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.

Here is what I keep circling back to. God does not offer this to head the disaster off. The exile has already happened. The chains are on, the worst they feared has come true. Only then does the promise arrive. We would have written it the other way round, a warning first and silence afterwards, because that is how we treat each other. Get it badly wrong and you forfeit the kind word.

This comfort is timed for the bottom. It is the sort of hope you cannot really receive until you have run out of your own. You feel its weight only once you are somewhere you cannot get yourself out of, which is where the first hearers stood.

Look at how the homecoming is described. They return with their whole heart. Not dragged back, not half in and half out, not arriving at the door with one foot still pointed the other way. If you have ever come back to God grudgingly, doing the right things while part of you stayed sulking in the far country, you know how rare a whole-hearted return is.

And here is the part that undoes the sums again. The same God who promises the new heart makes the return whole. The wanting is given before it is spent. So I cannot manufacture wholeheartedness and present it as my entrance fee. What I can do is ask him for the very heart that would want him fully, and trust that the wholeness is something he means to work in me, not squeeze out of me. The turning is mine. The capacity to make it whole is his.

People quote this verse as if it settles a general question: does everyone drift back to God eventually? Read three verses further and that reading collapses. The bad figs are named, and they are not a vague category: Zedekiah, his officials, the people still left in Jerusalem, and those who had gone down to Egypt. What is promised them is sword, famine and pestilence until they are consumed off the land God gave their fathers (Jeremiah 24:8 to 10). Same chapter, same prophet, no homecoming.

So this is not a rule about how wandering usually resolves. It is an announcement about one group God had already marked as good figs, and what he had decided to do with them.

That matters most when someone hands this verse over as a guarantee about a person we love: to a mother praying for a son who has walked away, or a husband hoping his wife will come back to the faith, as though Jeremiah 24:7 promises their story ends this way. We are not told our prodigal is in this basket. What the verse gives us honestly is the character of God on display, that when he restores, he restores by giving a heart rather than wearing somebody down. Preach the certainty God shows about himself. Do not borrow it as certainty about who comes home.

Here is the part I find hard, and I think a group leader should say it aloud rather than skate over it. Verse 6 promises God will bring these exiles back to this land, and verse 7 promises the heart to go with it. Neither came quickly. A few chapters on, Jeremiah writes to these same exiles and tells them to build houses and live in them, to plant gardens and eat the fruit, to marry, and to see their sons and daughters married too (Jeremiah 29:5 to 6). That is not the advice you give people who are going home next spring. The return comes only after seventy years are completed for Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). Do the arithmetic on a human life and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that many who first heard this promise were buried in Babylon, trusting a homecoming they never saw.

I would not soften that when teaching it. If you are sitting with someone in the fourth year of praying for a marriage, or a son, or their own dead-feeling faith, this verse does not promise them relief by Christmas. It promises that God is the sort of God who gives hearts and keeps his word, and that his timescale for keeping it is often longer than the one we would have chosen. Say both halves, or the comfort will not hold the weight people put on it.

This one fits services built around return: someone rejoining after years away, a members’ meeting welcoming back a person restored from discipline, or a prayer of confession read straight after the confession, because it names what is actually being asked for, a new heart rather than a pardon for the old one. It works less well as a first word to someone with no church background at all, since the promise leans on an existing, if fractured, relationship: his people, their God. Keep the wide-open verses for the stranger at the door. Save this one for the child of the house finding their way back in.

It does not belong at a graveside, offered to a family about someone who died with no visible sign of ever turning. Saying over a coffin that they returned to God with their whole heart, when nobody has grounds to know it, dresses a guess in scripture’s clothing, and grieving people notice even when they are too polite to say so. The safest place for this verse is where its first hearers stood: spoken to people still alive to hear it and still able to turn.

Picture where Babylon kept its confidence. Nebuchadnezzar had rebuilt the place into an argument you could walk through: ziggurats, a processional way, gates for carrying the city’s gods past crowds who knew exactly what the parade meant. And the people in Jeremiah 24 had not simply lost a battle. Their king had been carried off with them, and the gold vessels out of God’s own house went too, into the treasure house of another god (Daniel 1:2). If you want to feel that, imagine your church’s communion silver behind glass in a rival’s trophy cabinet, polished, labelled, admired.

I want to be careful here, because I have heard this preached with more confidence than I can back. It is often said that everybody in that world read a defeat as a straight fight between gods, winner’s god over loser’s. That is a fair sense of how conquest got talked about, and Marduk was the god Babylon credited. But I cannot hand you a line from any exile saying “Marduk beat the LORD”. What I can hand you is Jeremiah himself, later, naming Bel and Merodach and announcing that they are the ones dismayed (Jeremiah 50:2). He clearly thought the question was in the air. He simply refused to concede it.

So that is the noise 24:7 has to carry over. God does not arrive in Babylon apologising for a bad run. He claims the deportation as his own doing, the chapter says plainly that he sent them there, and then says he will still be their God. That is not a beaten god saving face. It is closer to a king walking into the throne room of the power that supposedly humiliated him and quietly moving the furniture about. What gets me is how little interest this verse has in defending his reputation. It never argues the case. It assumes he was never on trial, and gets on with promising a future nobody in that city would have priced at anything.

