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CHAPTER TWO
Translation of Words, Thoughts and Travesties
There are a number of fascinating points where extreme care is needed in translation of the Bible. It is in one aspect, like music, where someone must so imbibe the whole symphony that the parts have the more consonance with the overall scope, in every segment. The Authorised Version in general is outstanding in this, though there are a few failures, small in number and not affecting any doctrine. This is all treated in the work on translation. One of these figures below, and it is an appealing verse indeed.
Take Jeremiah 13:7, literally at the end this:
"Woe to you, O Jerusalem! Will you not be made clean ? after how long ... yet ?"
The poignancy and personal grief is immense! The New King James rendering excites wonder but not any admiration: "Woe to you Jerusalem, will you still not be made clean ?"
The AV on the other hand, here almost seems inspired.
"Woe to you, O Jerusalem! Will you not be made clear ? When once shall it be ?"
The underlying meaning seems to be this:
Will you not be made clear ? How long is it that you have already been in this condition of denial, and how long will you proceed thus polluted, and yet unwilling to have it changed ? Is it still the same with you ? How long ?
The effort to translate is good exercise because it tends to build up the awareness of the text. Thus to assume that the hard-hearted, non-recipient of passionate divine pity and mercy, in this case Israel, the nation, has no relevance in attitude or relationship to the divine will and attitude towards it, or that the latter is a mysterious closed book shunned in impenetrable darkness of mystery, is ludicrous, myopic. Indeed, it is as far from the text as evolution from creation (SMR pp. 140ff., The gods of naturalism have no go!). It ignores the empirical text or testimony: in this case, one of impassioned divine pity. Such a misconstruction is quite as unsolicited and gratuitous an approach as that which affirms that it simply depends on human will, in the ultimate, on flesh and its operation. It depends on God who PROCEEDS in desire and pity.
What then does He show in this verse in Jeremiah ? It is this. God WANTS Israel, and would love to have it, at the day of Jeremiah: NOW! He wants it to the uttermost, and in His heart yearns for the diminution of the time before Israel wakes up! How would any father, in whom love has place, NOT want salubrity and sense, wisdom and watchfulness, reasonableness and righteousness, grace and understanding and divorce from needless suffering for a child! Ah! we find in the New Testament, this time from the lips of the incarnate Messiah (Luke 19:42ff.), this divine grief: If only, if only when the time was there, opportunity lavishly made available, if only they had when He actually visited them, when time as it were stopped still, all bonds and bounds suddenly removed, if ONLY they had realised "the things which belong to your peace," ah! But now ? Ruin is the resolution of their dimness!
He does not languish in His anguish ineffectually. There is, if you will, no operation for cancer, and the years have passed to show it, so that the cancer continues and its course means death, death to the city, ruin with long-term ramification! (Luke 19:44, 23:38-39). Though He was about to give His own life to fill the gap, achieve the basis of pardon in truth and righteousness, confer freely divine grace on fallen man, in a love which bore the excruciating and did not turn away from mockery, misconstruction and boorishness, yet these, His city, did not receive the Prince of peace, and expedited His demission, like exhaust gases removed by a vigorous fan.
Not only was it then, at its epitome, but continually the opportunity which He made complete, call to each successive generation and those in it, Jew and Gentile, as indeed expressed in Isaiah 55:6ff., SEEK the Lord, CALL on Him, FORSAKE the evil way, the torrid thoughts, the turncoat follies, for He is alive, ready abundantly to pardon.
Returning then to the case of Jeremiah 13:27, we find the same longing and grief, for the people will not heed, nor give place to righteousness and truth, to the word of God and the kindness of their Creator. This is the atmosphere overall, flowing strongly at this point (cf. Jeremiah 13:15-17,11:16-17,5:17-31, 6:19). Ah! how long before they DO receive Him, blessing Him who came in the name of the Lord! In that case, 70 years (Jeremiah 25) as predicted. In the finale, when Christ came and visited them, so far two millenia; but the Messiah will come in power (Isaiah 32:1-4) and "the Spirit will be poured out from on high" (Isaiah 32:15, Zechariah 12:10). Long is it to harvest!
Yet mere force achieves nothing of this. Surely (Ephesians 1:4,11), He has already decided the length of time before that blessed event, but not in some stony mystery.
Rather, true to His unchanging nature, He acts in a realistic and indeed omniscient assessment of the price of purity, the time for repentance, yearned for by Him. In His assessment, His love foreknown as rejected by Israel at this time, in holy purity, He waits (cf. Isaiah 32:15, 30:15-18). That is what He says (30:18).
He is not frustrated for the simple reason that this is what love is like. It is not apparent, but real; not invasive but pervasive in its outgoings, does not behave arrogantly, but is tender-hearted, does not ignore facts, nor does it transgress. In wisdom, it is shown, and in wisdom comes the eventual taking.
What do we find in the latter ? It is this (colour to facilitate perception of the point here made).
"For thus says the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel:
In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness
and in confidence shall be your strength: and you would not.
But you said, No; for we will flee upon horses;
therefore you shall flee: and,
We will ride upon the swift;
therefore shall they who pursue you be swift.
