More Daemonic from the Old Testament= Jeremiah, 20, 7-13.
This starts with the prophet being mocked, on account of God, and perhaps feeling God is not doing enough to back him up. He would like to never mention God again, or speak in his name, given what he is subjected to by the people around him.. But, when he tries to give up on God, “there is in my heart a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.” Yet the people go on whispering against him, and hope it will be revealed that he is deceived; then they can overthrow him, getting revenge on him by silencing his prophetic voice forever.
Then he recovers, realising that the Daemonic Flame of which he is the prophet has not, and will not, abandon him.
“But the Lord is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, they will not overcome me.”
He realises that those who dishonour the Daemonic will themselves end up dishonoured; they will not prevail.
The prophet prays to God as the Daemonic Fire that tests the righteous, and sees the heart; he wants to see the Daemonic pay back those who disrespect it, “for to thee have I committed my cause.”
Only someone who has committed their flickering human spark to the Daemonic Fire will know how hard, and stretched, that deed of risk is= to commit one’s cause to this, and to submit to the results that flow from that leap of faith, is an ultimate bravery, and give away.
The Jewish holy people are always human, intensely human.. No play acting with the human clay, no pretence to rising above it..
Yet God does not grant the understandable vengeance that the prophet requests. Indeed, his suffering is a foretaste and prevision of the unjust suffering heaped on the Christ who is to come. Thus, the prophet’s request that the dishonourable be shamed is not answered= because Christ is the answer.
God is with those who foolishly, by the world’s standards, commit their very life, and all their cause, to the honour of the Daemonic Fire “as a dread warrior.”
God is a dread warrior= this is the Daemonic.
It is this warrior God who loves, and makes sacrifice. Such is his way of honour.
Let Christians wake up to this God, for Christ is the ultimate of this dread warrior. In him, what God is gambling on and fighting for reaches its apogee.
Dread warrior, be with us all. The gamble and the fight is for us all. This is Christ’s love, and its sacrifice.
The dread warrior does not favour his servants.