The Superinflected Personality – Part 2

Part Two

Now if Jeremiah is the antipode to all that other stuff that is against the revelation, what is his relationship to that other stuff? What is the posture that he occupies? There seem to be four parts to this posture:

1. The posture Jeremiah has to the situation is relative to God. It is not relative to the situation. That right there would reorient the entire world. In Jeremiah 1:16-17, God says: “I will pronounce my judgments” and then he says for Jeremiah to go over there and say to them whatever God tells him to say to them. They will know that whatever he says is not coming from him, but from God. Clearly, there is no objectivity there. This is the Lord speaking. The Lord is not objective, the Lord is right. There is no truth outside of him; there is nothing existent outside of him that stand independent of him as if it had a life of its own. It doesn’t exist. It is the hyper-inflected point of view against the will of God. Maurice Merleau Ponty (1908-1961) said that you cannot talk about truth unless you talk about truth within a given situation. He denied that there were absolute truths in the sense that you have a revelation from an absolute source. Many people, even in the church, believe the same thing. For example, we try to categorize “truth, such as biological truths, economic truths, mathematical truths, and biblical truths, as if they are separate truths and applicable to separate situations. This would be wrong. The only truth that exists is the truth according to the Lord’s point of view about any situation in our lives. Truth is whatever he says it is. That is the baseline. That is the beginning point for us.

Jeremiah, as a super-inflected personality, is postured uniquely in the shadow of this unique rock which is his God, and which is the discourse that the Lord has given him. He is not interested in objectivity. He is not interested in the situation, and he is not at all controlled, shaped, or influenced by the situation. He might say, “well I really feel bad that the world is in the mess that it is.” And in this way, he might say that the situation affects him. However, this is very marginal. What affects us is not the situation, however good or bad it is. We are never allowed to abandon God in favor of money or material blessing, or use God’s blessings as a pretext for materialism. Or if things are really bad we never say that we will be destroyed by the situation. If we are a super-inflected personality, we will walk through the realities that man has created, in that hyper-inflected environment, knowing that these things don’t define who we are, nor do they influence or shape us. We cry, we regret, we lament their loss. But the way we think and the symbols that we have in our discourse are relative uniquely to God, and have nothing to do with the situation. Now think about what that would mean if someone said, “I have a decision to make here in this situation.” We would ask, “What do you propose to do? How do you propose to make the decision.” And the person answered, “Well let’s look at the details of the situation.” We would say, “We don’t want to know the details of the situation. What we want to know is How are you postured relative to God? What does God have to say to shape your approach, thoughts and response to the situation?” There is no truth in the situation itself. The truth precedes the situation. That is the posture we need to take in every situation.

1. Jeremiah becomes a rhetorical singularity. In Jeremiah 1:17, God says, “Get yourself ready! Stand up and say to them whatever I command you. Do not be terrified…. ” Now what is he. He has all these words. He is this walking discourse of God. But he is singular (an individual). This is someone who is created by God as a singularity, who then moves from the position of a singularity to the differentiated (the hyper-inflected environment of minds that have been shaped by other thoughts than those of God). He is prepared to deal with the differentiated. Not because he grew up among the differentiated, so he knows them; nor because he was schooled among the differentiated like Moses was and so he knew how to navigate in those waters. In fact, Moses wasjerked out of there and reconstructed so that the Lord is able to use him. All of the prophets and all of the great people of faith were rhetorical singularities. If you have five rhetorical singularities, or five thousand, that God has created, then those singularities move against the hyper-inflected, differentiated environment out there. That is a guaranteed formula for conflict. There is no way to avoid this conflict.

2 Corinthians is clear about ministry being a conflict of mindsets. Jeremiah is convinced that this is true. Here he would experience the pain of his incommensurability (being guided and shaped only by the truth that has its origin in the mind of God.). He knows and says to the differentiated, “I am not like you. I am not acceptable to you. I do not find comfort in your fellowship. You can say things to me that purport to be the truth, but I know they are lies. You can reject me, hate me, punish me, beat me, imprison me, or kill me however the Lord allows you to do, but I will maintain my incommensurability.” This incommensurability is not created by us, or the situation, but is created by God. This is a wonderful thing. We don’t worry about the situation as if it is going to affect us because it isn’t going to affect us. What affects us, and must have affected Jesus (the tears that he would weep, the regrets and sense of loss that he saw all around him, the waste), is that we are incommensurable; and that incommensurability gives us pain. But it is a sign of our union with God.

Paul said the same thing exactly in Philippians Chapter 2. I don’t know why he didn’t use the word “incommensurable.” That would be a whole lot easier to capture this concept. But the fact of the matter he felt that, believed that, lived that and longed to be that. When he was describing the pain that he felt, his willingness to be like the Lord, he understood this. He wanted to be like the Lord, he wanted to know his pain, he wanted to know his suffering, and he wanted to join with the Lord in just that way. He championed Epaphroditus, this grand co-laborer of his, who risked his life many times to take care of Paul, risking his life for the Lord. We are going to feel the pain of incommensurability. And we ought to. If we don’t feel that pain, something is not right with us. This is not depression or a cause of some sort of mental illness. We should feel the pain of incommensurability. The Lord said he would reward us if we sharing in his suffering, share in his love, share in his feelings.

