From Moses to Jeremiah
Study of the Prophet Jeremiah, circa 1770
“And ye shall seek Me and find Me when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.” - Jer. 29:31
I learned this verse in high school and have treasured ever since. What a comforting promise! They LORD will be found by those who seek Him. He is watching. He notices the inclination of the heart. He hears our prayers, and His heart responds with tender joy.
What I did not know until last week is that Jeremiah was reminding his listeners of a much older prophecy. He was recalling God’s word spoken through Moses, knowing it was given precisely for the time in which they lived. Jeremiah was called to sound an alarm in Judah. The LORD was about to render judgment. Their time was running out. He had put up with their idolatry long enough. But of course, the people did not listen. They did not heed the prophet’s warning. Jerusalem was taken. The Temple was destroyed. The people ran to Egypt or were taken as captives to Babylon.
But Jeremiah’s work did not end with judgement. He continued writing and serving the LORD’s people from his exile in Egypt. He wrote words of comfort, like the verse above, reminding his people that though they had broken covenant, the LORD would keep His word. His love would never fail.
Here is the passage from Deuteronomy 4 which Jeremiah references in his book.
25 “When you father children and children's children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, so as to provoke him to anger, 26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed. 27 And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. 28 And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. 29 But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. 31 For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.
The LORD does not forget His covenant, even when His people trade the glory of His covenant for idols of stone and wood. He is always ready and eager to be found. But He will not tolerate idolatry. The reason, He explains, is that creation was given to all the nations. It is understandable, perhaps even excusable, for other people to seek God of creation by imitating the things He has made. But Israel alone had heard the Living God speak.
32 “For ask now of the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of. 33 Did any people ever hear the voice of a god speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and still live? 34 Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes? 35 To you it was shown, that you might know that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him. 36 Out of heaven he let you hear his voice, that he might discipline you. And on earth he let you see his great fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire.
For children of Israel, making idols was equivalent to denying their history, their calling, and their supernatural birth as a nation. As Christians, grafted into the people of God, very few of us are tempted to burn incense to statues made of wood or stone. We are, however, tempted to forget our supernatural birth. We find it easy to trade the glory of the New Covenant for things this world values. We are prone to forget that we have been called out of the world, from darkness into light, and we must live in the light as Jesus is in the light. If we do not, we will find ourselves disciplined, just like our spiritual fathers. And just like them, when we lose our way, we must seek the LORD with all our hearts in order to find Him.
Knowing that God never forgets His covenant, I am drawn to pray this prayer for Jews living in the modern state of Israel. The politics of the current war are too complex for me to parse. I only know that God is longing, He is waiting to be found again by His people. So I pray that those to whom He has covenanted Himself will seek Him with all their hearts, and so be found by the God of their fathers.