Chapter 32

A brief note here – Thank you to my readers for helping me stay on track – today marks 100 consecutive days of reading and understanding God’s word!

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It’s weird how life goes. Jeremiah was for years the one voice of God, predicting disaster when nobody else would believe the truth.

Now things are the other way around. Disaster is on the horizon, and people are really nervous. Suddenly – imagine the drama here! – Jeremiah comes into the Town Hall, as all seems lost, and plops a bag of cash down. He is intending to buy his cousin’s field.

Now, let’s be sure we understand this. Jeremiah has been preaching the warning of the Exile from Israel since early chapters. Finally, the city is under siege, and its fall becomes inevitable.

God wants to explain to the people of the city that one day this city will be back; so he uses a vivid picture. He buys a field.

That doesn’t seem like much, but remember that the people are under siege and scared witless here. So God wants to explain to His people that they will be back.

How to do that? Let’s see – loudspeakers haven’t been invented. Likewise we can’t ring their cellular phones. What are we going to do?

God’s solution is to tell Jeremiah to go and buy his cousin’s land. This is significant in their culture; land was preferentially sold to others in the family, so that none of the parcels of land would ever permanently leave the tribe to which it had been given.

This was a powerful statement. Jeremiah was willing to put aside the siege that was currently happening so that people would see a return in the future. There would have been no more definite way of communicating that Jeremiah saw this exile as having an end.

How does this connect with us?

Well, aside from being a pretty cool story, it’s a good picture to us of God’s promises. When God makes a promise, it is something you can rest on – it is guaranteed to come true.

Sometimes we find it difficult to believe God. Often this is because of our own experiences and/or hurts.

Since God has been Human, He understands that; but He does not fail to keep His promises, no matter what we do.

We have many promises in the Bible. Some of these are universal – that is, they are available to us any time (e.g. Salvation). Others are situational – that is, they don’t happen to everyone, just certain people (e.g. If you are in court for following Him, Christ promises that you will know what to say).

Every single one of these promises is something you can trust. God NEVER forgets one, never breaks one.