Held in the Stocks
Not Trapped But Held
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“O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. … If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” — Jeremiah 20:7, 9
The Stocks You Did Not Expect
No, I do not mean SpaceX stock that recently minted quite a few millionaires… This one is different…
I might be going out on a limb here when I say most of us believers intuitively knew that following God would cost us something. But perhaps we did not reason the reality. For many, when you gave yourself to God you were not naive. You did not expect a life of ease, and no one promised you one. You braced for the ordinary frictions of faith, the sacrifices, the narrow road, the ache of saying no to what your flesh wanted. What you did not expect was this. You did not expect the road to grow harder the longer you walked it. You did not expect obedience to close the doors you assumed it would open. You did not expect the relationship that was supposed to be your life to feel, in some seasons, like the source of your deepest pain.
There is a question that forms in the believer who has come this far and it rarely gets spoken in church. It is asked late at night, or in the car, or in the silence after the prayer that did not get answered. The question is simple and it is frightening: God, why has following You made things worse?
Picture a set of stocks, the wooden or iron devices used for public humiliation and corporal punishment in medieval times. Devices built to hold a body still, to bend it into a posture it would never choose, to leave it exposed in public where everyone passing can stare and mock. You are not free to move and are not free to leave. The thing meant for discipline has become humiliation, and you did nothing to land in the stocks except speak when God told you to speak.
I’m not reaching for a metaphor here but extracting lessons from the life of Prophet Jeremiah. As you read his book, you’ll discover that long before you sat in your own version of the stocks and asked God your frightening question, he sat in his, and he asked it first.
Enticed, Not Merely Deceived
When Jeremiah reaches rock bottom, he shouts “O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived.” The word he reaches for is pathah, and it is not the language of a lie told across a table. It is the language of seduction. It is the word used when a man entices a young woman, when someone is coaxed and persuaded and won over against the caution of his own heart. It is, astonishingly, the same word God speaks over Israel in Hosea: “I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.” Pathah is how God woos.
So hear what the prophet is actually charging. He is not saying God told him a falsehood. He is saying God courted him. God came to him in the tenderness of a calling, drew him, made the work look like glory and the nearness look like life, and Jeremiah yielded the way the beloved yields to the lover. Then the next words land like a second blow: “you are stronger than I, and have prevailed.” The verbs are chazaq and yakol, the language of being overpowered, of a strength you cannot resist and a contest you cannot win. He yielded to a courtship and woke up conquered.
This is the accusation underneath your own frightening question. It is not only that the road got harder. It is that God seemed to draw you in with sweetness and then overpower you with a calling you can no longer lay down. You did not stumble into this difficulty. You were wooed into it. And the One who wooed you was stronger than you, and He prevailed.
That is a fearful thing to feel and it was fearful when Jeremiah felt it.
The Word Became the Wound
What makes Jeremiah’s anguish unbearable is not the beating. It is what the beating was for. “Whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, Violence and destruction! For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.” The thing that should have been his honor became his humiliation. Every time he opened his mouth in obedience, the obedience itself drew the mockery. He was not suffering in spite of the word. He was suffering because of it; the faithfulness was the offense.
This is the cruelest turn of a season that a believer contends with on occasion. It would be one thing if your pain came from disobedience, from some sin you could name and repent of and leave behind. You could bear that. But this pain has a different shape as it came through obedience. The very thing you did because God asked it of you is the thing that cost you. The word became the wound and there is no repentance that removes it, because there was no sin to begin with.
Then the walls close in. “I hear many whispering. Denounce him! Let us denounce him! say all my close friends, watching for my fall.” Not strangers but Jeremiah’s close friends. The ones who once stood near him now lean in to watch him stumble, and they whisper the very words he had flung at heaven, hoping to entice him and overpower him at last. The accusation he made against God has become the strategy of his enemies. He is surrounded on every side by people waiting for the word to finally break him.
And here, at the bottom, is exactly where the fire begins.
Fire Shut Up in the Bones
So Jeremiah contemplates quitting. “If I say, I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name.” There it is, the resolution every exhausted believer eventually reaches. I am done. I will stop speaking, stop serving, lower my head and live a quieter life and let this calling go. And Jeremiah means it.
But he cannot do it. “There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” The word he tried to set down would not stay down. He shut it up inside himself and it began to burn. He held it in until the holding wore him out, and still it would not be contained. This is the first instruction the prophet gives us for seasons such as these, and it is not the one we expect. He does not tell us to be strong. He tells us he tried to quit and could not, and that the inability itself was the fire of God.
Hear this, because it is mercy disguised as torment. The fact that you cannot walk away, that the word still burns when every reasonable part of you wants to put it down, is not your weakness. It is the evidence that the word is true and that God has not let go of you. The flame that will not let you quit is the same flame that called you in the first place. You are not trapped, you are held.
Then comes the turn that changes everything. “The Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble; they will not overcome me.” They will not overcome me, they will not prevail. It is the same word Jeremiah hurled in his accusation at God: You were stronger than I, and You prevailed. The God who overpowered him is now the God standing beside him, and the strength that once conquered the prophet has become the strength no enemy can break through. The very power he resented is the power that now guards him. And for a moment the lament breaks open into song: “Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.”
The man in the stocks is singing.
The Last Word Was Not His
And then the song fades. We would like the chapter to end on verse 13, the praise still ringing. It does not. The man singing one moment opens his mouth the next and curses the day he was born. “Cursed be the day on which I was born! … Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” That is not verse 8. That is the end of the chapter. The last words Jeremiah speaks here are not triumph but a question about shame that no one answers.
God who kept the accusation in the text kept the curse as well. He did not give us a prophet who sang his way free and never looked back. He gave us a prophet whose faith and whose despair lived in the same chapter, sometimes in the same breath, and He called it Scripture. This is the mercy we most need: faith is not the disappearance of the darkness. We can mean the song of verse 13 and still wake to the curse of verse 18, and would not have lost faith. We would only have reached the bottom, where the prophets have already been.
So where is the faith, if not in the feeling? In the one thing that did not move. Jeremiah’s heart ran the whole length of the spectrum in eighteen verses, from accusation to fire to confidence to song to curse, and through all of it the word burned and would not go out. The feelings rose and crashed but the word held. He could curse the day of his birth and still be unable to stop speaking in the name of God, because the word was never anchored in how he felt, it was anchored in the One who spoke it.
That is faith in God’s word. Not the absence of frightening questions, but the fire that outlasts it. The word that enticed you, that you accused of deceiving you, that became your wound, is the same word that will be burning in you when every feeling has failed, when the song has faded and the shame has not lifted and you still have no answer for why following God has made things harder. You may never get the direct answer. Jeremiah did not. But the word will still be there, and it will still be true, and you will still be His. For the Word Himself entered our stocks, was mocked by His own and betrayed by His friends, and cried out from the depths a question heaven answered not with an explanation but with resurrection.
We are not promised the easy road He refused. We are promised Him.
Father,
We have said it, or wanted to, in the dark where we thought You could not hear. We have wondered whether following You has cost us more than it gave.
We bring You the question instead of hiding it, because Your prophet brought it first and You did not turn him away. Where the word has become our wound, give us grace to feel the fire beneath it, the burning that will not let us quit, the sign that You have not let us go.
When the song fades and the shame remains, hold us by the word we did not have the strength to hold. We do not ask for the easy road Your Son refused. We ask for Him.
Keep us burning until the morning comes.
In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.