1. Jeremiah acts as a leverage over the temporal context. In Jeremiah 1:18, God says, “Today I have made you a fortified city, an iron pillar and a bronze wall to stand against the whole land—against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests and the people of the land.” Again, he will face things coming against the bronze wall, but they won’t penetrate or move the structure. We have a great lesson here. Jeremiah was sent to Israel and to Judah, and he is immovable. His message isn’t going to change. It is not going to change over time. Jeremiah resists being moved which constitutes a kind of leverage over the temporal context.

We could say that Jeremiah didn’t have a great deal of success. But that depends on how we define success. From the Lord’s point of view, he did what he was told to do. He fulfilled his ministry; he fulfilled the totality of purpose to which the Lord had called him. Jeremiah is a super-inflected personality standing up against things that are probably worse than anything we will ever have to go through. It was a very hyper-inflected environment, a bad situation. He moves in and they hate him, plot to destroy him, do what they can to undercut his credibility and authority, his nobility, assault him personally and intellectually and otherwise, question everything that could be questioned. And yet God has turned this super-inflected personality into this massive bronze wall that just stands there. They are shooting at it but they are not getting through. They are laying siege, but the walls don’t come down. They never get an opening. They tie ropes around the iron pillar, but the pillar refuses to move.

Here too are we as Christians standing as super-inflected antipodes to the hyper-inflected world. The world does its best against us; but still the fortified city is maintained, the iron pillar refuses to bend and the bronze wall is stands. It is like the big elephant in the living room. You can’t ignore it. It doesn’t go away. And it doesn’t respond to the things that routinely force changes in everything around them. It doesn’t work that way. This is an anomaly. We need to think of Christian personalities as bronze walls. There may be nicks in the bronze walls, but still it stands.

Jeremiah didn’t decide that he was going to be this way, and therefore he held up against it. The Lord says, “today I have made you” in the same way that previously he had said “today I reach out and touch your mouth.” That happened at some point in time. So he stands because the Lord made him to do this. As long as he is faithful to the Lord, he is a bronze wall. He is impervious to anything that could destroy him, until the Lord decides that he has accomplished his mission and it is time for him to leave. He couldn’t possibly conceive of failure or of being overwhelmed until that time, because of the commitments that Jeremiah made to the Lord. He had been made a totality. This is a very significant thing. This constitutes leverage. It is hard to image how it exerts all the leverage it does on the material world, but it does.

Another example are the three Hebrews, there before Nebuchadnezzar. All they could do was resist. They knew that. They couldn’t run or walk out on there on their own. They just had to submit. These iron pillars, these fortified cities, these bronze walls were thrown into the furnace; and Nebuchadnezzar was dazzled by the fact that these people were not subject to the same forces that routinely have destroyed other people. It is true that if the people of Israel had been that same type of super-inflected personality, Nebuchadnezzar would have never been able to pose a significant danger to them. In the book of Isaiah, 200 years before Babylon ever ascended; Isaiah was calling for this time period when there would be great destruction by the Babylonians. But they would never have been in any kind of a threatening position to Israel if Israel had been loyal to the Lord and he told them that. Being faithful has big leverage over the world.

Acts 4 is another wonderful illustration of this concept. In that situation, the gospel is being preached and John and Paul are detained. The context starts in 4:23. “On their release Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God.” They are not going to grab an AK-47 and attack; nor are they going to seek a political or social remedy in response. This is the same concept that Jeremiah is facing. Continuing in vs. 27, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate sat together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” Now this is the same thing that the Lord told Jeremiah. They will fight against you, but they are not going to win because I have already determined this situation. In vs. 29 “Now, Lord consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.” (They are bronze walls, iron pillar and fortified cities.) “‘Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.’ After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” Now this is very different than some of the ways that humans propose to deal with a degenerate society, such as the Christian Coalition. It is the idea of “standing.” That is an amazing idea.

What about the example of a Christian woman being abused by her husband? She needs to know that the Lord is making her a fortified city and an iron pillar to stand in the situation. Or children facing every temptation from the world. They are fortified cities, they are iron pillars, and they are bronze walls. They don’t immediately look like they have a lot of automatic and powerful leverage over the temporal situation; but they do in virtue of this posture that the Lord has made for them.

Like the Christians in Acts 4, we don’t have any overt power over the government. They are not going to throw Herod off his throne, or demote Pontius Pilate from his position. They can’t do this. But they don’t need to do this. The Lord said in the book of Romans, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay.” If we stand in this unique position, of a super-inflected personality, a super-inflected posture, this constitutes leverage over the situation. Look at the example of Paul and Silas when they are arrested. Do they have any leverage over the situation? The world would say, “No. The authorities just went down there and clamped them in arms. They could beat them, thrown them in the innermost stocks, and could do anything to them that they chose to do. They weren’t armed. They didn’t pose any marshal threat to anybody.” Do they have any leverage over the situation? Well, yes! Do they know exactly how it’s going to turn out? Well maybe not. But they don’t need to. All they need to know is that they have been turned into these structures by God made to stand. They will resist, not on their own. It is not within them to resist or to hold up to this, but the Lord has made them bronze walls, iron pillars, and fortified cities. It is a rhetorical statement, “What can the world do to me.”

Here is tremendous leverage just by maintaining our position relative to God. The lever has always been with God. We are just along for the ride. Jeremiah was along for the ride. And we are told that if Jeremiah was not going to be faithful, the Lord would get himself someone else who would. But it was known about Jeremiah from before the foundation of the world was laid, that he would follow through all the way to the end. This is very different than the many examples of those who started out with the Lord and then chickened out or changed, like King Asa in the Books of Kings and Chronicles. He was a great reformer the first part of his life, but then the second part of his life he wafted over to trust in what he could see over what he couldn’t see. And he lost his status as a bronze wall. While he was with he Lord, they were shooting at him, and nothing happened. He just sat there and continued to work.

