Jeremiah 31:32d – Desperate for Real Rescue

31 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— 32 not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, Jeremiah 31:31-32d, New King James Version

I was about nine, and I had a lot to look forward to in a hotel room gearing up for another day at Disney World. Rather than anticipating this grace from my parents, I was looking backward in pride. I was taking another opportunity to recount to my brother, three years younger, how worldly wise I was.

This must have gone on for too long, for my parents saw fit to interject. They saw fit to remind me how panicked I was just the day before when I thought I was lost. We reconstruct our back story that quickly. We make ourselves the star of it, and we immediately begin wielding it to our comparative advantage.

Now, a child being lost in Disney World is not the equivalent of Israelite bondage in Egypt, but my readiness to forget my helplessness has comparisons there. So it is, then, that before He continues to unveil the reality of a renewed nature by grace in Christ, the Father continues to lay out an accurate comparison for what came before. The alternative to submitting to Christ's coming kingship was Egyptian slavery, cries heard in Heaven, increasing burdens simply for aspiring to better lives, malevolent suspicion of freedom in worship, and ultimately masters who preferred to exterminate their human property rather than see it live fully God's image-bearing covenant to the nations.

This is a needed rerooting before new growth can take place. Blanching at the grisly details, we wonder if they were necessary. Did not one generation of Israelites recount to the next with every Passover the reality of the Lord's deliverance? Why dwell on Egypt's power and the Israelite forefathers powerlessness? Israel's spiritual leaders are not cocky nine-year-olds, after all. Every time they glanced at the monument at the Jordan, surely they remembered that they crossed into the fullness of God's promises by His power and not their own.

There's at least a little of that vainglorious nine-year-old in even the best instructed of us, though. Witness the ego under pressure as the religious authorities duel with Jesus. He references the reality of a heritage of slavery, and they puff up, "WE are children of Abraham. We were never slaves to any man!"

Chains forgotten, in a sense, are being re-forged for subtler and more permanent bondage. If we don't remember the power of Egypt that once held us, pornography, codependency, love of money, our gratitude for our deliverance will be fleeting, slight, and self-centered. God, we might nod, thanks for making me me. Thanks for making me better, braver than my little brother so I could prepare for a life of framing my story so that everyone else I encounter knows my superiority. Thanks, our life "prayer" might go, should we deign to acknowledge His power at all, for nudging my trajectory in the right direction.

Gone, unless we remember aright, is a healthy fear of the vestiges of Egypt's habits still in us, a penchant for constant confession that we have no true freedom unless God continues to grant it. Gone is our treasuring of the strength and gentleness of His extended hand as He guided us through what surely would have entangled us for eternity. Depending on the New Testament metaphor, we were slaves, we were at war with God, we were dead. They are grim pictures, but they must be remembered if we will see today as God sees it, if we will see the new covenant He is setting up in Jeremiah 31:32 with awe and gratitude.

Gone, likewise, is any empathy for our brother whose bondage and bewilderment is a little more evident than our own. Unless we remember that God by His power, and His power alone, delivered both the vanguard of the Exodus and its straggling rear, a marching order ordained by Him, we will start to draw distinctions of worth where He draws none. We will be loath to see the image of God in on less ostentatiously self-reliant than ourselves.