Long before there was a Babylon to be carried off to, this promise was already on the page. Deuteronomy 30:1 to 6 pictures Israel scattered among the nations for exactly the unfaithfulness Jeremiah’s generation went on to commit, and says that afterwards, when they return to the LORD, he will circumcise their heart and the heart of their offspring, so that they love him with all their heart and soul. Hold that next to Jeremiah 24:7 and something shifts under your feet. Jeremiah is not improvising comfort under pressure, grabbing at whatever sounded hopeful with the city smoking behind him. He is presenting a cheque written centuries earlier and always going to be cashed.

I find that steadying in a way I did not expect. It would be one thing if God had scrambled a rescue together after a disaster he never saw coming. It is another thing entirely to notice that the whole shape of it, the disobedience, the scattering, the changed heart, the way home, was set out on the plains of Moab before Israel had so much as crossed the Jordan into the land it would one day lose. The exile was not the plan going wrong. It was the middle of a story whose ending had been written down first, and read aloud to people who had not yet done any of the sinning.

That does not make it less brutal to live through. Nobody in Babylon was comforted by knowing the shape of the plot. But it does mean Jeremiah 24:7 is not God being kind on the spur of the moment. It is God keeping an appointment he had made with himself long before anyone needed the mercy.

Here is the part that troubles me, and I would rather say it than smooth it. Verse 6 promises these exiles the actual land back, and verse 7 promises the heart to go with it. The land part happened; decades on, under Persian permission, people went home. So this is not a promise that failed to land. And yet read Ezra and Nehemiah, which describe what that same community did once it was finally there, and you do not find the wholehearted people of verse 7. Ezra arrives to be told that priests and ordinary families alike have intermarried with the surrounding peoples against the law (Ezra 9:1 to 2), the very unfaithfulness that helped earn the exile. Nehemiah has to reform them twice over, on the Sabbath, on the Levites’ unpaid portions, on marriages he had already dealt with once (Nehemiah 13). And Malachi, speaking to these same restored people, has to tell priests that offering a blind or lame animal is an insult they would not dare hand their governor (Malachi 1:8), and tell the rest that they are robbing God in their tithes (Malachi 3:8), and that they have said it is vain to serve him (Malachi 3:14).

So which is it. Were these the people given a heart to know the LORD, or were they, generations later, still being shouted at for precisely the half-heartedness verse 7 said was finished? I do not think the promise failed. I think it had started and was nowhere near done. Getting the land back was the visible, dateable half, the bit you could write in an annal with a year beside it. The heart came in instalments, and I think it is still coming. That is far less tidy than I would like. It means a promise can be entirely true and actively running while the people holding it are a mess in the middle of it, which is either the most disappointing sentence in this article or the most hopeful one, depending on the sort of week you have had.

If I had a six-year-old and a twelve-year-old on the same carpet, I would not start anywhere near theology. I would ask them to imagine being walked, with their whole family, for weeks, to a country where nobody talks like them, and nobody will say when they might sleep in their own bed again. That is gentler than what actually happened, and it is close enough. Then I would tell them what God said into it: not only that he would take them home, but that he would change what they wanted, so that wanting him became the thing they wanted most, the way you want your own bed after a fortnight away.

The honest bit, which I would not skip even for the six-year-old, is that this is a stranger promise than it first sounds, and the twelve-year-old will spot it before the tea break. God is not offering to give them what they want. He is offering to change what they want. Say that sentence out loud in a room of adults and somebody stiffens, because it can sound like being got at from the inside, like someone changing the lock on your own front door while you sleep.

I have felt that resistance and never entirely argued myself out of it. Where I have landed is this. The heart I am so keen to defend from interference is the heart that got them, and me, into exile in the first place. It is not a neutral thing being tampered with by a foreign hand. It is a broken thing being mended by the one who made it, and who is not obliged to leave it broken because I have grown fond of it. That does not answer everything a bright twelve-year-old could throw at me. I would rather tell a child there is a real question here than pretend there isn’t and let them find it on their own at nineteen.

There is a word running under this whole book, and once you have seen it you cannot stop seeing it. Shuv means to turn, to turn back, to return. It is the word behind Jeremiah’s charge of backsliding, which in Hebrew is closer to “turnings-away”, and it is also the word behind the invitation. He sets the two side by side in Jeremiah 3:22, where God calls the backsliding children to return and promises to heal their backslidings: accusation and cure built out of the same letters. That same root is sitting in verse 7, in “they will return to me with their whole heart”.

I like this more than I can easily justify. It means the fix was never a foreign idea bolted onto the problem. Coming home is not a different manoeuvre from wandering off, performed in some other language you would have to learn first. It is the same turn, walked the other way.

I should be straight with you that I am no Hebraist. I am telling you what any concordance will show you, not something I dug out myself. But that is the mercy of this one: you do not need Hebrew to check it. Read Jeremiah 3, then read 24:7, and listen for the same footstep going in the opposite direction.

• 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.