Jeremiah 16:13
“So I will throw you out of this land into a land neither you or your ancestors have known, and there you will serve other gods day and night, for I will show you no favor.” This is what happens to the Israelites when they “forsook the Lord.” To be cast into the unknown as a terrible place both of “I don’t know where I am” and “nobody else has ever been where I am” is the lonely fate of every man when he loses and forgets the proper relationship between himself and God—or rather, the proper relationship between his own knowledge and the knowledge of God. Just as himself and God are not the same thing; so is man’s own knowledge and the knowledge of God. He turns toward his own knowing, which is a “holding on” and a dead thing, rather than a knowing of God: which is the acceptance and favor of Abel—a letting go of what one knows, which enables the ability to turn and embrace, in a kind of love, what one can’t possibly know. (“You believe in God, believe also in me.”) And because the man who has forgotten the Lord has the improper attitude toward knowing, he is unprepared for the constant and gradual overtaking of the complexity of life and the negative aspect the unknown brings with it; which is simply common to all man as it is the nature of reality. And instead of learning to love the unknown, he learns to hate it. He learns to hate its complexity. He tries to avoid its punishments, but he can’t. He is a slave to it. He is thrown fully into the unknown’s inevitable clutches. If he could only turn and see. If he could only lift his eyes to the hills, he would see where his help comes from. And it also lies in the unknown.
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