RePost with edits: God Won’t Share His People With Another

In Isaiah 48 we read:

Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver;
I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.
For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,
for how should my name be profaned?
My glory I will not give to another.

In the context of a prophecy that God will deliver his people from Babylon and the nations, Someone recently pointed out to me the text of Jeremiah 13.11:

For as the loincloth clings to the waist of a man, so I made the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling to me, declares the Lord, that they might be for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory, but they would not listen.

This chapter in Jeremiah is full of severe judgment. But here in the midst of it, God himself tells his people that their sin strips him. His loins are uncovered and his glory has been taken away.

It is astounding that God tells us that we are his inheritance, and shows us in Scripture the saints praying to God to remember his inheritance and protect his people–as if God were some pauper hoping to come into a fortune. As if we corrupt sinners were his fortune. Jeremiah 13.11 is of the same sort. The all-glorious God considers himself naked without us–we who are by nature sinful and ashamed and prone to trade God for fig leaves.

It is interesting that God doesn’t say that he never really loved Israel whom he must now judge. Quite the opposite.  And while Jesus warns people who hear him but are too self-satisfied to follow him that he won’t remember people who merely listen to his preaching (“I never knew you”) he doesn’t have that message for those who enter covenant with him and then abandon him.  The mystery is not that he claims to never know them but that they don’t know him:

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth;
for the Lord has spoken:
“Children have I reared and brought up,
but they have rebelled against me.
The ox knows its owner,
and the donkey its master’s crib,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.”

Ah, sinful nation,
a people laden with iniquity,
offspring of evildoers,
children who deal corruptly!
They have forsaken the LORD,
they have despised the Holy One of Israel,
they are utterly estranged.

Get that? It is “my people” who “do not understand.”

We might ask if it is accurate in pastoring Christians to tell them that, if they reveal themselves to have disbelieving hearts, that this is because God has not done anything for them and doesn’t really love them.  The author of Hebrews, for example, follows Isaiah and Jeremiah for blaming such people for rejecting God’s well-meant gifts to them:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Notice, the author of Hebrews doesn’t say that some of us have confidence or that the blood of Jesus might have opened the new and living way for us, or for some of us.  The same people he warns about continuing in sin are the people he tells that they have a confidence.  Just like God told Jeremiah that he wanted to wear Israel as close to him as possible, but they rejected his offer, so the author of Hebrews tells the readers that God has given them access to the holy place.

Of course, Romans 9 and Proverbs 16.4 tell us that God fore-ordains all things including apostasy into unbelief. But that doesn’t change the fact that God gives real gifts that are rejected, including the gift of his love and intimate covenant relationship with Him through Christ. Jesus warns that some will be cast out of him (John 15, Revelation 3.16). When that happens, God doesn’t accept references to lacking his invincible grace as an excuse:

Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?

When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
is the house of Israel,
and the men of Judah
are his pleasant planting;
and he looked for justice,
but behold, bloodshed;
for righteousness,
but behold, an outcry!

For further reading: “What More Could I Have Done”

One thought on “RePost with edits: God Won’t Share His People With Another

  1. pduggie

    I was noting that though the lost sheep/coin/prodigal son parables express the great joy at the return of the lost, they don’t really disparage the unlost as fakers. Sometimes we read the “the sick are in need of a physician not the healthy” as a subtle call to the “well” to realize they are really sick.

    But the unlost sheep is safe in the fold. And the elder brother of the prodigal is NOT told by his father “You are as deeply offensive to me in your complaint as you brother” Instead, the father says ” ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.”

    Sometimes perhaps we preach law, and then gospel, but it seems Jesus (and God) are willing to preach (common?) gospel, then more gospel…

    Reply

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