The Anatomy of the Wait - Part IV
The Circumstantial Wound
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How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? — (Psalms 13:1-2 NIV)
Last week we sat with the psychological wound, the interior weight that produces Psalm 142 in the same cave that produced Psalm 57, the depletion no one can see and no one can photograph. This week we arrive at the fourth and final face of the wound David named in Psalm 13, and it is the wound with an audience.
“How Long Will My Enemy Triumph?” — The Circumstantial Wound
The fourth face of the wound turns outward again, and it is the wound of watching the wrong thing win. Not just feeling forgotten, not just feeling God’s absence, not just fighting battles inside your own mind, but having to watch, in real time, as the enemy appears to be defeating you, and doing so publicly, and doing so in a way that seems to narrate a story in which God has lost. If the first three faces of the wound describe things happening in private, this one describes the specific pain of a wound with an audience. The circumstances themselves are arguing against the promise, in front of everyone, and the enemy is not just present but is actively building a case that God’s economy does not work.
David lived this wound for many years. Saul occupied the throne God had promised to David, and Saul did not sit on it quietly. He turned the resources of the nation toward destroying the man God had already chosen to replace him, and every day that Saul remained on the throne was another day of visible evidence that God’s promise had failed. The enemy was not merely present. The enemy was winning, publicly and visibly and undeniably, and the man with the anointing was hiding in a cave while the man without it commanded an army. This is the shape of the circumstantial wound in its most familiar form, and it is recognizable to anyone who has watched the wrong person get the promotion, the wrong relationship thrive, the person who is not living right seem to prosper while the person who has kept the covenant appears to be watching from the wilderness with nothing to show for the years of faithfulness.
And from the middle of his own version of that pain Jeremiah said “You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me.” The Hebrew word for deceived here is patah, which means to entice, to persuade, to seduce, to draw someone in with a promise. Jeremiah is not accusing God of cruelty. He is making a charge much more precise than that, and the accusation is the one that the person in the fourth wound eventually finds themselves rehearsing whether or not they ever say it out loud. You said you knew me before I was born and yet this calling has made me an object of public ridicule. You said do not be afraid and yet I am terrified. You said I will rescue you and yet I have been in stocks and cisterns. You touched my mouth and put your words in it and the words have cost me everything. This is patah. You enticed me into serving and believing with promises that the circumstances are now contradicting at every point.
To feel the full weight of that accusation we have to go back to chapter 1 of Jeremiah, because the charge Jeremiah brings in chapter 20 is a point-by-point indictment of the specific promises God made at his call, and without hearing chapter 1 first the reader cannot understand what Jeremiah is claiming has been broken. God came to Jeremiah before he was born. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” The Hebrew verbs are all pre-existent and past-tense: knew, set apart, appointed, all operating before Jeremiah had breath in his lungs, before he had any capacity to consent, or refuse, or prepare himself for what was coming. This was not a commission given to a willing volunteer. This was a calling declared over a person before that person existed. When Jeremiah, upon hearing the calling, responded exactly as any of us would have responded, saying that he did not know how to speak because he was too young, God overrode the objection completely. “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.” And then God reached out His hand and touched Jeremiah’s mouth and said, “I have put my words in your mouth.”
Four promises, one by one, physical and personal and unambiguous. I am with you. I will rescue you. Do not be afraid. I have touched your mouth. Not vague assurances about God’s general goodness. Specific, direct, physical commitments from the God of Israel to a young man whose face had just been touched by the divine hand, and any reasonable listener would have concluded that a ministry launched with promises this specific would go well.
Then Jeremiah preached for decades. He preached judgment when the nation wanted peace. He preached repentance when the establishment wanted comfort. He was put in stocks by Pashhur the priest. He was thrown into a cistern by the officials who found his words inconvenient and wanted to bury him alive without technically killing him. He was mocked publicly and opposed systematically by the false prophets who told the crowds what they wanted to hear, and the crowds preferred the false prophets, and Jeremiah preached anyway, and none of the four promises from chapter 1 appeared to be materializing on the visible side of his life. He was not rescued. He was afraid. His mouth, which God had touched, was being used to say things that resulted in his imprisonment. It is from inside that gap, between the specific promises of chapter 1 and the specific humiliations of chapter 20, that Jeremiah issued the patah accusation. Now, if we read chapter 20 again with chapter 1 in the ear, we hear the charge for what it actually is. It is not a general complaint about suffering. It is a legal indictment of specific promises, and it is the most honest thing Jeremiah ever said to God, and God did not withdraw the calling or the anointing after Jeremiah said it.
Some of us have been in that exact conversation with God, though most of us have not said it out loud in a church setting because we have not been sure the church has room for it. You answered what felt like a specific call, a word God spoke over you that felt as personal as a hand touching your mouth. You stepped into it. And what you encountered on the other side was not the rescue you were promised. It was the cistern. It was the stocks. It was the public contradiction between what God said over you in private and what the circumstances began to narrate in public, and the people who did not answer the call, the ones who chose the easier path, the ones who tell the crowds what the crowds want to hear, they appear to be winning. The question underneath every day of your faithful obedience, whether or not you have ever named it, is the same question Jeremiah eventually wrote down. Did I mishear? Was this a commission, or was it a trap?
Jeremiah answered that question not with a resolution but with a confession, and it is the most important sentence in the chapter. “But if I say I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” He cannot stop. Not because the circumstances have changed. Not because the cistern has been drained or the stocks removed or the false prophets exposed or the crowds turned from them to him. He cannot stop because the word will not release him, and this is the claim embedded in the whole wound. The call is stronger than the circumstantial evidence against it. The circumstances do not have the final say over the call. The call has the final say over the circumstances.
Saul’s occupation of the throne was real, and it was also temporary. Jeremiah’s humiliation was real, and the words that came from the mouth God touched are still being read and preached thousands of years after every cistern he was thrown into has been filled in with dust and every man who mocked him has been forgotten by history. The fire shut up in his bones outlasted everything that tried to extinguish it, and the circumstantial evidence, whatever it looks like in your life right now, only tells the story up to the moment you are in. It cannot narrate what comes next. The enemy who appears to be triumphing is not reading the same ending you are, and the fire in your bones is not a feeling. It is your commission from God, and it has not gone out.
We pray:
Heavenly Father,
We come with the wound the whole room can see. The public contradiction between what you said in private and what the circumstances are narrating in public. The visible evidence that our faithfulness has produced nothing while compromise appears to have produced everything. We confess that we have read the visible timeline as the verdict. We have looked at what the enemy is building and concluded that you must have changed your mind.
Teach us that patah is not the end of the conversation. That the fire in the bones was there before the pain of our current circumstances and will be there after it, because the fire was never a feeling. It was the commission itself, and the commission has not gone out.
Do not let us confuse the visible chapter with the ending you have written. The enemy who appears to be triumphing is not reading the same story we are, and the circumstantial evidence, whatever it looks like today, only tells the truth up to the moment we are in. It cannot narrate what comes next.
Keep the fire in our bones. Keep our mouths in your hand. Keep us true to what you said in private even when our circumstances are preaching otherwise.
In the name of Jesus,
Amen.