Christopher J. H. Wright Quotes

I think Jeremiah is for our times. But whether the church in the west will listen to the Word of God today any more than in the chaos of 7th century BC middle east… Only God knows.

Yahweh demanded justice for the poor, compassion and equality for foreigners and refugees, systemic redress for poverty, structural mechanisms to protect the homeless and family-less from abuse and destitution, fair and equitable distribution of land, integrity in the judicial system, humility, simplicity and morality in the government (as opposed to wealth, women and weapons), etc. etc. If you want that kind of society, you need to be faithful to the living God.

We may legitimately see in the [Old Testament] event, or in the record of it, additional levels of significance in the light of the end of the story – i.e. in the light of Christ

It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.

Perhaps preachers today need to think about the assumptions that are common in their congregation – the plausibilities and comforting assurances – which may in themselves have biblical truth, but can easily become insurance policies waved around as immunity from any kind of serious evaluation of how we are living, whether we are truly following the Lord Jesus in the way he walked, whether we are doing righteousness and justice as God commanded.

I agree that we should regard all books of the Bible as equally inspired – and important. But some come into sharp focus at certain times, as particularly relevant and sharp in what they have to say to our culture at any given moment of history. And Jeremiah is a book for our times.

The church was made for mission-God’s mission

The Bible itself does not seem too bothered by the idea that talking of God suffering might in any way diminish God, or detract from his perfection. On the contrary, the Bible seems to revel in the richness of describing God in ways that reflect our own human realities.

We tend to speak of sin in very personal and individual terms. Jeremiah does not downplay that, but he also sees how a whole society can be bound up in the tentacles of sin, in the assumptions that everybody around you makes, about how it becomes easier to sin than not to, and how we can become so confused and contradictory in our reactions, when sin is pointed out.

The Jews believed they were the nation God had chosen among all the nations. And they were. But that did not give them immunity to God’s judgment. Like the nations, they too would feel God’s wrath if they refused to live in God’s ways. Furthermore, God could deal with other nations in mercy as well as judgment. Jeremiah was full of surprises, as against the popular religious assumptions of his day. That’s perhaps why some people, when they encountered Jesus, thought he was very like Jeremiah. He turned things upside down.

The whole earth, then, belongs to Jesus. It belongs to him by right of creation, by right of redemption and by right of future inheritance – as Paul affirms in the magnificent cosmic declaration of Colossians 1:15-20. So wherever we go in his name, we are walking on his property. There is not an inch of the planet that does not belong to Christ. Mission then is an authorized activity carried out by tenants on the instructions of the owner of the property.

Mission means inviting all the peoples of the earth to hear the music of God’s future and dance to it today.