Scripture:
“Judah’s sin is engraved with an iron tool,
inscribed with a flint point,
on the tablets of their hearts
and on the horns of their altars.Even their children remember
their altars and Asherah poles
beside the spreading trees
and on the high hills.My mountain in the land
and your wealth and all your treasures
I will give away as plunder,
together with your high places,
because of sin throughout your country.Through your own fault you will lose
the inheritance I gave you.
I will enslave you to your enemies
in a land you do not know,
for you have kindled my anger,
and it will burn forever.”This is what the Lord says:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.That person will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes.
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
Consider:
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve met with someone at the end of a job (or career) who’s said something like: I gave 60 hours a week to this company for 24 years and all I got was a goodbye party and a cake. They won’t even notice I’m gone in two months. On a similar vein, my husband had a manager at Walgreens who was fond of telling employees they were all replaceable. They could work or not work - the store was going to be open the next day either way. The manager saw it as a way to encourage employees to work harder, but I’m not sure if it didn’t have the exact opposite effect, because it forced them to put the job into perspective.
How often do we put our trust in things like our work ethics, the ethics of the company we work for, the number in our bank account or size of our 401(k), or the words of a politician or celebrity only to be let down in the end when the reality of human sin takes effect. All the things of earth are like grass, the prophet Isaiah says - and why would put our trust in impermanent, temporary things which don’t have the power to stay any longer than the wind which blows them away?
These are all “false hopes” we often lean on: bank accounts, career titles, relationships, or political shifts. We so often misplace our trust in the tangible things just beyond our finger tips, putting misplaced reliance on that which came from dust and will return to dust.
The words of this prophecy in Jeremiah might seem harsh and difficult to hear, but it names an often unspoken truth which was as real in Jeremiah’s time as it is in ours. Human hearts will fail us because they are held within someone who is fallible and as sin-filled as ours. This doesn’t mean no one is trustworthy - there are lots of people who do their very best to live honorable and courageous lives. But the farther away someone is from our everyday, the less hope we should entrust to them.
Instead, hope must be found in the renewing stream of the one source which never runs dry or lets us down from fatigue, corruption, or greed. When we anchor our hope in God, we find ourselves able to view those who would claim our loyalty with a bit of remove, remembering always they are more likely to disappoint than to save.
The shift from “false hope” to “true hope” isn’t about becoming a lazy employee or a cynical citizen; it’s about right-sizing these things in our hearts and placing them in their proper place
To be like the tree in Jeremiah, we have to grow downward before we grow outward. If our roots are deep in the “renewing stream” of God’s grace, we can handle a dry season at work or a disappointment in politics.
When we stop asking our jobs or our bank accounts to give us a sense of ultimate worth—something they were never designed to provide—we actually become better at those jobs. We work with a sense of “remove,” as the devotion says. We can be diligent without being desperate, and loyal without being lost.
Respond:
Christian Hope is built on the repeated telling of stories where God has shown up in the darkest hours throughout history. The stories we read from the Old and New Testaments are meant to help us find and shore up our anchor in the midst of storms.
Where have you unintentionally outsourced your peace of mind to a person or system that doesn’t actually have your best interests in mind? How might reclaiming that hope and placing it back in the “renewing stream” change your outlook this week?
Pray:
Claiming God, We often confuse loyalty with security. Remind us when we begin to believe our value is tied to a title or a label that can be deleted from a spreadsheet in a single afternoon, our peace of mind will always be fragile. Help us instead to root our identities in your love for us and our identity as children of God.
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