Today’s reading: Jeremiah 31; Romans 7
Jeremiah 31 is a great example of the “already, not yet” principle in biblical prophecy.
In this chapter, God is reassuring His people that He has not forgotten them and will keep His promise to bring them back to the land He had given them. That is simple and straightforward enough, but if we consider what we are reading with the benefit of hindsight, knowing what has happened when, as well as what hasn’t happened yet, the picture God is painting through Jeremiah here gets a lot more interesting.
Near the beginning of what He says, as God is saying that they will again be adorning themselves and dancing with the merrymakers, He also says that they will plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria. After that, He specifically says, “there shall be a day when watchmen will call in the hill country of Ephraim: ‘Arise, and let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.’” If you know the history of Israel’s return from exile, you might find this language a little odd. Why? Because the northern tribes never came back from exile…
When Israel returned from the exile, it was only ever the southern tribes (Judah and Benjamin) that returned; to this day, the northern tribes are still in exile. More than that, when the southern tribes returned, they didn’t have Samaria. This is why, in Jesus’ day, there was such animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans, because when the Jews returned to the land and were trying to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple, the people living in Samaria opposed their efforts and gave them trouble along the way. What that means is that these promises in Jeremiah couldn’t have been fulfilled when Judah returned from exile, that they would plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria and come from Ephraim to Jerusalem to celebrate before the Lord.
More than that, as Jeremiah is describing the return of Israel to the land, he writes something that might familiar to anybody who has read the New Testament:
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
The author of Hebrews quotes this passage in Hebrews 8 to speak of the reality of the church age and the indwelling Holy Spirit. Our sins are forgiven and God will remember our sins no more, but this only applies to Christians, meaning the rest of this really hasn’t happened yet, that everyone, from the least to the greatest, shall know the Lord. But also, this didn’t happen until well after the southern tribes returned from exile, so how is Jeremiah tying all these things together?
This is very often how biblical prophecy works. God is building toward an ultimate and full redemption and restoration of all creation, but He has been working His plan over millennia, bit by bit, to arrive at His desired end. Many of the steps along the way are what you could consider “minor fulfillments” of the broader work the Lord is ultimately going to accomplish, and, from the prophet’s perspective, they don’t necessarily see the distinctions between the minor and total fulfillments.
For example, here, God is going to ultimately redeem creation such that every person in all creation will truly know the Lord, and there will never again be rebellion because the Lord’s law will be written on the hearts of all. That hasn’t happened yet, but the return from exile was a picture of that ultimate fulfillment. Israel rebelled against God and was sent into exile from His presence, just as all of humanity rebelled against God back in Genesis and was cast out from being His people in Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel. But even in their exile, God did not forget His desire for a human family and redeemed His people from the lands they had been scattered to, bringing them back to Israel, and back into His presence. In the same way, through the cross, God made a way for all of humanity to be brought out of exile and back into His family. Through faith in Christ, the nations who were cast off in Genesis 11, are brought near. But even then, this is only a partial fulfillment because not everyone responds to God’s invitation. So God is calling humanity out from the nations to which they have been scattered, and all are able to return now from exile, but it is up to us whether we want to respond. But there will come a day, and it may not be far off, when the Lord will bring this promise to fruition in full, and those who have rejected Him will be sent off into eternal exile, and all those left, from the least to the greatest, will truly know the Lord, and Jesus Himself will sit enthroned over a restored creation as our eternal, righteous king.
So as Jeremiah writes what the Lord is revealing to him, some of what he is describing will be fulfilled when the Lord brings the southern tribes back into the land, some of it will be fulfilled after the cross, when the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost, and some of it will be fulfilled when the Lord returns in glory, but these didn’t necessarily look like different events to Jeremiah.
By doing this, God assured His people He was working, and He continues to assure us today, as we see those things which have been fulfilled, as well as those which have not yet been fulfilled, that He is still at work today, and that He will continue to work until all His promises have come to their complete conclusion in the last days.
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