Imagine the hope for people living in poverty. Do they have any leverage over their poverty? Yes! We need to say, “Don’t look at your poverty. The Lord will take care of that. You give yourself to the Lord, you become a super-inflected personality, and he will make you into a bronze wall.” This is what brethren have to learn no matter what their situation. Whether they are in positions of apparent eminence or not, the important thing is this super-inflected condition.

1. This posture has an absolute constitution. God brings about all of the individual elements in this posture. They are mandated by him and therefore absolute. He tells Jeremiah in vs. 1:18 that they are going to stand against him, and he will stand against them. It is going to run both ways. He is constituted as a bronze wall to stand against. This posture of resistance, the standing there and being what God told him to be, is an absolute element. That is his purpose. In other words, God is saying to him, “You are here to stand against. That is why you were born, that is why you are constructed the way you are constructed. That is why you have been shaped by me the way you are shaped. Your purpose in this world is granted to you by an absolute source.” Then in vs. 19, God says, “They are going to fight against you…” That is going to reflect the rigor that he has to face. Tremendous rigor. We know as we read through the book of Jeremiah some of what that involves. We don’t know everything that was in his heart, how these things hurt him. We would assume by analogy since he is like us that some of it did; but he had value added by God. He will face rigor on the one hand; but he also has rigor to stand as a bronze wall, iron pillar and fortified city. These things are made to resist. They are firm, immovable obstacles. They just stand there. And they are meant to withstand the rigor. We are meant to stand against the rigorous attacks of the world. We sometimes may not feel like a bronze wall, but it doesn’t matter how we feel. Something is operating upon us from outside the system. So the rigor is proposed by God. And God says, “I am with you, don’t worry about it.”

So how does Jeremiah deal with this in his personal conduct? He has to reject certain thoughts, certain actions, certain emotional responses, and certain information or observations that oppose what God has told him, “I will be with you.” There are some temptations to which he is not going to fall prey because the Lord is with him. This is an absolute constitution for his life.

Now compare the super-inflected posture– the absolute constitution, the leverage over the temporal context, the rhetorical singularity and the posture relative to God—to the antipodal charter for life (hyper-inflected environment). You can see that the latter is absolutely denuded, lying open, and vulnerable. He tells them this. This bronze wall, this iron wall, this fortified city are a reflection of God himself. They are running at high speed into a brick wall and when they hit it, they are not going to recover from it. Jeremiah represents truth to them, he represents God to them, and they are everything that they shouldn’t be and everything that is reprehensible to the Lord’s point of view. They are running at high speed, and if they don’t slow down and listen, and if they don’t stop, sooner or later they are going to come up against the wall of the Lord. And it is going to dismember them, limb from limb, which is in effect what happens when Nebuchadnezzar comes along. This is going to be grievous. Jeremiah in his resistance manifests the solidity of the Lord, as a bronze wall, but he also represents his patience. The Lord sits, waits, works, puts up with, and extends grace, mercy and patience until there is none left and he decides to bring judgment against them. He says this through Jeremiah and through Isaiah things like “I wanted to talk with you. I wanted you to listen to me. Where have I faulted you? Where have I failed?”

He says to them through Jeremiah in Chapter 2, “Hear the word of the Lord, O house of Jacob, all you clans of the house of Israel. This is what the Lord says: What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. They didn’t ask, ‘Where is the Lord?'” He says in vs. 7, “I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable. The priests didn’t ask, ‘Where is the Lord?'” So he says in vs. 9, “Therefore, I am bringing charges against you.” So he sends this fleshly wall of bronze ahead of him so to speak to say, “I appeal to you one more time. Respond to my mercy. Listen to this open gesture of grace. Turn from your evil ways. Because if you don’t you are going to hit that big bronze wall of my judgment one of these days, and there won’t be any coming back from that.”

This is another reason why we Christians have to be hard as rocks in this sense—solid all the way to the foundation. It is a lesson for all of us. Because we are representing the Lord himself as bronze walls. This man had an enviable position. He has been with the Lord for all these many centuries so I’m sure that this is an understatement from his point of view. I don’t know what he felt deep within him as a man, when he had to put up with all of this. But he knows he was in an enviable position. He represented the Lord to those people. He represented the Lord and his reality to the hyper-inflected environment and he did that from day one until his mission had been accomplished. This is not a negative thing. It is a wonderful position. Paul also understood this. He said that he could fill up what was lacking in the suffering of Christ. He wanted to know his hardships; he wanted to know the pain, so that he could be like him. All the prophets and the apostles had this in common. We are growing in our knowledge of this. So we encourage one another and try to develop in ourselves and in others that we teach this unique posture; and if we do he says that we will have achieved our place in the universe. After all was said and done, this was Jeremiah’s place—he is an antipode to the world. He wasn’t here to achieve his own purposes, or his goals, or to realize his own personal dreams. He was a man of God. We are learning more and more that when the Lord calls someone a man of God what that means. If you are a man of God, you are not your own. If you are a woman of God, you are not your own. All of that has been surrendered in favor of something much greater than that.

