"If you return, O Israel, says the LORD, to me
you should return.
If you remove your
abominations from my presence and do not
waver,
and if you swear, 'As the LORD lives,'
in truth,
in justice, and in uprightness,
then nations shall bless themselves in him, and
in him shall they glory"
(Jer 4:1-2)
Whenever we take Jeremiah's calls to Israel to repent out of the larger context of the Book of Jeremiah and use them as our calls to people to repent, our message becomes a man-centered, flesh-empowered, human effort to make our lives right with God. Like Israel then, people today, including believers, must replace idolatrous addictions to the things of this world ("abominations") with a white-hot, passionate love for God. But let us not forget that Jeremiah's call went completely unheeded, and pre-exilic Israel ended up suffering the terrible consequences of covenant disobedience. Likewise, today, when we tell a person to stop loving sin and to start loving God,
it may go utterly unheeded.
Jeremiah's continuous calls for repentance, however, are transposed
into God's promises of repentance because of the new covenant, which sits smack dab in the center of the book (Jeremiah 30-33). Its structural location
highlights its theological significance: the
heart of Jeremiah's message
is the promise of a
completely new, Spirit-empowered,
Torah-filled heart!
No doubt, we must call the people of this world (and believers sometimes) to repent, but we must also point them to the power of God that will get them to this destination. We must assure them that all of us can and will start loving God with all our hearts just as soon as we realize that God FIRST loved us with all of his heart, namely, by giving us his Son! Otherwise, our message may be seen by some as discouraging.