Jeremiah (1-31) 24:4 Commentary and Bible Study

What Judah is to do in obedience to God requires such clear instruction, for it is so different to what they have been told to do in the past. Always before, when the nation has been blessed, God has come to their aid, defended their land, defended Jerusalem and promised to keep them in the land which he gave to their forefathers. Now he is going to do something quite different: he is going to bless them in exile. He is going to bless them away from their land. The land will be taken from them by force and they will be unable to stop it, and yet the Lord will still be with them in a foreign land. They do not need to be able to access Jerusalem to be blessed. They can be blessed without the temple worship, the sacrifices, the freedom to go where they please. It is a foretaste of the blessing of the gospel age, when there will be no temple, no land, and believers will be scattered across the face of the earth in a great variety of circumstances, and yet God will be with them and they will have fellowship with him wherever they are.The wise in Judah will be carried away; they will be captives, in chains for a time, but God will be with them. The nation must go through this experience and submit to it; it is the will of God, and that is always best. God is doing them good and by faith they must see it. It will not seem to be so to all appearances, but it will be for their good. The nation has to go through this discipline, and the way to make God’s discipline profitable is to submit to it humbly and learn from it. Following a period in Babylon, which elsewhere Jeremiah reveals is to be seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11-12; 29:10), the faithful, the remnant will be returned to their own land. God had been watching over them for good all that time. Then when they return, they will see the big picture which God always had in mind. They will understand that he has accomplished something extraordinary. The nation has been humbled. Their incessant idolatry will be a thing of the past. They will have proved the Lord’s ability to recover them from what seemed an impossible situation. They will find that when God sets his eye on his people to do them good, nothing can prevent it. After this period of seeming waste and loss, his power has not diminished and he is able to build them up again. His anger towards the nation for all its sin which Jeremiah has expounded so clearly will be gone, and it will be a time of renewal and refreshing. Furthermore, God will not just work in their external circumstances but he will work in their hearts. He will put in them a genuine desire to obey him from the heart. There will be many truly converted and spiritual people among them. They will have assurance of salvation, and a sense of kinship with the family of God and union with God the Father. ‘I will be their God, for they shall return unto me with their whole heart.’ Great sincerity will characterise many – though certainly not all – of the remnant who would return. God still has a purpose in setting Israel apart, and they will continue until the coming of the Messiah, though not with the same external glory they had in the past.