Jeremiah spent most of career as a harsh-voiced prophet of warning. When catastrophe came, he spoke God’s words of hope.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the thirty-first chapter of the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:31-34). Jeremiah is my favorite of the prophets; this section is one of my favorites of his book. It’s frequently called the “Book of Consolation.”
You see, Jeremiah had spent most of his career warning the people of Judah, and particularly the leadership of Judah, that their actions were in violation of God’s covenant with them. They were running the risk — and at some point Jeremiah announced that they had gone beyond the line of risk — of forfeiting God’s protection for them as a nation.
Indeed, in Jeremiah’s time the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, not once but twice, and after that second invasion Jerusalem’s walls lay in ruin and its temple had been burned. The Book of Consolation comes from the depth of Judah’s loss and grief: the loss of their independence, the loss of their place of worship, the loss of their prospect for a future. Into that moment Jeremiah brought words of hope.
“The days are coming, says the Lord when I will make a new covenant with the House of Judah and the House of Israel, not like the old covenant, which they broke… I will take my law and I will write it upon their hearts. They shall be my people. I shall be their God.
Christians tend to associate Jeremiah’s new covenant with the new covenant that we understand that God has made with us in Jesus, and indeed there is good reason to think so. We do have a new relationship with God, one that God made with us by coming to us in Jesus, by going to the cross, by returning to life again through resurrection.
We have to admit, however, that we have not got a covenant that is written upon our hearts. We are no more able to keep the expectations God has of us then were Jeremiah’s contemporaries 2500 years and more ago. We still stumble, we still fall, we still fail to meet God’s expectations. But in the harshest moments that those people knew, in the midst of the most terrible calamity that they could imagine, God came to that harsh-voiced prophet and said: I have words of hope.
And let that be true for us, that in our most shadowed days, in our most troubled circumstances, let God speak words of hope to each and every one of us: words of hope made manifest in Jesus, words of hope that still lie ahead to be fulfilled, words of hope written upon our hearts, carrying us towards the fulfillment of that new covenant.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
