Chapter 3

Jeremiah’s message from God in chapter 3 is quite shocking to read.

The brutal frankness with which God speaks is confronting. And when all is said and done, Christians remain (as they have been) somewhat ambivalent about sex. We don’t feel comfortable discussing it (and the world knows that to be one of our hang-ups, by the way!).

So when we read of how God sees Israel’s and Judah’s behaviour, we’re often a little stunned.

Sadly we’re not stunned at the actual behaviour. We’re stunned that God describes it so openly – that God uses the metaphor of sex to demonstrate His feelings about His peoples’ behaviour.

Isn’t it tragic – we’re repulsed by the words God uses, not so much by the activity it describes!

But that’s exactly how God sees it. Remember, the relationship between a man and his wife is INTENDED to reflect God’s relationship with humankind! The traditional marriage ceremony includes the line that Jesus “sanctified marriage by attending the marriage at Cana”. That always seemed a long bow to draw, especially when you look at all the other passages which use this image. Marriage isn’t holy because Jesus went to a wedding! Marriage is holy because IT IS AN IMAGE OF GOD AND US!

God extends the metaphor further. He talks of how he gave Israel her divorce papers, and hoped that Judah would observe and learn. Yet Judah continued to “walk the streets.”

Friends, to God it is shocking and repulsive when we choose sin instead of Him. It is vile, disgusting, distasteful, odious and dozens of other words, many of which are too archaic to make any sense to most of us.

Why are we not shocked when we see it?

Probably for the same reason that seeing malnourished African kids on TV no longer shocks us. It’s something we’ve become accustomed to, something we see all the time.

We lose sight of how we should see it.

God is also talking of how the clock can’t be turned back. Right now I am observing as a non-Christian friend deals with infidelity in his marriage. Both he and his wife are committed to sorting through the problems and getting back to where they once were.

That should settle it, right? Since they’re both wanting to get past this, surely they should just be able to forgive each other and move on, yes?

No, actually. He and another woman didn’t just have an “affair[1]”. They had sex. He went to someone who was not his wife and had sex with her. And if it is shocking to us, how much more shocking is it to his wife?

It will take time and effort – possibly years – for this marriage to be rebuilt. I hope they work things out, but there’s always the possibility that it won’t happen.

Sure, the desire to forgive and forget is an important part of the whole process, but that’s not the whole story. Trust has been lost, and trust must be re-built from the ground up, one painstaking brick at a time. And whatever is built cannot and will not be the same as what they had before. As Jeremiah says in verses 1 – 3,

“If a man's wife walks out on him and marries another man, can he take her back as if nothing had happened?”

That’s the bad news. But there’s good news to go with it.

God has planned what He’ll say to Israel/Judah when they return!

You know the Prodigal son? It’s not a new revelation of God’s personality. You can see here in this book that God always has the willingness to take back the prodigal!

It’s not a matter of letting things be like they were before. It’s a darn sight better than that. God is planning to make things NEW. He’s planning to build a new covenant, one which will leave the old one for dead – people will no longer say “Remember the good old days of the Ark of the Covenant?”, because the new covenant will be better.

I think my message for tonight is simply this – God is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. We know that. But guess what – that means that today, just as back in Jeremiah’s day, God is willing to take back the repenting sinner! If it is you or me coming back to God, God is excited about it, just as He was for Israel and Judah!

Look at the language used here – you see God’s longing for a return. “Come back – I can heal your wanderlust!”

And there’s the promise that everything will be repaired.

This is actually a little bit of a holy moment for me, because without anyone else’s words, I can see that this is a prediction of Messiah’s coming. I don’t need any other commentary to tell me this. I feel that little prickle on the back of my spine, telling me of the presence of something supernatural.

Perhaps I’m going to need to get used to this feeling in Jeremiah.

[1] Isn’t it strange how we give such an innocuous name to such a horrifying betrayal of trust?