Fear of the Lord

My reading from Jeremiah 26 today struck me.

To be more precise, it was the little snippet about Uriah in verses 21-23 that at first glance, seemed out of place. (My first thought was, “Where in the world did this random guy come from??”) But details matter to God, and Uriah is there to teach us something.

Jeremiah and Uriah were both called by God to prophesy to Israel. Both were persecuted for the sake of God’s name (v. 11 & 22). But that’s where the similarities end. The contrast is striking:

There was another man who prophesied in the name of the Lord, Uriah the son of Shemaiah from Kiriath-jearim. He prophesied against this city and against this land in words like those of Jeremiah. And when King Jehoiakim, with all his warriors and all the officials, heard his words, the king sought to put him to death. But when Uriah heard of it, he was afraid and fled and escaped to Egypt.

That’s Uriah’s response (v. 20-21). Here’s Jeremiah’s (v. 10-15):

When the officials of Judah heard these things, they came up from the king’s house to the house of the Lord and took their seat in the entry of the New Gate of the house of the Lord. Then the priests and the prophets said to the officials and to all the people, “This man deserves the sentence of death, because he has prophesied against this city, as you have heard with your own ears.”

Then Jeremiah spoke to all the officials and all the people, saying, “The Lord sent me to prophesy against this house and this city all the words you have heard. Now therefore mend your ways and your deeds, and obey the voice of the Lord your God, and the Lord will relent of the disaster that he has pronounced against you. 14 But as for me, behold, I am in your hands. Do with me as seems good and right to you. 15 Only know for certain that if you put me to death, you will bring innocent blood upon yourselves and upon this city and its inhabitants, for in truth the Lord sent me to you to speak all these words in your ears.”

And what happened to Uriah?

22 Then King Jehoiakim sent to Egypt certain men, Elnathan the son of Achbor and others with him, 23 and they took Uriah from Egypt and brought him to King Jehoiakim, who struck him down with the sword and dumped his dead body into the burial place of the common people.

Jeremiah, on the other hand…

24 But the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah so that he was not given over to the people to be put to death.

It’s really very interesting the way that the narrative of Jeremiah’s ordeal is suddenly interrupted by the entrance of Uriah – “And there was also a man… Uriah son of Shemaiah…” (v. 20). At the end of the day, their responses serve as a lesson to us.

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Uriah feared the word of man more than he feared the word of God. He “heard” King Jehoiakim’s threats of death, and instead of trusting the God who had called him, Uriah trusted in himself. He loved his life more than he loved God (John 12:25). When I read about him at first, I thought, isn’t it telling that we don’t have a ‘Book of Uriah’?  Uriah may have started out well, but he did not finish the race well, nor did he keep the faith until the end. He has no legacy to speak of (apart from what we know of his sad end in this chapter). He disbelieved and doubted God. And of all the places to run to, he ran away to Egypt, the former place of Israel’s oppression and bondage. (The Israelites, too, when wandering in the desert, often yearned to return to Egypt when the going got tough.) What may appear to be a place of safety is really a place of bondage (which I talked about in a previous post).

Jeremiah, on the other hand, is the picture of a man of faith. He stood boldly before his oppressors and repeated what God had told him to say. Unlike Uriah, he remembered God’s faithful words of promises to him. From the beginning, God had already promised that He would be with him (Jeremiah 1:8). He encouraged Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:17-19). When Jeremiah fell into despondency, he turned to God (15:15-18). And God always, always reassured Jeremiah with His words of truth (15:20-21).

 

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One feared God; the other man. God’s word will stand firm and true even in the face of adversity. Just as He had proclaimed, His words are the fire that burnt the lies and accusations of Jeremiah’s persecutors. His word broke the hard rock of Jeremiah’s difficult circumstances (Jeremiah 23:29).

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Help me to be like Jeremiah, O Lord.

In the quiet.

Day breaks through the fabric of darkness
Searching for answers in the fog
I cry out to God
Break through my darkness that I may see light.

Final hurdle…

…not.

After four years of uni, GAAAH. This five-year course is starting to feel too long. But I comfort myself with the fact that I’ll graduate with two degrees under my belt. Hohoho.

