Stand in the Ways and Ask for the Old Paths

The accusation that gets made, and it is almost never made unkindly, is that the young want something new.

That is the shape of it at the table. The young want it modern. They want it easier. They want it the way the Americans do it. And the older ones say this with real sorrow, because they carried something a long way at a cost nobody younger can properly estimate, and they can feel it thinning in their hands.

I want to say plainly that I am not after anything new. I have never once wanted a newer version of this. What I have wanted, since I was about eighteen, is something older.

Older than the way we do it now. Older than the way it was done in the village. Older than the arrangements that were made under a government that made everybody careful, and older than the arrangements before that, all the way back to the thing all of those arrangements were originally built to protect.

That is not a modern impulse and it is not a young one. It is a sentence in Jeremiah, and God is the one saying it.

The instruction is to stop and ask

Here is the verse, and it has four commands in it before it has a promise.

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. (Jeremiah 6:16, King James Version)

Stand ye in the ways. Stop where the roads meet. That is the first instruction, and it is an instruction to stop moving, which is exactly what nobody in a family argument ever does.

And see. Look at what is actually in front of you.

And ask for the old paths. Not invent. Not improve. Ask, which is a word that assumes somebody else knows and that you do not, and assumes the road already exists and is older than you.

That is the least revolutionary sentence in the world, and it is the exact motion a young person in this community is usually accused of refusing to make.

You are being told to stop and ask, and the asking is the obedience. Jeremiah 6:16 makes the command a request for something older, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who is described as guiding rather than inventing, which is the same motion in a different word.

He does not say every old path is the good one

Read the middle of the verse again, because there is a distinction in it that a person can miss twice.

ask for the old paths, where is the good way

He does not say the old paths and the good way are the same thing. He says: ask for the old ones, and then, among them, where is the good way. There is a sorting inside the sentence.

Which is honest, because everybody's grandparents did some things that were the good way and some things that were simply how it was done in that valley in that decade. Age alone has never made anything true. A thing that has been done for four hundred years has been done for four hundred years, and that is all that fact establishes.

And notice this also cuts against the newer instinct with equal force. If age does not make a thing right, then newness does not either, and a young man who assumes that whatever the older ones do must be the problem is running the same lazy argument in the opposite direction.

You have been given a sorting to do, and He put it inside the instruction rather than leaving it to instinct. Jeremiah 6:16 asks where the good way is among the old ones, and it is the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 2:12, who is given that we might know the things freely given of God rather than sorting by age.

Moses tells them to ask the old men

If you think this is a young man's dodge, look at where the same instruction sends you.

Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. (Deuteronomy 32:7)

Ask thy father. Ask thy elders. The command to go back further is a command that walks you straight into a conversation with the generation above you, and it puts you in the posture of a person receiving rather than correcting.

This is the part that most young men skip and it is the part that makes the whole thing honest. If what is wanted is genuinely older, then the people who carried it are a resource and not an obstacle, and the conversation that has been avoided is the one the verse sends a person into.

I would add something I have learned the hard way. Ask the question you actually have, and then be quiet for a long time. Most of the older ones in this community have never once been asked to explain something, only to enforce it, and it takes them a while to find the answer because nobody has ever wanted it.

You are sent toward them by this instruction and not away from them. Deuteronomy 32:7 says ask thy father and thy elders, and it is the same Spirit, Ephesians 4:3, by whom the bond of peace is kept while a hard conversation is happening inside it.

What is at the far end of every old path

Here is why going back further is not a nostalgia project, and it is the only reason the exercise is worth doing.

At the end of the oldest path there is not a better practice. There is a Person, and He has not changed since any of the practices were built.

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. (Hebrews 13:8)

That verse sits in a chapter about remembering the ones who taught us, and it is the anchor for the whole enterprise. What is being looked for behind the arrangements is not a purer arrangement. It is Him, unchanged, the same one my grandmother prayed to in a language I half speak.

Which means the search is not a comparison between two cultures and never was. Nobody's version of a service is the old path. The old path runs under all of them and predates every one of them, and everybody at that table is standing on it or looking for it.

You are looking for a Person at the end of it, and He has not moved since your grandparents found Him. Hebrews 13:8 says the same yesterday and today and for ever, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 2:18, that both generations have their access to the same Father.

The thing promised at the end is rest

The verse ends with a promise, and the promise is not accuracy.

and ye shall find rest for your souls.

Not: you shall be correct. Not: you shall win the argument at the table. Rest.

That tells you what the whole exercise is for. A person doing this properly is not assembling a case. He is trying to stop being tired, and the tiredness comes from carrying a hundred requirements he cannot rank, which is a specific and exhausting kind of work.

And when Jesus uses that same phrase, He attaches it to Himself and to a yoke that fits.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:29-30)

Notice He does not offer no yoke. There is still a yoke and there is still learning. What changes is that it fits, which is the difference Peter was pointing at in Acts 15 when he called the other thing a weight no one had ever managed to bear.

You are promised rest at the end of this, and rest is what He named as the outcome. Jeremiah 6:16 ends on rest for your souls and Matthew 11:29 repeats it in His own mouth, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, John 14:26, which is a word about rest and not about victory.