Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 348 · December 14
Fire in the Bones
“Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.”
It is the high gate of Benjamin, beside the house of the LORD in Jerusalem, in the years before Babylon took the city. Pashur, the man who was "chief governor in the house of the LORD," has had Jeremiah beaten and locked in the stocks there overnight. In the morning Pashur lets him out, and Jeremiah gives him a new name on the spot: "The LORD hath not called thy name Pashur, but Magormissabib." The new name means terror on every side.
Then comes the passage our verse sits in, and it reads nothing like a cheerful testimony. "O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed." The Hebrew verb Jeremiah uses means to entice someone, to talk them into something. The same verb comes back three verses later in the mouths of his enemies, who are watching for him to slip: "Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him." So Jeremiah is saying that God won him over and then overpowered him, and that the work has made him a laughing stock: "I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me."
So he quits. "I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name." The quitting lasts for one sentence. What stops it is his own body refusing to keep quiet: "his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay." He wore himself out holding it in, and he does not sound glad about it.
Now read on to the end of the chapter, because people who quote verse nine usually stop too soon. Two verses on, he says, "But the LORD is with me as a mighty terrible one." Four verses on, he is singing: "Sing unto the LORD, praise ye the LORD: for he hath delivered the soul of the poor from the hand of evildoers." In the very next verse he says, "Cursed be the day wherein I was born," and the chapter ends in that darkness four verses later. Perhaps praise and cursing have both turned up in the same week of your life, and you have decided that one of them must be false. This page holds both, side by side, and God kept it in His book that way. The fire He put in Jeremiah's bones did not go out on his worst day, and the Lord who stood with him "as a mighty terrible one" stands with you on yours.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 348 is Hiding Place and Songs (Psalm 32:7).