I Set Watchmen Over You

You said the thing. You said it carefully, you said it once, and you were right.

And the man you said it to looked at you like you had insulted him, and went and did it anyway, and now there is a coolness between you that everybody in the family can feel and nobody will name.

So you are sitting there wondering whether you should have kept your mouth shut.

God has been here

"And I set watchmen over you, saying, 'Listen to the sound of the trumpet!' But they said, 'We will not listen.'" (Jeremiah 6:17)

Read who did the setting. God did.

These were not self-appointed men with opinions. He posted them. He gave them the trumpet and He told them what to say, and they stood up and said it, and the answer came back in four words. We will not listen.

The watchmen did not fail. They were posted, they blew, and the answer came back anyway. Every part of the job was done and the outcome was still exactly what it would have been if nobody had stood up at all.

The job was never the outcome

This is the hardest thing in the whole category and most of us have never had it said to us plainly.

You are not responsible for whether he listens.

Ezekiel says it in the language of blood. If the watchman blows the trumpet and the people do not take warning, their blood is on their own head and the watchman has delivered his life (Ezekiel 33:1-9). Jeremiah shows you the same arrangement from the other side, from the point of view of the men standing on the wall with a horn in their hands and a city that will not turn its head.

The measurement is not did they change. The measurement is did you blow it.

I know that sounds cold when the person who will not listen is your own son. It is not cold. It is the only thing that lets a man keep standing there year after year, because a man who grades himself on other people's obedience is going to quit, and he is going to quit right about the time he is needed most.

What the answer usually sounds like

Nobody says we will not listen. That is Jeremiah's summary of it, not the transcript.

What you get is softer. You get I hear you, followed by nothing. You get you might be right, said in a tone that ends the conversation. You get thanks, I will think about it, from a man who has already decided. You get that is just how you are, which is the most efficient sentence in the language for making a true thing sound like a personality trait.

And sometimes you get the good one, the one that hurts, where he agrees with every word, thanks you for caring enough to say it, and changes nothing at all.

Learn to hear all of those as the same answer, and stop reading them as a verdict on whether you should have spoken.

Say it right, and say it once

Being ignored does not mean you did it well. Some men get ignored because they are unbearable, and the trumpet is not to blame for that.

So a few things worth being honest about.

Did you say it to him, or about him. A thing said to your wife about your brother is not a trumpet. It is a complaint with a witness.

Did you say it once and clearly, or twelve times and vaguely. Repetition is not faithfulness. A man who brings something up every time he sees you has not blown a trumpet, he has become weather, and people put on a coat and carry on.

Did you say the actual thing. Most of us hedge the sentence down to something we can defend, and then feel unheard when he responds to what we said rather than what we meant.

And was there any love in it. Paul puts alertness and standing firm and acting like men in one breath and then adds that everything you do be done in love (1 Corinthians 16:13-14), and a warning delivered without it is just hostility carrying a verse.

If all four of those are clean, then you did the job, and his answer is his.

The long assignment

Jeremiah did this for about forty years.

Forty years of standing in front of people who did not want him there, saying the same true thing, watching it not work. He was thrown in a cistern for it. He had his scroll cut up and burned by a king who listened to it column by column and fed it into the fire as he went. At the end of his life the remnant he had warned took him to Egypt against his will, still not listening.

He is not in Scripture as a cautionary tale about ineffective communication. He is in there as a faithful man.

That should reset what you think this looks like when it is going well. A watch kept faithfully and a watch that produces results are two different things, and Scripture is far more interested in the first one.

The Watchman they would not hear

There is a Man who stood over that same city and wept over it.

He said He had wanted to gather them the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and they were not willing. He said it out loud, in public, days before they killed Him. He was not ignored because He was harsh or unclear or badly timed. He was the perfect Watchman with the perfect warning, and the answer was still no.

So if you are sitting there tonight thinking that a warning nobody heeded means you got it wrong, look at Him and think again.

And notice what He did after they refused. He did not withdraw and let them have what they had coming. He went to the cross for the people who would not listen, which is the only reason any of us are here, because every one of us was in that crowd at some point.

Blow it once, and stay

Two things, and they go together.

If there is something you have been rehearsing and not saying because you are pretty sure it will not land, say it. Clearly, to his face, once, in love. Then stop. You are not required to make it work.

And then stay in the relationship. That is the second half and it is the half men skip. The temptation after a warning is ignored is to go cold, to make him feel the distance, to let the silence do what the sentence did not. That is not a watchman. That is a man taking his ball home.

Say the true thing. Take the answer. Keep showing up on his birthday.

That is what standing a watch over somebody who will not listen looks like, and there is no shorter version of it.