August 7, 2022 - In the Hour of Anguish - Pastor Paul Vallee

Jeremiah 20:7-18

As we journey through the Christian life, there come moments where it seems God is distant and the task at hand seems overwhelming. Things are not transpiring as we would hope or desire. Jesus had his Gethsemane experience, where the conflict between what He knew He needed to do and the difficulty of doing it collided and created conflict within His soul. The agony in the garden was knowing that He would be estranged from His father because he would become sin, who had never sinned. The abhorrence of being separated from the Father and the darkness that would assault His soul seems beyond Him. There are moments where we are treading on our journey of faith, where we come to our ‘dark night of the soul,’ where we feel the abandonment by God and the task before us seem beyond us.

Roland Harrison relates the intensity of the anguish that Jeremiah was experiencing from the hostility of those he was ministering to. “This powerful poetic section contains unusual psychological insights, not merely in relation to Jeremiah himself but for canonical prophecy as a whole because of the self-disclosure of profound emotional conflict. Jeremiah’s sensitive nature appears in his reaction to the sarcasm and ridicule with which his message was received.”

One of the expectations of a prophet was that their words would come to pass. However, in Jeremiah’s case, there seemed to be a delay, and as a result, Jeremiah was considered by many to be a false prophet and later a traitor to his people. For a person who cared about his people, Jeremiah was often heartbroken regarding their rebellion and wept over their soul’s condition. He has been called the ‘weeping prophet’ because of his intense intercession for God’s mercy upon the people. Yet there was also a great emotional and spiritual toll on this sensitive man’s life. He endured much sarcasm and ridicule. For the most part, his ministry was not well received, and at times he experienced hostility and physical abuse. His life was threatened and endangered even though God promised Jeremiah protection from death itself. We learn from this episode the challenges and difficulties that obedient ministry exposes a person to. Serving others is often painful and very difficult. People are often impossible in their expectations and demands. So while a part of Jeremiah wanted to quit and remain silent, there was another conflicting emotion within him that could not keep the passion of sharing the message of warning that needed to be expressed. In all of this, Jeremiah expresses his deepest angst to God. This is the final cry of Jeremiah to God regarding his ministry.