Restored

Yet God, after our many rebellions, treats us in salvation in the same way he treated Judah. Because of Christ, we are healed from the disease of sin. Because of Christ, we have him to stand in our defense. Because of Christ, we have hope that we are actually a part of the bride of Christ and forever wed to him.

The desperation of my situation was not fake; it was real. Without Christ I was genuinely destitute. Yet the power of the gospel is stronger than my plight. My life with Christ is the light that overcomes the darkness that was my life without Christ.

This gospel-centric way of reading Jeremiah is not forced, as the next section demonstrates.

Jeremiah 30:18-22

The picture of restoration in this section is rich and encouraging. Notice the language of completeness: “every city . . . every citadel.” With all that God has taken away, he will also give. This is not a temporary restoration; this is a complete restoration. Yet we know how this ends: God does allow the city to be rebuilt under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah. The exiles do return. There is a future and a hope. But then the city is once again given to Roman occupation and destroyed in AD 70. So how, in any reasonable sense, is this fulfilled?

Brueggemann’s suggestion, that a text such as this is to be viewed in a promissory sense and not a predictive sense, is helpful (To Build, to Plant, 42). That is, the focus here is not when and how this will be fulfilled but that it will be fulfilled. This is more promise than prediction.

There is a sense that this will be fulfilled in the prophet’s time, relatively speaking. The exiles do return to Jerusalem. There is also a spiritual sense in which this is fulfilled in the time of Christ when he restores all things spiritually and brings an invisible, but real, kingdom. Finally, this is fulfilled in the new Jerusalem that John sees coming down (Rev 21–22). In that moment all the promises of the prophets are ultimately fulfilled.

This is what theologians call the “horizons” of prophecy (see Wright, Message of Jeremiah, 304). There is the horizon of the time of the prophet, the horizon of the coming of Christ, and the final horizon of the new heavens and the new earth. The challenge of interpretation is to understand on which horizon the text is to be viewed.

One could say that all things are fulfilled in relation to Christ and the gospel message. The prophets anticipate Christ, Christ comes, and then his obedience to the will of the Father executes the plan to consummate all things by Christ. This is to reverse the language of Colossians 1:16: “Everything was created by him . . . through him and for him.” The Old Testament is for Christ, the New Testament is through Christ, and the Revelation is a reality by the obedience of Christ. Anticipation, execution, and consummation.

Jeremiah 30:23-24

The final section is sobering. It reminds God’s people that the coming storm cannot be stopped. Yet even this judgment is an expression of his integrity. Jeremiah writes,

The Lord’s burning anger will not turn back

until he has completely fulfilled the purposes of his heart.

In time to come you will understand it.

The harshest fulfillments of prophecy still remind us that God keeps his word. He is immutable. He always makes a promise to protect the weak and bring justice on the oppressors.

Jeremiah 30 is a text of hope in a dark time. God had promised them immediate hope and ultimate hope, but the ultimate hope would come on another horizon altogether. Let’s end at the beginning.

God made all things in the creation and then destroyed all things in the flood. However, Noah was too much like his father Adam, and the legacy of sin and separation from God simply proliferated with the race. God then started over with a new race—a physical race of people but a people who would be his through a covenant instituted by God. God initiated this covenant through Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3.

The Lord said to Abram:

Go out from your land,

your relatives,

and your father’s house

to the land that I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation,

I will bless you,

I will make your name great,

and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,

I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt,

and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Notice the three parts of the covenant: God would give them a land, make them numerous, and make them a blessing to all people.

One way to understand Scripture is the progression of how God kept the three parts of the covenant.

When the famine forced the young family into the land of Egypt, they could not envision what would transpire. They would go in a family of seventy and emerge a nation of a few hundred thousand. They prospered so much that the Egyptian government was afraid they would rise up and force them into slavery.

After the exodus from Egypt, and their subsequent rebellion-induced wilderness wandering, they received the land God promised them. This was the land of Canaan.

It is at this point hard to see how they are a blessing to all nations. The answer is, of course, that they are a blessing to all the nations through the promised one, the Messiah. Jesus would come for every tribe and tongue. He would be a light to the nations (Isa 49:6), and all people would worship him (Phil 2:10; Rev 4–5).

As mentioned, Jeremiah 30 touches these horizons. There are promises that will be fulfilled a few years after they were declared by Jeremiah, some not until the time of Christ, and others still not until the new Jerusalem comes down. One way to view this would be through cycles of bondage and freedom.

Jeremiah is prophesying in the time that only two-thirds of the promise is complete. The Messiah has not yet come to bring all things to himself. Jeremiah’s message of restoration would not be completely fulfilled in the lifetime of those listening to the message.

Today the Abrahamic covenant is fulfilled, but not completely. In a real sense the covenant promise to Abraham was a missionary covenant. The blessing to the nations is a message that has not yet reached all the nations. The covenant, in this missionary sense, is more fully complete when we extend the missionary call to the world.