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Righttt.

Tomorrow will be the final round of tutes for the year, but the nightmare has just begun. Three essays, all worth 50% due one after another. I can do this! I can do this! I can do this! *chants ad nauseam*

Re-enrolment for next year has opened, and as I was looking through the subjects available for my majors next year, it’s really saddening to see how many subjects have been cut out ever since the Melbourne Model was put in place. I compared the 2006 Handbook (the year I first enrolled) with the 2010 one, and more than half the subjects have disappeared, or have been changed and named differently. One subject I was particularly keen on doing for next year is not there anymore – I have a feeling it’s been replaced by this other subject which covers similar areas, but the structure is different from what I remembered it to be.

It’s hard to believe that next year will be my final year – and it’s scary too. I still don’t know where I’m headed after graduation in December 2010, but I’ll just have to keep trusting in God to lead me down this road. For now I see through a glass, darkly… now I know in part… but one day I will see all that He has had planned.

Boyband nostalgia

I was – and admittedly, still am – a huge fan of Backstreet Boys and Westlife. There, I’ve said it. And if there were any concerts in the near future, I will confess too, that I will not hesitate to buy tickets. Oh gosh. I feel like such a silly fangirl now.

The past few days, I’ve been listening to a lot of old BSB hits from the 90s era. Ah, the memories. As I was singing along to those sappy, cheesy lyrics, a somber thought came to me: that these songs now evoke different feelings. As naive young girls growing up in that pop-saturated era, where MTV was filled with endless videos of such songs, these songs had once seemed to tell of some fairytale romance that any impressionable teenager will obsess over.

Now as we move into adulthood, I think we’ve seen that real life isn’t the fairytale dreams that you probably once harboured in your hearts. So ten years later, I still listen to these songs, but no longer with a lovestruck, dreamy outlook or carefree innocence of childhood. We all have to grow up someday.

But hey, ten years later, both of my favourite boybands are still together (albeit each is less a member now)! And I still enjoy revisiting musical memory lane, listening to these songs from the 90s and early 2000s, every now and then. But the sands of time has carved imprints and etched scars upon the guilelessness of the young heart, and the songs no longer evoke emotional fantasies, but merely amusing memories of a naivety long past.

Midweek interlude

Today’s piano lesson left me feeling somewhat inadequate and a little in despair over my current stage. That’s not to say that it was a bad lesson – as has been the pattern, I’ve been learning heaps each time, but right now, the point that is being driven home, and nailed in hard, is the fact that I have so many bad habits to break, and to wean myself off years and years of bad practicing. Sigh.

Lessons like these make you feel as if you’ve never really started or accomplished anything in the first place. I almost think that I should start from Level 1 again or something.

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After VCA, I finally got around to going to the City Library to pick up my card and verify my identification after registering online almost three weeks ago; I should have probably done this waaay earlier (probably a few years ago!) but I never really found the need to use the City Library, especially not with Baillieu providing for the needs of every Arts student.

After picking up my card, I decided to explore the City Library since I’ve never actually visited it properly. It’s not really an academic library; there’s lots of fiction and DVDs and magazines – the atmosphere is more like an everyman than an academia. Roaming through the shelves on the first floor brought back a sense of nostalgia of simply browsing through rows of books to borrow for purely enjoyment’s sake. I’ve almost forgotten that feeling, especially after three and a half years of academic research and borrowing books “because I have to”. I foresee more visits in the future. Have I mentioned how much I love bookstores and libraries? I rather spend my day in Kinokuniya or Borders than shop along Orchard or at KLCC the whole afternoon.

The first half of the semester is [almost] over! if not for the fact that one of my tutorials is rescheduled to tomorrow instead because of the strike. I seriously don’t understand the effectiveness of strikes or protests – it was something that my Politics tutorial discussed about two weeks back, and we generally agreed that there are more effective ways of getting your point across than merely marching down the streets and disrupting civil life and accomplishing nothing at the end of the day except to get yourself in the news that may or may not impact audiences the way you want it to. Political Communication has been a really enjoyable and stimulating subject so far, but anyway that’s another story.

My plans for the semester break look like this: research, read, write, research, read, write.

The life of the university student.