillusioning, or even tragic circumstances will dictate whether those circumstances ultimately bring us down or build us up. It is that choice — how to respond to circumstances — that Jeremiah must face early in his life.

Jeremiah's Context

If circumstances are important to understanding somebody's problems, then it isn't a surprise that the Book of Jeremiah starts by setting up the social, political, and religious circumstances into which Jeremiah was born and in the midst of which he would live his life.

The book starts out by placing Jeremiah in the historical context of what was happening in the Kingdom of Judah.

These are the words of Jeremiah, Hilkiah's son, who was one of the priests from Anathoth in the land of Benjamin. The Lord's word came to Jeremiah in the thirteenth year of Judah's King Josiah, Amon's son, and throughout the rule of Judah's King Jehoiakim, Josiah's son, until the fifth month of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah, Josiah's son, when the people of Jerusalem were taken into exile.

(Jeremiah 1:1-3)

The ancients often used the reign of kings to date events. If Jeremiah received his call in "the thirteenth year of Judah's King Josiah," that would be around 626 BC. He was active until at least 587 BC, about forty years later. For some of you, the dates and names may hold little interest, but stick with me. Usually when we get these kinds of details, it's because there is meaning behind them. And in this case there certainly is.

This wasn't just any forty-year period but perhaps the most pivotal and volatile forty-year period in the history of the Israelites. The larger Kingdom of Israel had reached its...