“For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.” Malachi 3:6

Hello, Friends. 🙂 How is your daily Bible study coming along? It’s amazing how much of God’s Word you can take in, just reading a chapter a day. The kids and I have gone through Genesis, Exodus, and the Gospel of John this year. The exciting thing for me is that they have been initiating what they want to read next, and they have chosen for us to study Jeremiah next.

When we read the Gospel of John, we saw Jesus tell people that He is the exact representation of His Father and that knowing Him ensured that they knew what God the Father was like. And, as we are working our way through Jeremiah, we are consistently seeing parallels between God’s words to Israel and Judah in the OT and Jesus’s conversations with His disciples in the NT.

In Jeremiah (5:10) God says of Jerusalem, “Go up through her vine rows and destroy, but do not execute a complete destruction; Strip away her branches, For they are not the Lord’s…”

The people did not genuinely know God, and we see Him removing those who are spiritually dead. This parallels Jesus’s analogy of our relationship with Him in John 15:5-6 when He said, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dried up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.”

To intimately know and serve God is life.

Jeremiah 2: 20-22 is an interesting passage. It is interpreted very differently between the NIV and the ASV or KJV, but it refers to the yoke and bonds that the Israelites once wore. God freed them from oppression (We know how He rescued them from Egypt, as well as many other foreign oppressors from the time of the judges on…) and Israel agreed to serve the Lord, yet they were not faithful.

In a continuation of the cycle the Jews seemed to always insist upon, (fall away > oppression from foreign lands > return to God > Rescue and Restoration) Jer. 5:19 says to Judah, “As you have forsaken Me and served foreign gods in your land, so you will serve strangers in a land that is not yours.” In their desire to be like the nations around them and their lust for the idols of those lands, they walked out of the Presence of the Lord and His protection. Their willing slavery to sin led to their enslavement to Babylon.

But what was God’s heart for them?

He continually called them to repentance so that they could receive the forgiveness that He longed to give them. Jeremiah 6:16, “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, We will not walk in it.”

Jesus echoed this sentiment in Matthew 11:28-30. “Come unto Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

The last parallel I would like to share with you begins in Jeremiah 5:1. God says to go up and down the streets of Jerusalem in search of ONE person who does justice and seeks the truth. If He could find just one… he would forgive the entire city.

One righteous person to stand in the gap for all the others was not found in Jeremiah’s day, but He was born later. And He did not only stand in the gap for Jerusalem; He died for the whole world, that whoever trusts in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

He is the Lion of Judah, and His name is

Jesus.

I hear people say that the God of the Old Testament was full of wrath and that the God of the New Testament is loving, but that just isn’t true. The fact is that He is the same God.

Always holy and just.

Always loving and merciful.

His justice demands that He punish sin, but he has always offered forgiveness, and His mercies will continue to be new each morning. Because God never changes, we are ensured eternal life when we depend on Jesus to stand in our place. He has paid for all sin, past, present and future (1 Peter 3:18). Only when Jesus returns or we take our last breath will it be too late to repent, and no one knows when that will be. Yet, let me encourage you to choose to serve Him today. The rewards are out of this world. Every day is an adventure, and the more you get to know Him, the more you will love Him!

He is THE BEST.

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