Now there has to be a gulf that separates the hyper-inflected environment on the one hand and the super-inflected personality on the other. This gulf is not built out of the arbitrary wishes of the prophet. He is not saying, “I am over here and you are over there, and I like it that way and this is how it needs to be to do my work.” He knew that this was a gulf that was stipulated by the Lord himself. So he is not guilty of pride when he says, “I’m over here and you’re over there.” He is recognizing the role of the stipulation. The fact that they would have accused him of arrogance and pride is a symptom that they did not recognize the gulf as stipulated between a certain kind of personality and another kind of personality; and, furthermore, it is clearly stated in the book of Jeremiah that this gulf is enforced. The power of that enforcement resides in the Lord himself. He is going to make sure that there is a gulf. He is warning Jeremiah that he has fixed the gulf here and that he better respect that gulf. The super-inflected personality finds protection as a fortified city, iron pillar and bronze wall. God promises protection if he does what he is called to do. That maintenance of the gulf was a tremendous lesson. He couldn’t be bought off or seduced into the hyper-inflected environment.

Christians must be willing to say and to see that God has placed a gulf between us and the hyper-inflected environment; and that we can’t cross those lines and be faithful. A man needs to be able to say to his wife and to his children, “We have been shaped by God. This family is a totality. We are controlled by the super-inflected discourse. There is a gulf. Now my son, here is what I am trying to say to you. God himself has put a gulf between things, people, conduct and discourse. You to the best of my ability are going to stay on the side of this gulf that has been shaped by God’s discourse. This is why I am disciplining you. This is what I am trying to live before you. This is how I am trying to help you learn to yield to God. Because if you don’t, you are going to end up on the other side of that gulf and you are not going to like it. You might like it for a while. You might say, ‘Oh look at the money I make. Look at the freedom I have. Look at all these opportunities that are in front of me. Look at my free exercise of will and some of the things that come along with that.’ But later you are not going to like it. It will turn bitter in your belly. It is better for you with all the pain of incommensurability that it may bring for you to stand on this side of the gulf. That is why God is shaping you into this unique personality called the super-inflected personality with the discourse from the mind of God that comes along with it.” In this way we prepare children for this kind of pain.

Why would children think that the worse thing in the world is that they have been subject to peer pressure, that someone doesn’t like them, that they have been rejected, and that this is the end of the world? Why would their will to live be destroyed because of this? It is because he knows nothing of being a super-inflected antipode. He knows nothing about being a super-inflected personality. He knows nothing about maintaining super-inflected discourse. Somebody dropped the ball.
(Thematic 4) The Super-inflected Personality as a Spiritual Condition

In Jeremiah 2:5-13, Jeremiah is depicted as a super-inflected personality and that that is a spiritual condition. Furthermore, it appears that personality is synonymous with spiritual condition. Now this is getting at it from the reverse. Can we assume that personality is synonymous with the spiritual condition? I think we can. Of course, we are talking beyond whether or not a person has a sense of humor or bounces back after he has a flat tire. Looking at what God condemned in the people tells us what the reverse is that he wanted them to see and to be. Some properties of this spiritual condition that he desires in them are:

1. The super-inflected personality would be the optimum spiritual condition. This would be the highest condition of a human, being shaped by God, being touched by God, being inflected (formulated) by God. In Jeremiah 2:5, it is said, “They followed worthless idols and became worthless.” There is hyper-inflection. They did not yield to super-inflection and they became worthless. They reached the lowest rung on the human spiritual condition ladder because they distanced themselves form super-inflection. When they did that it was a slide to the bottom—maybe one rung at a time or maybe some will slide quicker than that. But it is going to happen. So we could conclude that if man were to reach the most optimum condition it couldn’t be judged technologically, literarily, or culturally. All of those appraisals would be displaced, senseless. The only way to gradate the optimum condition would be that of being super-inflected. That changes all of the canons of appraisal that is normally used, i.e., wealth, intelligence, education, or political eminence, etc. What about the person that is super-inflected across the totality of his life? What more could that person ever hope to achieve?

Take the example of a man who is relatively speaking poor, and yet he is super-inflected. Has he reached the optimum of human spiritual potential? Well yes he has. And has he furthermore achieved the purpose for his existence on the earth? Well he certainly has. Now today if we are living super-inflected lives, we have achieved the purpose. This is today; this is when the purpose is to be achieved. This is it, we have achieved it. But we often confuse startling episodes or events as marks of achievement. But that is not so much the case as that today, while perhaps a great event did not happen in our life in terms of something dazzling or startling, we lived a super-inflected relationship to God. Our life has achieved its purpose. It is why we are here. To do this.

What would happen if a parent asked, “What is your goal in life Mary Jane?” and she answered, “Oh I want to live a super-inflected life and be a super-inflected personality.” You can see the conflict some people would have with this. Some parents would say, “Uh huh. What we really wanted to talk about is your future?” And Mary Jane says, “Well me too. If we are super-inflected personalities, God takes care of that. We are totalities.” The parent says, “Well I know Mary Jane, but there is school and there is career…” She responds, “But that doesn’t really matter does it. All that is going to be prefigured by God. I just need to be faithful and super-inflected.”

We don’t usually see this as the optimum. Therefore, we don’t yield to it as the achievement of mankind. What would a society look like filled with super-inflected personalities? It would look like what the Lord called the kingdom of heaven.

