Never Too Far Gone

You have to know where this sentence sits to feel its weight. Jeremiah 24 opens with a strange little vision: two baskets of figs set out in front of the temple, one full of good early figs, the other so rotten you could not eat them. The vision comes after the deportation that took King Jeconiah, along with the officials and craftsmen of Judah, off to Babylon. To everyone watching from Jerusalem, those carried away looked like the rejects, the ones God had spat out. The people left behind assumed they were the favoured remnant. God turns the whole thing on its head. The exiles are the good figs, and this verse is what he says he will do for them. So this is not a general word of comfort floating free of history. It is spoken over a particular group of frightened, displaced people who had every reason to think they were on the wrong side of God’s verdict. That is the company this promise keeps, and I find it changes how I hear it. Grace gets aimed at the ones who look written off.

Read the verse and notice who is doing the work. He gives the heart. He is their God. Nearly every clause has him as the subject, twice in the plain words “I will”: “I will give them a heart to know me” and “I will be their God.” There is one line where the people are the subject, “they will return to me with their whole heart”, but even that comes after the heart has been given. The order matters enormously. He does not wait for them to want him and then reward the wanting. He supplies the wanting first.

The phrase “a heart to know me” is worth slowing over. In Hebrew thought the heart is not mainly the seat of feeling the way we use the word; it is closer to the centre of the will and understanding, the place where you decide and discern. So God is not promising a warm glow. He is promising to remake the very faculty by which a person knows and chooses. And the knowing here is relational, the kind of knowing you have of a person, not a fact you could pass an exam on. That is the easy thing to miss. The gift is not information about God. It is the renewed capacity to be his and to mean it.

“They will be my people, and I will be their God” is one of the oldest refrains in Scripture. It belongs to the covenant language God used with Israel, and it carries forward into the promise of a new covenant. Here is the remarkable part: in Jeremiah it is spoken not at a high point but at a low one, over people in chains. The covenant is being renewed precisely where it looked broken.

A few chapters later Jeremiah names this as a new covenant, one written on hearts rather than stone (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel, prophesying among the same exiles, speaks of God giving a new heart and putting his Spirit within (Ezekiel 36:26). And then the New Testament shows where that promised heart-surgery is finally paid for and poured out. At the last supper Jesus lifts the cup and calls it the new covenant in his blood. The heart we could not produce is given because he gave himself. I cannot read Jeremiah 24:7 now without watching it run downhill all the way to a Roman cross and an empty tomb, where the promise stopped being a hope and became a fact.

There is a quiet sum most of us run without noticing. We add up the years we drifted, the same sin confessed and committed again, the prayers we stopped praying, and we conclude the account is overdrawn. I have done that maths myself, usually late at night. What undoes me about this verse is that it refuses to let the total stand. God does not say the exiles must earn their way back into his good books. He says he will give them the heart they lack and call them his own again.

So when I have wandered, the honest first move is not to whip up enough sincerity to deserve a hearing. It is to ask him for the very thing he promises here: a heart that knows him. I have prayed that prayer feeling almost nothing, and found the feeling catch up later, like a sail filling after the wind has already turned. If you are flat, cold, ashamed and going through the motions, you are not disqualified. You are roughly where the first hearers stood. The promise was made for people exactly that far gone, and it held.

• Where am I quietly keeping a tally that says I have drifted too long to come back, and what would it mean to hand that sum to God instead?
• If the heart that wants God is itself a gift he gives, what changes about how I pray on the days I feel nothing?
• The exiles thought they were the rejected ones and were wrong; where might I have misread my own standing with God?
• Who in my life looks like a “bad fig” to me, and how does this promise challenge the verdict I have passed on them?

If you want to stay near this, you could read more from Jeremiah or sit with a verse chosen for how you feel today.