While driving to a friend’s house and back recently, I skipped over my podcast queue and instead played the book of Jeremiah on an audio Bible app. I’d just started the book in my morning Bible time, so I wanted to get an overview of the whole story.
For over an hour, I listened to prophecy after prophecy denouncing the sin of God’s people and proclaiming the destructive judgement that God would bring on them. To my surprise, I arrived home refreshed and rejoicing in the Lord. How could such a dire book have this effect?
Can I Be Free?
It had been a rough few days in my marriage. My husband hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was struggling with anger, irritability, and a critical spirit. These sins had plagued me for a long time, but the temptation felt particularly fierce. No matter how much I prayed, I saw little change. I’d apologize to my husband one minute, then make another biting comment the next.
I started to feel like I’d never be free. These sins had hardened around me like cement—would I ever be able to scrape them off?
Before getting married, I’d lived alone for five years. I was accustomed to having the conditions of my home under my sole control. I feared that those years had formed me into a monster of selfishness and that there was no cure.
But as I listened to Jeremiah, I heard the good news: My sin will be dealt with; I’m not stuck in it forever. And the even better news: God will be the one to do this, not me. Because he hates my sin more than I do.
Judgement Poured Out
All throughout Jeremiah, we see how angry God is at his people’s sins—their idolatry, violence, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy. He declares,
My people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
and hewed out cisterns for themselves,
broken cisterns that can hold no water. (2:13)
The consequences of their sin will be terrible: “Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place, upon man and beast, upon the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground; it will burn and not be quenched” (7:20).
God will not let sin go unpunished. The prophet predicts the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, who will take God’s people into exile. And he lives long enough to see this happen.
And yet the sparks of hope haven’t been completely extinguished. Amid the pronouncements of judgment, God gives a glimpse of what lies beyond:
Return, faithless Israel, . . .
I will not look on you in anger,
for I am merciful,
declares the Lord;
I will not be angry forever. (3:12)
Later in the book, God promises a Messiah to come: “This is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness’” (23:6).
As new covenant believers, we now see how these incredible promises come to pass. God sent his Son to die on a cross, taking on the punishment for our sins and giving us his perfect record of righteousness. He defeated our sin and made us holy.
God’s Old Testament people would endure the agony of defeat, destruction, and exile before God showed them mercy and brought them back into the land (16:14–15). But Jesus faced this punishment in my place, and because I’m united to him, I’ll one day live with him in the eternal kingdom—free from sin forever.
Hating Sin
The problem is that I don’t hate my sin enough. I know it’s wrong and displeasing to God, but I tend to think more about how it makes me feel or what it’s doing to my marriage. But through Jeremiah, I saw the biggest horror of it: how it offends my holy God.
God hates my sin enough that he promises to deal with it. I don’t have to rely on my meagre self-control. Like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I can stop trying to scratch at the scaly sin over my heart and instead let God un-dragon me—as painful as that may be.
The next time you hear intense, doom-filled oracles from prophets like Jeremiah, don’t ignore them, skip over them, or be discouraged by them. Let them prompt you to come to our holy God in repentance, asking him to deal with the sin he so hates. You won’t get free any other way.