Jeremiah 31:21 – A Wanton Wanderlust

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“Set up signposts,
Make landmarks;
Set your heart toward the highway,
The way in which you went.
Turn back, O virgin of Israel,
Turn back to these your cities. Jeremiah 31:21, New King James Version

"We are quite ignorant of the real power of our habits," writes CS Lewis in a 1942 letter to Mrs. Percival Wiseman, " until we try to give them up."

Picture it. Here is a great mind acknowledged by the world as an Oxford don and by the Church fed by his insights many decades after his death. He and Mrs. Wiseman sit in a world set afire, the futility of man's assumptions exposed to their ashen foundations. Still, Lewis confesses the nearly intractable power of habit.

Something similar, humbling, hopeless but for the grace of God, is going on in Jeremiah 31:21. In this case, on the scale opposite of depravity's power of habit are episodes of giddy goodness. God has traced them like so much ad copy up to now in Jeremiah 31.

His faithfulness to bring His people back to the land will be proven. They will be productive, at some point growing grapes on mountains. They will be secure. The sentry on his overwatch will be able to come down and celebrate God's goodness. The virgins will dance. The soul of the priest, even, will be satiated. They will even see the same landmarks of home they once took for granted differently. Joy in God AND what He does is real and pervasive.

And yet, He warns that circumspection is required with respect to recidivism. Be aware, God cautions, of the power of discontentment, even in Me, even in all I have done in your hearing and in your sight, indisputably in your lifetimes. Though He made them virgins again, renew them from the inside out, old habits still lurk at the door. We don't drift into good things.

There is a beautiful, binocular depth perception here at this precipice. We have seen what God does by His sovereign grace. Only He can make a people virginal again. He moves national events according to His foretold purposes, both uproots and preserves His people according to His plan that is longer than a lifetime. He sets His own watch against ennui on the part of His people and preserves their ability to enjoy genuine excitement in Him again.

Yet, by that same pervasive grace, He assigns and empowers human responsibility here in Jeremiah 31:21. Set up signposts, He charges. Make landmarks, He insists. Set your hearts, says He Who pulls down idolatrous strongholds within those hearts. Turn back, He nearly pleads, and enjoy My blessings as an expression of My gracious character in which you are content.

He is calling His people, then and now, to a vigilant awareness of our souls' condition. We don't need to wait for the dramatic equivalent of exile, again. By the signposts and landmarks He grants, by measuring ourselves against the standards of His Word, by prayer, by seeking connection with His covenant community wherein brothers and sisters would tell us of the backsliding they see, we don't have to make a shipwreck of faith before we turn around. Even by seeing His action in the lives of others in our city, our sphere, we can turn again to rejoicing and realize with repentance the reluctance of our feet to stay at home in Him.

If God's effectual call was thus to His people in Jeremiah's day, how much more passionate and proven is it after the cross, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit? The father, by this point, has planted His own signpost in the cross of His Son. It speaks forever of affection no wandering thoughts or feet could gratify. Need a landmark? Look at the tomb He has emptied, designating His Son the firstborn of many brethren. Need novelty? See what He continues to do in the lives of these, consistent with the steady metronome of His character, and yet a little different each time.

If we have a hard time feeling at home in His grace expressed consistently in the same settings, the questing heart can likewise be satisfied in Him. We need not wander for wandering's sake, as rebellion against the pleasant places wherein He has drawn life's lines for us. The Earth is ours, and the fullness thereof.

Scan the horizon, and even still we won't know the fullness of our blessing. Ask, He says, and He will give us the nations. Ask, then, that the Spirit sift our hearts' motivations to determine where we seek the new as rebellion and recidivism, and where, to whatever degree, we seek it because we would see another aspect of His glory, would know yet more evidence that He Who sends us to all the nations is already at work there. Even old habits can be redeemed, enlarged, as they find their new purpose in Him.