One thousand will flee at the rebuke of one;
at the rebuke of five will you flee:
till you are left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain,
and as an ensign on a hill.And therefore will the LORD wait, that He may be gracious to you,
and therefore will He be exalted, that He may have mercy upon you:
for the LORD is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait for Him.
For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem: you will weep no more:
He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry;
when He hears it, He will answer you.
The result is sovereign but as unmysterious as the sun as a light source sitting salient in the heavens. He KNOWS what is the case, what are the lessons, what the time, the nature of the case and translates this into history; but WHAT He knows is Israel as it actually is. He is neither baffled nor peremptory. He knows the darkness and the light, and disposes Israel sovereignly, but neither in any essential mystery or blockade of His love. On the contrary, in love, He rules, knows and acts, this being His nature. It is judgment which SUPERVENES when man in his seeking lust, would term mercy manacles. In purity, despite vast zeal, the Lord waits. Man knows what it is to wait, as when ripe fruit matures in Autumn. God CAN over-ride all natural barriers; but He does NOT over-ride the purity of love or the reality of dealing with persons made in His image. In the end, His charge is clear: I WOULD but you WOULD NOT, based as it is before time, yet its truth is quintessential for any time.
It is man as foreknown, not foreseen (Romans 8:30), that is in point, and for Israel in this text, the divine calendar for repentance time is sure, but the divine heart is, if possible, even more so. In foreknowing, He knows what is there, and not what is not, and no more merely pre-empts without the intense love of John 3:17-17, than He exempts from the need for a repentance without illusion and faith without pretext. He neither acts without understanding nor loves without knowledge. It is important not to create philosophic models of God built up from various ideas, but to take Him as He is and shows Himself to be in His word.
Confusion between the finality of what He knows and the way in which He knows it - He being as made manifest in I John 4:7ff., is one of the thrusting shames of theology very broadly. In asserting that the human will does not secure new birth, no, neither will of flesh nor of man, the Bible does not rescind Colossians 1:19ff., in principle, nor texts such as Jeremiah 13:27 in practice; but excludes the human will in itself as the final determinant, which is God Himself, His sincerity knowing man not as merely mouldable, but in relation to passionate mercy and intense love, which neither forces its object nor founders on the way, but knows its own (II Timothy 2:19).
Where love has no place, the will of man rules (John 3:19), and that is the condemnation, this divinely construed, foreknown ultimate preference in man. THIS IS the condemnation in view of the heart of God, His love and action and sending, in saving model: Light has come into the world and men have preferred darkness. It is not His love which did not REALLY so come, but man's preference which DID really come before the presence of God, and foreknown, prefers to continue in its own putrefying juices, as if these were salubrious. How long it often is before the time for repentance, as in Israel, at length comes (Romans 11:25ff.), whether before this or that calamity! But now, it is no less so for this world as another and much larger unit (Matthew 24:12).
The act of God in regenerating is thus majestic, sovereign, secure, spiritually clean, a bounty of spiritual surgery without cost, except to pride, without abdication of wisdom, but in accord with Him who acts. The entire scope of creation and redemption, with regeneration in the input, is of HIM, His kindness, as is His construction, His translation from the mercy-loving heart which is His (Ezekiel 33:11, Micah 7:19ff.,Titus 2-3) into the prodigious acts of mercy which He deploys.
So vast and huge is this divine wonder, that the ONLY negative thing cited as the ground of condemnation in terms of this, as in John 3:15-19, is man's preference for darkness. From the glory of the first things to the wonder of the last things, the magnitude of the love of God like Spring, shows itself before a departing people, and from first to last, the originality of the Original for all, has been a treasured glory, dismissible by the desultory, in the Winter of contempt, collusion or cold disregard, left by spiritual emigrés, but yet available and then trumpeted, till the last trumpet calls to alms or to arms! Alas for those who take arms against God then (Revelation 19:19)!
The other aspect, theoretical, that negative judgment is some mysterious divine departure from God's own stated principles is, in the end, an abortion of the beauty of it all, and a clandestine if confused input that refuses to bow to the word of God. It is not so hard: God sovereignly acts to make the Gospel, send the grace, enable its acceptance. He does this, NOT with human will as the paramount agent, but rather as a decisive aspect in His foreknowing not of events but reality itself, seen as He knows. It is not overturned by love, rather realised, for God is love (I John 4:7ff.). Thus in NOTHING is His character, His nature, His planning, original and carried out to the end, His own, to be so debased as, denying a multitude of affirmations, leads some to harass His holy word. Man can deny this statement of I John 4:8; God confirms it.
Love cleans, corrects, even rebukes, enables solution; but it does NOT yield to imaginative options from ignorance which would merely make it a debased form of convenience, or a manipulative tender. God is holy.
Where sin is not yet in the eternity before our time, so He knows (Ephesians 1:4); where differentiation of the nature of this or that person through sin is not yet in view, so He knows; where deceit is not yet, so He knows.
In time, He acts; and for all time, He loses none of those whom so He has foreknown. This is encouragement even to the most wicked, for the wind of divine mercy is not adverse at the outset, but His love is most pleasant. In the aftermaths of human pride and insolence, then indeed, love spat on with meaningless mouthy mould, there is another scene, and the scenario, foreknown also, is of another kind.
Evacuate the air by all means, but never blame the atmosphere if you do!