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- What attributes of God’s character does this passage reveal?
- How does the passage point to Jesus?
- How should the truth of this passage change me?
- How do the events of today’s reading help you better understand the grand narrative of Scripture?
Jer. 32
God’s ways are not like ours. I think we so often struggle with who God is because we read the Bible from a human perspective. So when we read about His losing patience with His faithless people and pouring out His wrath on them, we think about our own spontaneous anger that erupts when we reach the end of our rope. But this isn’t that. God promised restoration to His people even before His foretold judgment finished playing out. He expressed His great love in the middle of His outpouring wrath.
That tells me a couple things. First, there was nothing spontaneous or reactive about God’s wrath. He planned His judgment and His restoration and brought them about at their appointed times. Second, this outpouring of His wrath was part of His great love. In God, these seemingly opposite aspects are one and the same because everything is made perfect in Him. We can’t truly grab hold of that because we aren’t perfect; we aren’t God. But we can and should be aware of it. Knowing God is not the same as understanding Him.
Again I say that part of the purpose of the Bible is so that we can know both ourselves and our incomprehensible God. He gave us these stories about the nation of Israel to teach us these things and to show us His plan for us. Just as His plans for judgment and restoration played out for Ephraim and Judah, so will His plans for the judgment of the whole world and the restoration of those who rely on Him take place at His appointed time because of His perfect love for us.
Jer. 33
I think God’s words in this chapter mean so much more than what it sounds like they mean. We tend to read them from the perspectives of time and physicality. However, I think about Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. “But whoever drinks from the water that I will give him will never get thirsty again.” (Jn. 4:14a). The woman didn’t understand and thus applied His words to her physical thirst. We, however, know that Jesus was referring to the thirst of our spirits; our true selves and not simply our physical beings.
God promises some awesome things in this chapter. He connects the fulfillment of those things with the coming of His promised Messiah. This is why the people of Jesus’ day had misplaced expectations and didn’t recognize Him for who He is. What we need to understand, however, is that true healing, peace, abundance, and joy don’t take place externally. Those things can only come from within with the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit. God did redeem the people of Israel from their captivity. But that was just the physical representation of His true promise of complete spiritual restoration through Christ. Jesus administered righteousness to us not so that we would be saved from our external circumstances, but that we would be redeemed from our spiritual exile from God.