Jeremiah’s Desperado
I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:7 NASB
Return – Hauser makes me cry for the passion of music. The Eagles make me cry for the pathos of living. I’m pretty sure God feels the same way. Consider the constant theme of the prophets:
Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. Isaiah 55:7
Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and thus may the Lord God of hosts be with you,
Just as you have said! Amos 5:14
I will heal their apostasy, I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from them. Hosea 14:4
‘Return, O faithless sons,’ declares the Lord; ‘For I am a master to you, and I will take you one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.’ Jeremiah 3:14
“But if the wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed and observes all My statutes and practices justice and righteousness, he shall surely live; he shall not die.” Ezekiel 18:21
I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:7
What’s the message? RETURN! Shuv. Come down from your fences. Let somebody love you. Amazingly, God wants to do just that. As far as I can tell, He’s the only god who has this desire.
Do you find that sentence reassuring or disturbing? How can a God who knows everything about you, all your failures, all your sins, all your discouragement and disappointment—how can He love you when you don’t love yourself? You know it, don’t you? Inside there’s the wide-open spaces. Doing jobs that need to be done. Staying distracted. Always alone. But it’s not home, is it?. “Return to Me,” says the Lord. I think He means it. I am desperate for Him to mean it. Riding fences is killing me. “Their prison is walkin’ in this world all alone.”
Shuv (šûb) is the summary verb of God’s call to Man. Victor Hamilton notes:
The Bible is rich in idioms describing man’s responsibility in the process of repentance. Such phrases would include the following: “incline your heart unto the Lord your God” (Josh 24:23): “circumcise yourselves to the Lord” (Jer 4:4); “wash your heart from wickedness” (Jer 4:14); “break up your fallow ground” (Hos 10:12) and so forth. All these expressions of man’s penitential activity, however, are subsumed and summarized by this one verb šûb. For better than any other verb it combines in itself the two requisites of repentance: to turn from evil and to turn to the good.[1]
Virtually every book in the Tanakh carries a plea to return to God. The ubiquity of this theme demonstrates two important things: 1) God’s heart is broken over the loss of relationship, and 2) He is ready to heal the wound when we are ready to come down from our fences. There is no doubt whatsoever that God cares. The problem is not on the divine side of the equation. It’s on the human side. It is a common tragedy that men mistake God’s instructions as forms of punishment. They do so because they do not nurture themselves, and, intensely feeling their fall from grace, they believe they deserve retribution. Consequently, they cannot hear the divine pathos of God.
What a tragedy! On face value, the text shouts, begs, implores us to listen to the heart of God—the divine desperation to have us back. But we often don’t hear the cry because our ears are tuned to the unworthy frequency, that broadcast of disqualifying imperfection deep within. Emotional disconnection trumps the text. In fact, it drowns out even the divine appeal. Considering the scope of šûb, our inability to hear is extraordinary. Šûb covers just about every nuance of what it means to return. “Holladay (p. 117) concludes that there are a total of 164 uses of šûb in a covenantal context. The majority of them, as one might expect, are to be found in the classical/literary prophets 113 times, with Jeremiah leading the way (forty-eight times).”[2]
Can you? Can you come down from your fences and open the gate? “I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred.”[3]
Topical Index: šûb, shuv, return, turn back, Jeremiah 24:7
[1] Hamilton, V. P. (1999). 2340 שׁוּב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 909). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 151.