1. The super-inflected personality is anchored to absolute discourse. He criticizes the people because they did not ask, “Where is the Lord? How can we find him? Where is he? Where have we been?” When we ask the question “Where is the Lord?” it focuses the question of where we are because we have an absolute standard. But they did not ask that. The ideal personality has to be anchored to this absolute discourse. So without that we don’t achieve this spiritual condition which is the optimum. That is a synonym of our spiritual condition that goes further than doctrines, ethics and soteriology. We want to know where the Lord is. We want to anchor the substance of our life to a particular discourse. How can we possibly do that unless scripture was used as representational phenomenon over the totality of the life that we live?
2. The super-inflected personality is the pivotal coherence factor between the eternal and the temporal. In Jeremiah 2:7, God says to the people, “I brought you into this great land but you came along and messed it up.” Instead of their personalities being a pivotal coherence factor between the temporal and the eternal, they opted for something else. But if they were inflected by God as personalities, he says “You will help unite the two worlds.” They were meant to be at the index position between the two worlds. Pivotal coherence factor is a personality. The spirit of God is a personality and he has discourse. Christians occupy a role there in faith and in manipulation of symbols as personalities. The index position is occupied by personality—by someone acting; and therefore, we become pivotal coherence factors between the world we can’t see and the world that we do see. That explains why these people did what they did and why they didn’t do what they were called to do. God wanted them to become super-inflected personalities that stand at the confluence between two great worlds. More than that, become the pivotal factor of coherence between the two at the index position. That will change the world for these people. The temporal side will change because it is obligated to change.
3. The super-inflected personality is a projection of absolute discourse. Now here you have the reverse in Jeremiah 2:8. “The priests did not ask for me, they did not know me. The leaders rebelled and the prophets prophesied by Baal.” They did not project absolute discourse. They were projecting hyper-inflected discourse. So super-inflected personalities are just the opposite of that. They project absolute discourse. If you took a person who is super-inflected, there are going to be a lot of things that might be said about that person. “That guy is not from around here because he is not a sociologically adjusted individual.” He acts different, talks different, looks different.” What is wrong with that picture? Nothing. These people were condemned at this point for one thing—and that is that they were projecting hyper-inflection. It was leading them to absolute destruction. Jeremiah comes along and he is just the opposite of that. He is projecting something that comes from outside the system. It is absolute discourse. Leaders certainly should be like Jeremiah. This is what they should do.

The spies in Numbers 12, 13 & 14 and the reiteration of that account in Deuteronomy 1 were leaders, each one taken from the 12 tribes. They were leaders. They were called leaders. A leader first and foremost should project absolute discourse. He shouldn’t project our plans, our collective divinations—where we can be in five years, etc. He projects a super-inflected discourse that is synonymous with his spiritual condition. Now how do we know whether or not a person has a certain spiritual condition? Sit and listen to him. Of if we don’t do that, we can sit over here and watch him. We might be cautioned, “Well let’s not get too critical. This guy goes to church, he’s liberal with his money, teaches a Bible class on Wednesday night, is upright, very honest.” But what discourse does he usually project? Is it hyper-inflected (which may not appear to us to be worldly because there is no cussing and there is no drinking going on)? We might not see it as hyper-inflected or as necessarily bad. But once you bring this super-inflected discourse in and compare it, then you have a much firmer hold on what his spiritual condition really is.

1. The super-inflected personality truncates a hyper-inflected spiritual condition. In Jeremiah 2:9, God says, “I am going to bring charges against you and they will also come against your children’s children.” You have a continuum of things happening here. It has been going on and needs to be truncated. Now can they truncate it? Well yes they can. How? If they listen to the super-inflected discourse and they conform to it and let God super-inflect their own discourse and consequently their personalities, they could overturn that history. They could overturn that flow of habit. They could overturn that propensity that they have had all this period of time. It overturns the sociology that was working against God.

Can you truncate the hyper-inflected spiritual condition? Well, that can certainly happen. If it couldn’t have happened, the Lord I would have never sent Jesus into the world if he knew that no one would have turned to him. He wouldn’t have sent Jeremiah if he knew that it was senseless. But Jeremiah fit into a much larger picture. Can the problems of Mexico be truncated? Yes, all their problems are hyper-inflection anyway. Can they be truncated? Yes, could be, must be. And the Lord knows that they can be and here is precisely the instrument that will do it. Now what would happen in Mexico if the majority of those personalities were super-inflected? It would be an entirely different world. That is the power of the proclamation of the gospel. It is the power of these symbols for which we have been given responsibility. Can it turn anybody around? Yes, and all it takes is for that person to say “Wow. I’ve never thought about being a super-inflected personality. Can that really happen?” You bet it can. “Well I don’t think I could ever do it?” That’s right, you can’t do it, not now, not ever. This is the super-inflection of God. You give yourself to his discourse and things change. Talk about hope as opposed to hopelessness.

The world likes to come around and say, “There’s hope. We can fund something.” The IMF (International Monetary Fund) is not going to do for us what the Lord can do for us. We have a message in the kingdom of God to say to the world that is beyond anything that the IMF or the United Nations, or any other lending agency could ever do. We can say to them that we can guarantee that things get truncated if they turn to God’s discourse. We can say to any individual that they are wrong if they think they are too bad, too rotten, to change. We have these dazzling cases where one continuum or another was truncated. For instance, Paul, Matthew the tax collector, the centurion, evil men who are turned by God.

