Jeremiah 17

Verse 1-2

It isn’t hard to imagine the permanent damage of an iron chisel or what a pen of a diamond point can do.  You do not simply take a piece of cloth and erase what has been written.  Imagine if your heart was really a book with stone pages that could not be editted or reversed, and imagine if your every thought and deed were inscribed there forever.  Would God be able to look at the stone tablet in your heart and read a book of loyalty to Him?  Would He read how you think of His beauty and excellence?  The Lord sees, and doesn’t forget what kind of stories we write with iron chisels.  Just as a husband takes a virgin wife but only to find she has been unfaithful, so the Lord took His people Israel and read a story of unfaithfulness on their heart.

Verse 3

God gave them all their need, and saw to their happiness.  Yet in their idleness they gave their love to another god, a god that can’t speak or voice an opinion.  These kinds of gods are much easier to control.  Their altars are built where men decide.  They offer the object of men’s lust as blessing in exchange for an offering after man’s desire.

Verse 4

Do we fare better?  What does your heart story tell?  Where does our mind wander in moments of idleness?  When there is nothing before our eyes and nothing to occupy our time, does our heart narrate loyalty and love to the Lord Jesus?  The weight of my shame presses on me.  The tablet of my heart is a story of vile self-love and idolatry, betrayal against my good Creator.  Such stories incur the jealous anger of He who is righteous.  As a jealous husband shuts up his good favor,  so the Lord  removes the inheritance He once gave in His covenant.  The hearts of stone stand as a monument of our betrayal that will remind Him forever of our unfaithfulness.

Our hearts are truly “set in stone”.  Sin and self-love is a part of our DNA, the end result for everyone is a story of unfaithfulness to the God who created us.  Yet He still began a covenant with men, first to promise an habitation for them.  They were blessed by God to be a blessing to everyone around them.  The end results were disastrous, but the fault was not with God.  God was faithful in His end of the agreement, yet the more He did much more than just keep His Word, but He gave mercy and forgiveness when they broke the covenant.

That old covenant was to be concluded, that covenant with Abraham and Moses.  And so it was when God began a man and took on the curse of the covenant He promised to Abraham.  As Jehovah substituted for Abraham in the darkness with a torch and flax, so Jesus the God-Man substituted Himself to die in the darkness that covered calvary.  But simultaneously at the end of that old covenant was establish a new covenant.  Whose promise was far better than a parcel of land, but a new creation.

As Jeremiah 17 teaches us, what we need isn’t new land with new government and new laws.  But we need new people, with new hearts, transformed hearts.  The New Covenant promises a new birth with a new nature that has never known sin and and never will, because it is kept by Jesus who conquered death and now lives forever. And this is the good news of that covenant: “That whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”