Jeremiah 30:1-3 – Feeding Our Heart's Hope

1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, 2 “Thus speaks the Lord God of Israel, saying: ‘Write in a book for yourself all the words that I have spoken to you. 3 For behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord, ‘that I will bring back from captivity My people Israel and Judah,’ says the Lord. ‘And I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.’ ”Jeremiah 30:1-2, New King James Version

The other day I talked to a veteran teacher and administrator in Lebanon over a mutual admiration Will Durant's Story of Civilization series. He extolled the habit of writing in response to what one learns in an admired text, picking up a mantra he often insists on with his students. You can buy a steak, and it won't help you. You can cook the steak, and it won't help you. You can chew the steak and remain unchanged. It is only when the steak is metabolized to become part of you that you gain its full benefit.

Jeremiah 30:1-3 shows the Lord's expert awareness that even veteran prophets need this insistence on absorption. Message after message has come to Jeremiah and has been faithfully delivered. This one's for him. Writing in a book for yourself, God instructs as emphatically as when telling Jeremiah to deliver a message to the king or in the temple. Why, these other targeted audiences promised so much more traction as potential tipping points for Jeremiah's people? Does it not seem self absorbed for Jeremiah to write to himself?

God tells us, and him, why. For, behold! God knows that His fallen human creatures reach the point of innovation quickly. We cease to wonder that He speaks to and through us. His Word, His Presence in attention to our prayers, these quickly become means to an end. We cease to behold and immediately make application to becalm or bestir others. Jeremiah wouldn't be human if he hadn't taken up the tendency to respond to the bat signal of God's message with an adrenaline rush, with some of the dread he admits to elsewhere, and with a preoccupation with the expression of the human faces in response to God's next missive.

Thus stopped from being a mere means of delivery, from being demoted from divine image-bearer to disposable tool, what is Jeremiah to behold before he moves and speaks? What are we to behold as his latter-day heirs? Four words in English, and we already must stop. The days are coming. God gave man the ability to infer, to put the pieces together, and to predict what comes next. The difference is that after man's fall, our predictions hardened from hypothesis into dogma. We as a believing audience assume no less than the future ages Peter scolds that what has been will continue unabated. The rut we settle into is dreary accommodation.

God's Word to Jeremiah, and to us, confronts this. So does A.W. Tozer in The Attributes of God: Deeper into the Father's Heart. “When God plans to bless a man, he takes this poor time-cursed creature into His hand and says., My son, I breathe into you eternity and immortality.” Often as a preparatory precursor to reminding us, again, that He placed eternity within the hearts of men, He remediates us on the reality that He can improve earthly circumstances from those we have congealed to as the new normal.

The Word Jeremiah is called to absorb and to write himself a reminder on in his own hand is God's authoritative Word. God reminds Jeremiah of this midway through the message, conceding that it is possible even for His choice servants to get used to hearing from Him. The voice that spoke the stars into existence, that bid the waves yield to dry land, He still speaks with undiminished authority.

Not only are different days coming, but they are crafted by Him as specifically as was the original world before the fall, gardened as lovingly as Eden, as much an object of Divine enthusiasm as the Promised Land toward which He originally led His people.

He sparks that inherited enthusiasm because it quickly grows dim within us. We can quickly cover what He did in the days of old with gauzy nostalgia. Just as this original audience, having been exiled, could settle into a metaphorical or backward-looking admiration for the promises of God, so can His present people. Thus, He says He is going to enact for Jeremiah 30:1-3's audience, exiles all, a reboot which allows them to appreciate His present power.

What needs to be lovingly transcribed in the book we keep only for ourselves, beloved? Where do our hopes need the iron infusion of the steak of His promises specifically to us? Where have we taken what he CAN do in the long term future on the New Earth at the expense of what he can and will enact in our line of sight, before our deaths which are promised to be precious to Him? What format would make us more viscerally aware of His wild, uncontainable love for us and interest in our present lives?

Sarah Wall calls this preserving Ebenezer moments and transcends the stream of the media as technology is empowered by grace. "Photographs also seem to have this effect for me.  I can look at a photo and be instantly carried to the posture of my heart at the time it was taken.  As much trouble as social media can be, I've really appreciated the 'Memories' feature of Facebook.  I normally make a point to look it over for this very reason.  It helps me remember." 

"For better and worse, when I glance back over the things I was writing about and the burdens I was breaking under 10 years ago, I am instantly brought back to that place. And I remember His faithfulness when I was good.  And I remember His faithfulness when my heart was adulterous.  And I marvel anew every time.  Sometimes tears will spill over on account of the joy I find there.  And sometimes the tears are because I cannot believe the capacity my heart has to be so vile when I'm chasing empty wells and lying promises. But in either case, it's always awe.  It's always wonder." 

Application of what God is teaching him from the wisdom of other books helps Kevin Swider to take ownership of Heaven's perspective on his present circumstances. Paula Koima lovingly records God's promises to her in a notebook, while reflecting back on the application of these promises in her Facebook memories over the years. These can help us to absorb that God's glory really does enter our sphere and uplift our hopes for here and hereafter.