1. The super-inflected personality projects, monitors and maintains a gulf of discourse between the two cosmologies. In Jeremiah 2:10-11, God asks, “Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols.” Why did they do this? There was no gulf; they did not maintain the gulf. That stipulated division was not maintained, was not monitored. But here you have a spiritual condition on the hoof. This is a man or a woman. This spiritual condition has the ability, inherently, to project the gulf, monitor when the gulf is being respected, and maintain the gulf of discourse. (We don’t talk like they talk, etc.) So think about what that would mean. If we are preaching and teaching we are asking people to examine where the gulf is being maintained and where it is not. We are trying to help them see where the gulf is not correctly maintained. We want to encourage them to put the gulf between what the Lord thinks and what they have always been thinking. This is hard for some people to do. They believe if they have always thought something that they can’t change. But we are talking about a spiritual condition. If the spiritual condition is there, we could assume that that gulf is there, fixed, monitored and maintained.
2. The super-inflected personality is systematically inflected. We say systematic because this affects everything. In Jeremiah 2:12, we have a strongly worded statement, “Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror, declares the Lord.” We can’t think and act on our own thoughts. Everything about this universe that is super-inflected shudders at this. It covers everything. It is systematic. Our intellect will shudder, the emotions shudder at this abandonment of God. He is talking about the whole of the universe coming to recognize what the people are doing as so bad; they shudder that they could do this. They are appalled at what is seen. They are a part of the super-inflected universe—the stars, and all the heavens. Well if this is true of them, then it is certainly true of us. It is a systematic thing. It is pervasive. We have to become like the heavens. We study scripture in order to get systematically super-inflected—in every area of life.

1. The super-inflected personality is the apogee of spiritual discernment. He says they were guilty of two sins (1) they forsook him, the spring of living water. They did not recognize him as a spring of living water; they did not see its necessity to their lives. They did not see it as valuable or helpful to them. (2) They dug their own cisterns that cannot hold water. They decided they would go to something that could not meet their requirements. They couldn’t make these spiritual discernments. When they heard the truth, they didn’t see it. This is similar to the veil in 2 Corinthians 3 & 4. They couldn’t see it. The water was flowing, but they didn’t drink it. So they were dying by the spring of living water. Jesus told the woman at the well that if she drank of this she would never thirst ever again. The distance between Jeremiah and the Lord collapses here. Jesus comes along, saying that he is the apogee of spiritual discernment. He says in John 5 that he says whatever he sees in heaven. He knows.

This is reminiscent of 1 Corinthians 2, when Paul talks about the spiritual man who discerns all things. He is achieving this apogee of spiritual discernment. The people to whom Jeremiah spoke did not have this. Is it important to achieve this apogee of spiritual discernment? Yes! Who achieves it? Only a super-inflected personality does. That is that spiritual man in 1 Corinthians 2. This is a marvelous picture of Jesus as he comes along and teaches them, not like the Pharisees, scribes and teachers of the law, but with this authority that he brandished around because when they heard him, they knew it was spiritual discernment they were hearing. We have to believe that in Matthew 8, that is what happened to the centurion. He knew that what he heard was spiritual discernment and he desired it. Do we want spiritual discernment? Does the church want spiritual discernment? Yes we do, but we will only achieve this if we are super-inflected personalities because that is a spiritual condition, and these things are synonymous.
(Thematic 5) Super-inflected Distillation

One of the big effects that being a super-inflected personality has in the day to day routines of life, is the ability to distill things. This especially is seen in Jeremiah 4:10-31. We face the contemporary context as a sort of cauldron, under pressure from God. The revelation has come against it. There is some “essence” that is going to be “cooked” off of it by this pressure being brought to bear upon it. This is the same way that the revelation extrudes on our minds. It puts pressure on us. The word of God exerts pressure upon us. This explains why Christians have always been persecuted. When the revelation puts the contemporary context under pressure, or the temporal dimension under pressure, then you get the extraction of the essence of what is in the cauldron.

Jeremiah being a super-inflected personality had the ability to distill various things:

1. He distilled that absolute truth is fractionated from popular opinion. We have to make a gradation. Is there absolute truth? Is absolute truth the same thing as popular opinion? Or is popular opinion that which determines what absolute truth is? Jeremiah would say “no”. In Jeremiah 4:10, he says, “then I said, ‘Ah Sovereign Lord, how completely you have deceived this people in Jerusalem by saying, you will have peace, when the sword is at our throats.'” He had the ability to discern the difference between absolute truth and popular opinion. Now if we have a church that is awash in popular opinion, never questions popular opinion, never projects or proposes a need to question popular opinion, they will not see the distinction. There is also a tendency to amalgamate, to assimilate the revelation of God to popular opinion. Well if that happens the gradation between absolute truth and popular opinion simply ceases to exist. While popular opinion in Jeremiah’s time was that the people were in pretty good shape, the truth was that the sword was at their throats. So he would come along and deny the validity of popular opinion, especially when popular opinion diverged from absolute symbols. That makes him the prophet that he was. But he knew what he was looking at and he could say of the world today “all these people have this opinion, all the writers say this, all the media have this opinion, this is what is to be recognized as the consensus. But we say, “The sword is at our throats.” In a bygone era, we might be called “cassandras,” “false alarmists,” “fanatics,” “people upon their moral perches,” etc. But still the only way to see the difference between popular opinion and absolute truth is if you are shaped by God. This is something that God does with our minds—shapes us so that we can distill the distinction.
2. He distilled the apocalypse from the routine. They don’t see the apocalypse coming although he has told them it is. In Jeremiah 4:11-12 he says, “At that time this people and Jerusalem will be told, ‘A scorching wind from the barren heights in the desert blows toward my people, but not to winnow or cleanse…” (This is not a helpful thing. They are not going to say “Oh I needed that.”) “…a wind too strong for that comes from me. Now I pronounce my judgments against them.” So the apocalypse is distilled from the routine of life. Routine takes over and nobody sees the apocalypse, the death, the wind come at them from the desert. They are not concerned. Apocalyptic preaching, apocalyptic discourse would be considered annoying and needless. It creates questions, worries, anxieties and fears. Well it should! If we are not with the Lord, the gospel should rattle our cage, it should unnerve us. It ought to make us fearful, make us want to vomit to run up against the terror of God himself when he is on the loose and he is looking for his enemies, when he decides to come to the barricades. Because there is no reprieve from that court. The verdict is in. So when he goes looking for his enemies, this is a fearful thing. It is the apocalypse. He always told the Christians that in one form or another.

