Passages & Pathways 1: The Ancient Paths
Welcome to a little series of blogs called ‘Passages & Pathways’. Our church is called ‘Pathway Church’ and there are lots of passages in the Bible that use language about paths, roads, ways, journeys and things like that. So this series of blogs will explore a number of those passages, and help us consider our own pathways, and the one we are on as a church. Hopefully it’ll be both fun and useful for you!
And we start with a verse that we’ve adopted as a bit of a vision verse for our church: Jeremiah 6:16.
‘This is what the Lord says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.’
The Crossroads: which path to take?
Ok. Confession time: I actually cut out the last bit of the verse when I copied it in above. Because after the call from God to look out, to ask for a good way and walk in it, God then says, “But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” In other words, the particular people God was speaking to and encouraging to go a certain chose not to. Instead, they chose a different path.
Those particular people were the people of Israel in the Old Testament of the Bible. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God is calling his people to return to him because they have wandered off in all kinds of ways that are terrible for them. God can see it, and only wants good things for them. But he never forces anybody to go a certain direction or live a certain way.
And all of this brings us to the idea of choice. God’s words here start with the image of a crossroads. At a crossroads, you can see lots of different paths and you have to choose which way to go. As a church, we recognise that all of us make all kinds of choices about what kinds of people we will be, what kinds of lives we’ll live, and how we will (or won’t) involve God in it all. Do we believe there are better and worse answers to those questions? Absolutely! But do we think it’s right to force those on other people? No. If God doesn’t, nor will we…
The Ancient Path: is newer always better?
But according to this verse, there is such thing as a ‘good way’ to find and to walk in. And it’s described by Jeremiah like this: “the ancient paths”. Sometimes, in our fast-changing world, it can feel as though newer is better. New smartphones do more than old ones. New cars are more efficient than old ones. New ideas are more interesting than the same old, same old.
Of course we don’t always feel that way. An old friend is often a closer friend. An old pastime is more comfortable and comforting than something new and unfamiliar. Old does not always mean outdated, but often we can slip into thinking it does. And in this verse God actively calls the people not to a shiny new thing, but to return to something tried and tested. Their mistake was taking on board too many of the new ideas they encountered in the world around them instead of staying true to what God had said all along.
So as a church, we don’t try to be old-fashioned (I’m writing this as a blog, not a telegram!), but we are trying hard to remain true to something far older than us. And I think this is true in at least two big ways.
First, we aren’t looking for a new message because we think the message about Jesus in the Bible (that he came to restore everything that is broken and died so that even though we are broken we can be made whole again) will never grow old!
And second, we are trying to look back to how the earliest Christians behaved as we think about church and what it looks like. We think there are lots of different ways that church can look, and the Bible is not actually very prescriptive about what that means. But the reason we are doing things a bit differently than most churches today is that we’re trying to get back to the principles and patterns of the earliest Jesus-followers, and stripping everything else back.
The Good Way: finding rest in…what?
The final thing I notice in this verse about walking in the good way is that when you walk in it Jeremiah says you can ‘find rest for your souls’. If that’s possible, sign me up! Your soul is the innermost part of who you are, the part of you that was made to connect most closely with God. And instead of a restless soul always searching for more, or an angry soul always picking a fight, or a hopeless soul that has given up, God wants our souls to be at peace and find rest.
But find rest in what? What is it that gives our soul that kind of satisfaction? Well, where did we start? We started with God’s voice calling to us at a crossroads. We saw the instruction to ‘ask’ for the good, ancient way, and the idea is that God will answer. So where are we finding rest for our souls? We’re finding it in the one who leads us there, the one who shows us where it is. We’re finding it not by looking inwards to ourselves or outward to others. We’re finding it by looking upwards to God.
And fundamentally as a church, that is what we are about. We believe that there is a pathway for us all to find and walk in, and that pathway is not just towards God, but actually is God himself: Jesus. He is what all of life is meant to be about, and is the way to life: full life, life as it was meant to be, eternal life. It starts and ends with him. And when we content ourselves in him, we can find rest.
So we all have a choice in the crossroads of life. There is an ancient way that is good for us when we take it. And that way has a name: Jesus. And we’ll dig into that a bit more next time.