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Pastor's Blog June 20, 2019
"The Righteous Branch, The Lord Our Righteousness"
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"Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets; all my bones shake; I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the Lord, and because of the words of his holiness" (Jeremiah 23:9, KJV). As we have often seen with Bible translations, the KJV tends to reproduce the Hebrew word "holiness" in its translation of several passages, while modern translations accurately convey the various meanings of the idea of holiness in theirs - and Jeremiah 23:9 is no exception.
Just a few verses after God's promise of raising up a righteous "Branch" from the line of David who will be called "The Lord our righteousness" (vv. 5-6), Jeremiah bemoans the fact that false prophets regularly prophesy in the name of God (or pagan deities) and lead the people astray (vv. 9-40).
But Jeremiah's complaint has an interesting focus: while he is physically distressed by the rise and activity of false prophets, Jeremiah is also physically distressed by "the words of his [God's] holiness." Of course, Jeremiah's physical ailments due to God and false prophesy are quite different from each other; Jeremiah is saddened and shaken by the many deceiving prophets, while he is disoriented by the holy words of God. Nevertheless, Jeremiah credits his physical response to both true and false words of God: he is sickened by the defiling words of false prophets just as much as by the sanctified words that come from God. This actually makes a lot of sense.
The book of Jeremiah helps us understand that we have a love-hate relationship with the word of God. On the one hand, Jeremiah echoes the sentiment of the Psalms and Proverbs when he proclaims his desire to hear from God (Jeremiah 15:16). On the other hand, Jeremiah also heralds the experience of Ezekiel when he states that God's word is hard to bear, swallow, and follow (Jeremiah 20:7-9). The reason Jeremiah has such a varied relationship with God's word is because of the affect of God's holiness on Jeremiah: it can be the cause of the prophet's joy in the Lord (Jeremiah 31:23) as well as confront him with the disheartening truth of his own sinful heart (Jeremiah 17:9).
Jeremiah 23:9 aids us in understanding that God's holiness and God's word are intimately related, and sometimes both have an exhilarating and nauseating effect on us. And as we continue to wrestle with the holiness and word of God in our own lives, understanding this can be an encouraging and helpful insight.
God Bless.
Pastor Nathaniel Gamble
