How Will You Do?

by Johnston, Brian, D. | Category: N/a | Mar 2005

The patient was paralyzed and unable to feed himself. Yet, when prompted, he requested prayer for those 'worse off' than himself. Greater trials develop greater grace as Jeremiah discovered.

'"If you fall down in a land of peace, how will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?"' (Jer.12:5 NAS). The 'thicket of the Jordan' was a place of thick growth which could present difficulties for humans. Renderings in other Bible versions include the 'pride', 'swelling' or 'flood-plain' of the Jordan. Tracing its other Bible occurrences, we discover it refers to a place that's the habitat of lions (Jer.49:19; Zech.11:3). Perhaps the annual overflowing of the Jordan into its flood-plain evicted lions from this luxuriant thicket on the riverbank, which endangered lives in the surrounding countryside (Jer.50:44). However it may simply be that progress was more difficult through its thick growth.

More interesting is the way God applied this reference to Jeremiah's personal situation. The prophet had been understandably ruffled by the fact that the people of his own region of Anathoth had turned against him. Jeremiah vented his bitter complaint to God. By this response God seemed to be saying: "If exposure to relatively small evils causes you to make such bitter complaint, how will you feel when in the course of your ministry you'll be exposed to much greater trials?" It was God's way of fortifying the faith of His prophet who would soon need to call upon greater reserves of God's grace for worse mistreatments lying ahead of him at the hands of the rulers in Jerusalem.

Our Lord Jesus, too, knew rejection by those of His mother's family in Nazareth, before the far greater trial which awaited Him likewise in Jerusalem. Yet 'from the track, He turned not back' (C.A. Tydeman).

Johnston, Brian, D. | Mar 2005
N/a