Jeremiah 31:33a – Waiting Worshipfully

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days… Jeremiah 31:33a, New King James Version

This Friday was the first day off I remember as a "professional student," and I was determined to seize it. I was 29, and already the student had become the teacher had become the student yet again. Jarred by and unready for the transition from dutiful recipient of instruction to being the decision-maker and tone-setter, I wanted to make up for years of delayed maturity all at once.

I showed up at the government office where I wanted to work at the end of my two-year masters program to lay claim to an internship. The kindly bureaucrat I confronted was startled. The faculty does that for you, you know, she allowed. As I got to know her over time, her name was Jimmie, again and again she had to assure me as my mind leaped ahead months and years to overcompensate for past unresponsiveness, "Trust your program."

That's something of the transition between Jeremiah 31:32 and 33. God rehearses the one-sided faithfulness of His dealings with Israel and Judah. I made the previous covenant with your fathers. I lead you by the hand. I proved more powerful than Egyptian bondage. I, God says pointedly and poignantly, was a Husband to you even in your unfaithfulness.

Got it. Message received. The flesh, still present in its impatient and grandiose reckoning, wants to know what it can do and do NOW while freshly convicted in the royal of emotion rather than real, mature resolved granted by grace. God's got Jimmie's part as the brakes on the overeager in this. This new chapter will be one that He will turn the page into. This new covenant, much like the old one solemnized while Abraham slept and while the Exodus was too afraid to approach the mountain He made holy, will be offered and confirmed on His terms and in His timing. The covenant I will make, He dictates. He will do it, He declares, AFTER those days.

What days? The days He just outlined in the one-sided relationship in which He has displayed His everlasting character to Israel. Each of those chapters, as disappointing as they were to national and personal pride, and those confirmations of weakness, even self-inflicted and self-celebrated at times, God showed His strength, His grace, His absolute determination to fulfill His covenant to Abraham and make Abraham's descendents more than the stars in the sky – more in numbers, and, it turns out, more in the blazing, purified righteousness only He can bequeath. James says the real heirs of Abraham will shine like stars in the firmament.

What to do when freshly convicted, freshly overwhelmed by the depth of our sin? Very often, wait. Wait for emotion's waves to rush past, for the urge toward self-justification to make its way through us, leaving vacancy for a quieter, subtler resolved. In time, brothers and sisters, we will recognize that cheeky insistence on making up a 99 run deficit with one swing, and we will confess to its futility. Better to wait, like the proto-Church waited for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit it could lay no claim to deserve.

We wait that our sense of our new identity may seep its way deeply into our souls. We wait to know over time that we are truly Christ's, that our security in Him is more stable than the latest pangs of self-serving guilt. We wait that we might know in subsequent days, in HIS timing, the difference of serving out of gratitude, of get to rather than got to. By His grace, the nations will know, too, starting with their representatives among whom He has placed us. They will know that we wait willingly, and serve subtly meantime, confident that Christ will finish what He has started in us.