A Fresh Start

Passage: Jeremiah 31:27-34

Jeremiah speaks to a people who have painted themselves into a corner. They are in a relationship whose conditions they’ve violated too many times to be able to undo the damage. God has told his people that if they live by his rules, everything will go well for them. The converse is true, as well: that if they abandon God and his rules, he’ll abandon them to the arbitrary whim of a merciless world. God has also told his people that their relationship with him is collective. They live out the rigors of God’s Law in community, instructing and encouraging each other to keep the faith. God corrects and punishes his people as a community when they fail to hold individual members accountable. God tells parents that their children and even grandchildren will suffer the consequences of their unfaithfulness.

Jeremiah intervenes at a time when God’s people are on the brink of experiencing everything God warned them about. As a nation they are about to find out how hard life without God can be. Jeremiah’s prophecies focus repeatedly on the coming judgment. But interspersed are promises that better times are ahead. In Jeremiah 31 God talks about a new relationship with new terms. God says, “A day will come in which children won’t suffer for their parents’ sins. They’ll be held accountable only for themselves.” God says, “A day will come when I don’t need to send prophets and preachers and teachers because my word will dwell in each of your hearts. I will forgive your wickedness and remember your sins no more. I will be your God and you will be my people.”

To Jeremiah and his people, this sounds impossible. It sounds too good to be true. They’ve gotten used to the idea that God’s forgiveness is unattainable. That even if they repent and change their ways, the heap of their parents’ and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ sin is insurmountable. In this prophecy God gives them a glimpse of a new way. A clean slate. The fresh start that you and I know in the person of Jesus Christ. The thing Jeremiah and the children of Israel long for so desperately – the thing we can’t live without – is a thing none of us can secure for ourselves. God offers it freely to those who long once and for all to be called his people. A fresh start.