AP

Jeremiah 24:7  I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.

TQW on 28 July 2023 was on Jeremiah 24:5-7.  Reading what I wrote back then, I noticed that I was ‘waxing eloquent’ on the goodness of the absolute Sovereignty of God even when we are perplexed, and struggling, with his often strange and mysterious Providence!   It was almost 4 months after this that my late wife was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer which took her into the Lord’s presence 19 months later, in June last year.  I have thus discovered how much easier it is to accept what the Heidelberg Catechism (Qs 25-27) says about the Providence of God when things are going smoothly in my life than when the ‘wheels start to fall off’!

Let me testify quickly, however, to the Lord’s faithfulness in sustaining me these last 14 months, but I must admit it has been much harder to cope with than I had expected!  Seven and a half years prior to all this, on 28 January 2016, TQW was just on verse 7 (the verse I have chosen for today) when I wrote: “As God prepared his people for the 70-year exile in Babylon he wanted his faithful prophet Jeremiah to make very clear to them the sharp distinction between those who were willing to submit to his sovereign Plan and those who relied on their own humanistic wisdom to solve their problems.  The difference between the two mindsets or worldviews is like the difference between wholesome, nutritious figs and rotten, inedible figs (verse 2).  God’s Plan involved humiliation, slavery, suffering and the total destruction of the City and the Temple they loved because they represented their security in their sovereign LORD; Man’s ‘plan’ was based on human logic and saw only human resources.

The important point of today’s verse is that the only way we can change from man-centred thinking to God-centred thinking, to get out of the bad fig basket and into the good fig basket, is by God’s giving us a new heart to know him!  Our society is becoming more and more influenced by humanism, and at an increasing rate, while devoted, Bible-believing Christians are being ignored, marginalised, opposed and ridiculed – much like Jeremiah was when he presented God’s Plan to Israel.  How could the destruction of Jerusalem and God’s Dwelling Place, the Temple, and 70 years of exile in Babylon possibly square with: ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’ (Jeremiah 29:11)??!!

How are we responding to the present agenda our world is pursuing?  With human wisdom and logic and reliance on human resources?  Or with unshakeable trust in God’s unstoppable Plan of Redemption in which we can take part through the workings of his grace alone, “return[ing] to [him] with all [our] heart”, regardless of what the cost might be to do so?  Can we say with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him’ (Job 13:15)?”  I’m now busy trying to learn the truth of this for myself.  I’m learning (albeit ever so slowly) to experience, what George Mathieson wrote about when he lost the love of his life because he was struck with blindness: ‘[the] Love that will not let me go’, and to ‘trace the rainbow through the rain’, and ‘feel the promise is not vain that morn shall tearless be’.