“At that time, declares the Lord, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jer. 31:1-3). What a scene! Those words – dripping with promise – begin a chapter with hardly a parallel in all Scripture. And to hear them in their context! After so much rebuke from the “iron prophet of the LORD” (Jeremiah 1:18), for a people who would lose their homeland, their daily life, and their temple, for a people who would struggle in a foreign nation with seemingly no hope of return, Jeremiah bids them to lean in and to listen: there will come a day of rest.
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