Jeremiah 31:11 – A Relished, Redemptive Ransom

 
For the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
And ransomed him from the hand of one stronger than he. Jeremiah 31:11, New King James Version

In John Grisham's novel The Testament, billionaire Troy Phelan is reconsidering his choices. His children squander and squabble over his wealth. His oldest made such a mess of his business that he ruminates over having to devote his best people's time to straightening it out. Phelan decides to write off his previous familial investments, in a manner of speaking. He will pay off their debts incurred up to the moment he dies, and be done with them. His money will go elsewhere, to an illegitimate child engaged in foreign Gospel missions.

Although this makes an interesting premise among men, the opposite emotion from God in Jeremiah 31:11 is more intriguing. Whatever the cost of this tycoon's previous hopes for an investment in his children, God's was infinitely greater. Yet, God does not seek to distance Himself from this active effort. He brings it up and charges Jeremiah to do the same. If God has a resume, or a marquee, or a portfolio, redeeming Jacob is on it. Other parents and grandparents whip out pictures of their kids while cuddly and comparatively innocent. God talks about redemption in gripping detail.

And this evidence of the effusive tenderness of His heart was only the beginning, was only a practice run, a dress rehearsal. Save a nation which spitefully forsook His promises from the extinction and subservience they deserve? Sure, He can do that. Reestablish them in the land He said would be theirs for a thousand generations, all while other countries so uprooted are intermingled and forgotten to history? Sure. This is good, and important enough to Him to preserve it for us in Jeremiah 31:11, but there's more.

On the other side of Calvary, living out our experience as part of a united, blood-bought people who were not a people, we can't pass over the words God celebrates, redeemed and ransomed, and merely think, good for them at a point in the past. This is more than Israel's promise, as great as that promise was, as potent as its picture was in showing God, King of Kings, as greater than Nebuchadnezzar whom God used to chasten His people. When ransomed and redeemed role into our ears, when they resonate in our hearts, we identify with the true cost.

We serve a Savior, after all, Whom Isaiah foretells is SATISFIED with the price established before the foundation of the world that He would pay and with the effectual results. We, his bought people, progress in fits and starts, here a little more like Him then yesterday, there regressing or at least more aware of an area in which we need His active grace to progress. He, though, sees the sweeping arc, the Scriptural certainty that He will present us spotless before His Father. Thus, when the Trinity recalls ransom and redemption, there is no whispered tone, no writing off, no relegation to regret.

How can this expression, insistence of the Father's heart change our horizontal, human-to-human relationships? Jesus connects for us in one of His parables, describing a man who owed the national debt to a great king, was forgiven it, and yet refused to extend forgiveness on a minor matter. Our King celebrates forgiveness and its cost in Jeremiah 31:11. He flies it on His flag. He shows it for most in His character. There is no place, then, among those so bought four lingering resentments, for probationary precautions.

If our relationships, entered into by faith, have cost us, we thereby enter into the great fellowship of Christ's suffering. If we recall unrequited love extended to our brothers and our sisters, we can follow those thoughts through to their conclusion of the cross. In these risky extensions, we got to join Him in the business of our new family. We got to be disappointed, maybe even wounded, and got to experience the healing in His stripes. Where earthly fellowship falls short of wholeness, in spite of our efforts in so far true reconciliation lies with us, we can look forward to the completed work of grace and mercy resounding forever more around Christ's throne.