The Lord is looking for his enemies. We can’t shrink from the installation in people of fear. This is not politically correct to say these things today. It probably wasn’t all that politically correct in Jeremiah’s time either. Humans don’t like this. Our nervous system desires something a little easier and a little more encouraging. “Encourage me, but don’t beat me over the head.” I have never for an extended period of time preached hot hell and freezing rain from the pulpit, day in and day out. But there is a place for this. It is what we could call super-inflected realism. We are in relationship with God. He is a jealous God. He does not take kindly to defections. They will not be forgiven. Those of you who are fooling around with your sexual sins, with economics, with philosophies, need to be afraid because the Lord will stalk you down one of these days and you are going to rue the day. You cannot sin and expect that he overlooks it. You can’t say, “well since he didn’t pour out his wrath on me today, therefore, God does not see.” He does see and he holds you accountable and he will bring you to court sooner or later. That is the kind of God he is. The apocalypse is a rhetorical reality. It is not just verbiage. For us it has to be a rhetorical reality. It is coming and it is just a simple matter, from our point of view, of time.

1. He distilled the relevant tasks amid human ingenuity. In Jeremiah 4:13-17, he says, “Look! He advances like the clouds, his chariots come like a whirlwind, and his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe to us! We are ruined! O, Jerusalem, wash the evil from your heart and be saved. How long will you harbor wicked thoughts?” He is appealing for them to do the most relevant task. They are not going to see it that way. “A voice is announcing from Dan, proclaiming disaster from the hills of Ephraim. Tell his to the nations, proclaim it to Jerusalem: ‘A besieging army is coming from a distant land, raising a war cry against the cities of Judah. They surround her like men guarding a field because she has rebelled against me,’ declares the Lord.” What is the most relevant operation in the face of human ingenuity? When you are sick what is the most relevant operation when you are sick? Faith or human ingenuity? What is the most relevant operation when you have money troubles, faith or human ingenuity; generosity or trust in God? Are these relevant tasks amid human ingenuity? We have to ask these questions? Human ingenuity or human creativity is always present. We learn how to do things. For example, we know how to make better mousetraps. We learn more efficient ways to handle certain aspects of material existence, e.g., farming and some other things. But when we face all the range of possibilities, do we still know what is the most relevant and what is not? Do we know that repentance is relevant? Do we know that maintenance of faith is the most relevant task before any of us as we face all of the issues of life? How do you distill that from human ingenuity? This is doesn’t done routinely. An example of human ingenuity would be a person who says, “Well I don’t know. I have to trust my psychiatrist and my psychologist because they know best; and here you are telling me something else? I don’t believe that what you are saying is the most relevant task in dealing with this particular problem.” If they had said in Jeremiah’s day that the most relevant task is to get this standing army built up on par with our enemies, or to have to adjust to a war economy, or something like this, they would have been absolutely dead wrong in that appraisal. That was not the relevant task. The most relevant task was repentance; and that was something with which the Lord admonished Israel all the way through.
2. He distilled the emotional representations of needless tragedy. In Jeremiah 4:18-21, he says, “Your own conduct and actions, have brought this upon you. This is your punishment. How bitter it is! How it pierces to the heart! Oh, my anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain. Oh, the agony of my heart! (This is Jeremiah) My heart pounds within me, and I cannot keep silent. For I have heard the sound of the trumpet; I have heard the battle cry. (He knows what is coming.) Disaster follows disaster; the whole land lies in ruins. In an instant my tents are destroyed, my shelter in a moment. How long must I see the battle standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?” This is emotional for him. I do not see how we will ever be able to protect ourselves from those emotions because it distills emotional representations of this needless tragedy and it certainly it needless. He is pierced. He feels anguish. He talks about his pain, the agony, how his heart palpitates. This is even affecting his physiology, and he cannot keep silent. He is moved to speak. There is no way that he is going to speak without that emotional set of representations about this needless destruction. It didn’t have to happen. It is the same when we look at the life of an individual, for example when a parent cries bitter tears over their children because of needless tragedy in their lives.

