Scripture Daily

Context No. 1374 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 30:12-17: in context

12For the LORD says, “Your hurt is incurable. Your wound is grievous. 13There is no one to plead your cause, that you may be bound up. You have no healing medicines. 14All your lovers have forgotten you. They don’t seek you. For I have wounded you with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one, for the greatness of your iniquity, because your sins were increased. 15Why do you cry over your injury? Your pain is incurable. For the greatness of your iniquity, because your sins have increased, I have done these things to you. 16Therefore all those who devour you will be devoured. All your adversaries, everyone of them, will go into captivity. Those who plunder you will be plunder. I will make all who prey on you become prey. 17For I will restore health to you, and I will heal you of your wounds,” says the LORD, “because they have called you an outcast, saying, ‘It is Zion, whom no man seeks after.’”

God speaks a hard word to his wounded people, and then a word of hope. Your hurt is incurable, he tells them, your wound grievous; there is no one to plead your cause, no medicine for your sore; all your lovers have forgotten you. And he does not spare them the reason: I have dealt you the blow of an enemy because your guilt is great and your sins many. Yet the passage turns: all who devour you shall be devoured, and those who prey on you shall become prey. For I will restore health to you and heal your wounds, says the LORD, because they have called you an outcast, saying, this is Zion, for whom no one cares.

The turn in this passage is startling. God has just described a wound he himself inflicted in judgment, an incurable hurt with no human healer, deserved because of real sin, and then, in the same breath, he promises to heal it: I will restore health to you and heal your wounds. The God who wounded is the God who heals; the discipline was real, the sin was real, and still the last word is not the wound but the healing. And notice why God moves to heal. It is not because Zion has earned it, but because the world has written her off: they called you an outcast, Zion for whom no one cares. God's healing comes precisely to the one everyone else has abandoned, the outcast no one seeks. That is deeply characteristic of him. When others have forgotten us, when we feel we are the one no one cares about, cut off and beyond help, that is exactly the condition to which God says, I will heal you. His compassion is drawn to the abandoned; the very fact that no one else seeks us moves him to seek us himself. The wound may be real and even deserved, and the God who allowed it does not pretend otherwise; but his final intention toward his people is healing, and he draws near to heal precisely when the world has declared us an outcast no one wants.

When I feel like the outcast no one cares about, wounded and beyond help, can I hear God's word that he restores health precisely to the abandoned, that the very fact no one else seeks me moves him to seek and heal me himself?

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