Friday, March 25, 2016

Year 6, Day 84: Jeremiah 31

Theological Commentary: Click Here


Discipleship Focus: Provision

  • Provision: God gives us what we truly need.  God knows our needs better than we can know them.  We learn to trust God to provide for us.

As we move through Jeremiah, we find ourselves stepping more and more into the land of grace.  This is an especially unusual chapter in that we hear a prophecy given towards Israel rather than Judah.

Jeremiah did most of his prophesying towards Judah because that was the nation that was not yet in bondage.  But here we get to hear Jeremiah talk to those who are already in captivity.  In truth, they’ve been in captivity for a few hundred years.  Here Jeremiah gives them a reason to hope for the future.  God tells them that a time will come when they are no longer blind, lame, and pregnant.  {For an explanation of these three analogies, see the blog post linked above.}  Instead, God tells the people of Judah that they will become the grain, wine, and oil.  The people of Israel will go from mourning to joy.

This is a really neat point to remember.  If we recall the history of Israel – that is, Israel after the split following Solomon’s reign – we can remember that at no time was the nation loyal to God.  Their leaders were evil.  They created new places to worship with their own idols.  The people worshipped Ba’al and the Asherah.  These people could easily have been dismissed by God and forgotten.  But they aren’t God provides for them as well.  Even in their rash and bold sin, God provides for them, too.

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