Preparation
God looks to Jeremiah and tells him to write something
prophetic. Even though the people of
Judah were just now going into bondage, God wants to give them a lesson about
the time when they will come out of bondage.
This is actually a very strong act of compassion.
God knows how difficult it will be for the Hebrew people to leave
their homeland. They will feel like
God’s promises weren’t forever. They
will feel hopeless. They will not see
their own guilt in the matter at first.
It is going to be a difficult time for them.
Thus, God sends a word of promise to them through Jeremiah. There will be a future. There will be a restoration. The promises won’t be forgotten. God is at work.
I wonder what it was like for those people going into the
Babylonian captivity to look to the future.
Were they filled with hope? Could
they focus on anything but their own misery?
How difficult was it for them to stay faithful? How many turned away from God? Since the majority of the people were already
rebellious against God, how many came back to Him? I wonder about all of these questions.
I think this is fertile soil for us to consider in our day. God has asked us to follow His Son. He has told us that it will be
difficult. He has told us that there
will be hard choices to make. There will
be sacrifices. The temptations of the
world will be many. We will have
opportunity after opportunity to rebel and turn away. But He has given us the promise of eternal
life with Him if we stay the course.
In many respects we are like those early captives headed off to
Babylon. We have a future hope, but our
current reality will make it hard to hang onto that future hope. How many will hang on? How many will fall along the way? How many who aren’t currently hanging on will
learn to hang on as time goes on? These
questions are at the heart of what it means to follow in obedience to the
identity that God gives to us.
Breaking the Yoke
God declares several times through Jeremiah that the day is coming
when He will break the yoke that is upon the Hebrew people. Quite literally, it is possible to take this
passage to mean that there is a day when the yoke of Babylon will be broken
away from them. We do know that day
comes under the Persians. There is a
literal fulfillment of this passage.
However, as I often spoke of in Isaiah, I wonder if there is a
double (or even triple) prophetic voice being said here. After all, while the Hebrew people were
allowed to return to Jerusalem under the Persians they weren’t exactly
“free.” Then along came the Greeks and
there was no freedom whatsoever. I think
we all know what happened when Rome moved into town. After Rome, the Muslims came in and that was
pretty much the end of the story.
So could it also be that there is a spiritual interpretation
here. When Jesus Christ came, He
preached, taught, and lived a life that was free from the bondage of sin. Jesus was about living a life in which the
yoke of sin was broken away from our necks.
We still might be in the world, but we need not be of it! Is it possible to read this passage as being
spiritually fulfilled under Christ and not necessarily fulfilled under the
Persians?
Of course, there is also a third possibility. There will come a day when Christ returns to
this world. There will come a day when
sin and death are entirely put away.
There will come a day when all enemies have been spiritually and
physically put under the feet of Christ.
That day has not yet come. I
believe in that day we will see the true ultimate fulfillment of this passage.
That is the day when we shall truly live in quiet and ease. After being disciplined, that is the day when
God will ultimately cure us from what ails us.
That is the day when those who devour us shall be devoured. Then we shall be restored to health. Then we shall truly be His people and He
shall truly be our God.
The Incurable Ailment
As I finish this blog post, I must comment on the multiple times
in this chapter that the Lord says, “You hurt is incurable and your wound is
grievous.” What an incredibly profound
description of sinfulness.
As I pondered this thought in conjunction with the tri-fold understanding
of this chapter that I unveiled above, I couldn’t also wonder about how this
passage is to be understood.
It is possible that there is a physical understanding. The people will learn repentance in
captivity. They will come back to the
Lord in a worldly sense. They will focus
and order their life around God. But we
know humanity. This doesn’t cure the
incurable sin of humanity.
In Christ, we see the cure.
Christ dies on the cross. He is
the cure for the incurable. However, we
ourselves are not yet cured. The cure is
present, but it is not yet fully and completely in effect. Spiritually we are cured, but the flesh is
still weak.
Then we die. Paul tells us
several times that we must be crucified with Christ. We die to Christ; we die to this world. The day will come when we are remade by God
for the purposes of eternity. Only God
can cure the incurable both physically and spiritually.
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