I found this passage from Jeremiah 13 to
be the most startling from today’s reading….
Thus said the Lord to me, “Go and buy yourself a linen
loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.” So I bought a
loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a
second time, saying, “Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and
go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.” So I went, and
hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord
said to me, “Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I
commanded you to hide there.” Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I
took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth
was ruined; it was good for nothing.
Then the word of the Lord came to me:
Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride
of Jerusalem. This evil people, who refuse to hear my words, who stubbornly
follow their own will and have gone after other gods to serve them and worship
them, shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing. For as the
loincloth clings to one’s loins, so I made the whole house of Israel and the
whole house of Judah cling to me, says the Lord, in order that they might be
for me a people, a name, a praise, and a glory. But they would not listen.
Underwear is not something we normally
talk about in polite company, nor do we expect to find a story about underwear
in the Bible. Yet, here it is. Why does the Bible talk about underwear in this
instance?
The Jews had not been listening to
Jeremiah’s warnings about impending doom should they choose to continue to
pursue the worship of false gods. Thus, the Lord decided to give them a
dramatic object lesson.
For a number of years, I have used a
“mystery box” for the children’s sermon in the Sunday morning worship service.
I ask a different child each week to put an object in the mystery box for the
next Sunday and I talk about that object in the children’s sermon, relating the
object to some biblical or spiritual lesson. There are a couple of ground
rules: (1) the object that the children put in the box cannot be alive or dead.
(2) The object has to fit inside the box with the lid closed. I have had
children put all sorts of objects in the mystery box over the years, but I have
never had any child put underwear in there. I wonder what I would have said if
one child had done that?
Well, God put underwear in the mystery
box and asked Jeremiah to talk about that object to his people, the Jews.
However, this was not your run-of-the-mill underwear. First, it was linen. That
was the kind of fabric the priests wore. The average person probably would not
wear linen underwear. Therefore, we get the hint that this underwear was meant
to be symbolic of the close relationship between God and his people. The Jews
were meant to be a kingdom of priests, spending time with God in his Temple,
remaining close to him. However, they were not living up to their calling.
That is where the next step in this
object lesson comes into play. God tells Jeremiah not to wash this special
underwear. Can you imagine? If one lesson is drilled into children, it is that
they should put on clean underwear every day. Apparently, more than one mother
has said, “What if you were in an accident, and taken to the hospital, and the
doctors took off your clothes, and found you were wearing dirty underwear? How
shameful!”
The point of the object lesson is clear:
the Jews were not remaining clean loincloths for the Lord to wear. And we are
not talking about your normal amount of dirt here. We are talking serious dirt.
The Lord tells Jeremiah to go to the
river Euphrates and hide his dirty underwear in a cleft of the rock. Then he is
told to go back later and retrieve his really filthy underwear that is now so
wet that it has fallen apart and is no longer fit to wear.
As the father of three boys, I have
washed a lot of dirty underwear and dirty clothes. It does not happen too
often, but sometimes, some clothes that boys like to wear become so dirty, so
overused, that they are no longer fit to wear, even for dirty, outdoor sorts of
jobs.
The point that the Lord wants Jeremiah
to get across to the Jews is that they had become like that dirty, rotting
underwear, hidden in the cleft of the rock by the Euphrates for weeks. They
were no longer fit to be worn by God.
This is not a happy message. It is, in
fact, a shocking message, shocking in the level of intimacy this object lesson
suggests should be there between God and his people. God wants us to cling to
him like underwear to a human being’s loins. If we are honest, then we will
admit that we do not cling to God in this way, at least we do not cling to him
in this way all the time.
However, there is some good news in
this. God would not have Jeremiah deliver this shocking object lesson unless he
wanted to give his people an opportunity to return to an intimate relationship
with him. If God was going to give up on his people completely, then he would
just do it, not announce it and give them a chance to repent. We serve the God
of the second chance, and the third, and the fourth, and…. I believe God gives
us as many chances as we need to return to him. He will do whatever it takes to
retrieve us, even sending prophets into our lives to live out before us some
very shocking object lessons. God loves us that much. In fact, his love never
stops reaching out to us… ever.
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