All tragedy is inherently ultimately needless. Do people have to be killing each other in Bosnia? Well no, not if they listen to the word of God. Do they need to be starving each other to death in Somalia? Well no, not if they listen to the word of God. Does some guy have to murder his friend? Well no, it is all needless. These terrible crimes that are happening—needless. And we carry that emotion around. Jeremiah carried that emotion around, and we can see the weight when he says “how long do I have to endure this inner agony?” This must be much like what Jesus experienced when he was here. He comes into this world and he is super-inflected, he had to cry, he hurt, he lamented, he regretted what would happen to the people, and he carried the emotional representations of that tragedy within you all your life. And we need to separate what a real tragedy is from something else. For example, we feel the death of a child is tragic and in a way it is. But that pales relative to what is happening here in Jeremiah. A little baby, who passes from this earth and goes into eternity, from the Lord’s point of view, is a reward. Now we lament that he won’t grow up and wonder what he missed. That is sort of a biographical statement. We’ll miss holding the baby. We’ll miss loving the baby. The baby won’t become an ambassador or something else. Instead he was exalted into eternity in a pristine perfect condition. We call that “tragedy,” and I suppose we can up to a point. Yet, in 1 Thessalonians 4, the Lord seems to prohibit us from lingering on that way of representing it. His saints are with him, we just can’t see them, they are better off than they have ever been, they don’t hurt, they don’t need anything, they are in absolute perfect condition and they are protected in every way possible and in every absolute sense that that can be expressed. In Revelation, it is said “Blessed are they who die in the Lord.” So where is the tragedy? He never seemed to depict the death of his saints as “tragic.” This is “victory.” We know what a tragedy is when we see people willfully denying God and willfully abandoning his revelation and we look at this world and we know that 99% of what we see is needless suffering because they haven’t realized that this universe is super-inflected. If you don’t bow to that willingly, you will bow to it one way or another because, the Lord always has the last word in these things.

1. He distilled a super-inflected realism from the froth of self-deception. It says in Jeremiah 4:22-28, “My people are fools; they do not know me. They are senseless children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil; they know not how to do good”. (That is the dimension lost.) I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens and their light was gone. I looked at the mountains and they were quaking; I looked, and there are no people; every bird in the sky had flown away. I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert; all its towns lay in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger. This is what the Lord says, ‘The whole land will be ruined, though I will not destroy it completely. Therefore the earth will mourn, and the heavens above grow dark, because I have spoken and will not relent, I have decided and will not turn back.'” The key is that God has spoken. When we get to the point that the Lord says I have spoken and will not relent, I have decided and will not turn back, then that is the end of the story. That is utter hopelessness and they are getting there. And they are getting theirs in this generation as well. And they need to know where that point of no return is. We have to say to them, as Jeremiah did “you cannot get by with this.” You cannot live your life a certain way outside of these truths that govern the universe, these canonical truths that I have spoken. I will come to a point and I will say something about you and it will be bad and I will not change my mind. That decision, once I make it, is not subject to amendment. It will not be overturned, and I will no longer hear your pleadings. Now they can go on in self-deception, but part of the work of the prophet is to rob them of self-deception.

Continuing in vs. 29, “At the sound of horsemen and archers every town takes to flight. Some go into the thickets; some climb up among the rocks. All the towers are deserted; no one lives in them. What are you doing, O devastated one? Why dress yourself in scarlet and put on jewels of gold? Why shade your eyes with paint? You adorn yourself in vain, your lovers despise you; they seek your life.” So here is the prostitute putting on the finery, going out and trying to seduce the enemy. The enemy is not coming to be seduced. The enemy is coming for blood. They can live that deception if they choose, thinking they can handle the situation, thinking “They have always yielded to our wiles before and we can do some things here to get them off our back. We may have to pay a price or two, but it won’t be as bad as this crazed prophet says. Well, this terrible verse 31 says, “I hear a cry as of a woman in labor, a groan as of one bearing her first child—the cry of the Daughter of Zion gasping for breath, stretching out her hands and saying, ‘Alas I am fainting; my life is given over to murderers.'” Now that is disturbing and chilling. He turned that nation over to a bunch of professional killers. They thought they could win their lives by being seductive, by making promises, by their allure, by surrendering (that is what prostitutes do up to a point). But God said this was in vain. We need a realism. But what kind of a realism? Not the realism, of course, that the philosophers have touted. But a super-inflected realism. And how do you distill that from the froth of self-deception? How would anyone know whether or not they are being self-deceived? They wouldn’t unless there is a way to distill the truth. This happened to Paul on the way to Damascus. He says, “I thought this was right, but I knew later when the Lord confronted me that this was all wrong. In this confrontation, he was able to see the super-inflected realism, “You are hostile to me,” Jesus said to him. “You cannot fight against me.” And Paul knew that.

So when you bring the pressure of the revelation of God to bear on the contemporary context, it distills these kinds of things. Whether or not they are easy to digest, of course, is another matter. But that is pretty heavy duty stuff. Absolute truth is fractionated from popular opinion; so we know the difference. We know who is being led by the nose; and we are not going to be led by the nose. We can distill the apocalypse from the routine. They don’t see it, they don’t think anything bad or terrible is going to result from this. But we know because of the word and we learn what the most relevant operation is amidst the glowing and growing human ingenuity. We know what it is. It is repentance. It is reconciliation to God. We say to the world at large, “Repent and be reconciled to God. That is what you need to do. That is what you need to do before you think about doing anything else to change your life, your government, your world, your society, your universe.” There is distillation of the emotional representations that we have to carry around with us. We can’t be afraid to carry those emotions. We cannot hide or avoid the symbols and the emotional baggage that comes along with those symbols. In fact, the more sensitive we become to the Lord, the more we would hurt the way he hurts as he sees the world, which becomes another basis for unity with him. If we feel the way he feels that is a unity—so that is good, it isn’t bad. So when we hurt, at one level we don’t like it, but it is good in a more significant way because if we weep and cry over the same sinfulness that the Lord hates and detests, and we hate and detest the same things, we are unified with him. So it is good and we don’t have a fear of this. Then we obtain this super-inflected realism that separates itself from self-deception. Well this is a God-send and a great blessing. That is one of the keys to our salvation. I would think that in looking at these five areas, you have major elements in salvation. Because unless you can separate the thoughts of God from the thoughts of man, it is impossible to maintain faith.