The Daily Word
The reason God allowed this tragic and traumatic event to happen was the refusal of the people and their leaders to turn from persistent idol worship and all the sin which that entailed in that period of history. Prophets like Jeremiah and others faithfully urged the people to turn back to the one true God, but they were ignored and even punished for preaching things the people did not want to hear. And there is a lesson there for us in our own times, for God says He will not always plead with us and if we continue to resist His calls to change, then He will leave us alone in silence and alienation from Him. Which is exactly what happened before the exile when He lost all patience with both Israel and Judah and allowed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple to be destroyed and virtually all the population to be killed or carried off to exile.
But a wonderful verse in Jeremiah 33 pointed forward, firstly to a time when the people would return form exile and the books of Nehemiah and Ezra both record those events. So the verse, even in those dark times was a cause for hope. BUT, it also had a prophetic meaning, pointing even further forward to the coming of Jesus, God’s Son into the world. The verse simply says, ”And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity”.
More than a message of hope for the People of Israel, this verse points forward to the victory of Jesus over sin when He died on the cross at Calvary, paying the price for all sin and allowing God to forgive our sin and indeed to cleanse us from all iniquity. In a hard to understand book like Jeremiah, this little nugget of gold shines out to confirm what we already know in our own lives, IF we have Jesus as our Saviour.
Article written by Brian Preston, Elder @SFGH Church
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