Favor in a faraway land

 This week's verses are Jeremiah 31:2-3:

“The people of Israel who survived
death at the hands of the enemy
will find favor in the wilderness
as they journey to find rest for themselves.
In a faraway land the Lord will manifest himself to them.
He will say to them, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love.
That is why I have continued to be faithful to you.

 These verses show the love of God, while also showing that it's not the kind of sugar-coated fairy tale love we sometimes expect. He cares and he provides, but he sometimes allows hardship and suffering.

Israel had already suffered when Jeremiah shared these words. They had been victims of ethnic cleansing by the Assyrian empire. Large numbers of people had been killed and others had been forcibly relocated, so that the Assyrians and their successors could occupy the land and extract its resources.

We often imagine that God would not allow his faithful to suffer or be killed. If we were in Israel on the cusp of the Assyrian invasion, we might have been like the false prophets who told Jeremiah that God would not allow them to be invaded. We would have been like Peter arguing with Jesus when Jesus told him what was going to happen. We don't understand how goodness can exist in an imperfect world.

In a communal sense, Israel was being disciplined for turning away from God. But we hear no mention that the righteous were allowed to keep their land, that their daughters weren't raped, that their sons weren't taken into slavery, etc. The nation together suffered for what the majority had done. But imagine you were one of  those righteous people, like Jeremiah. How would you reconcile your circumstances with the out of context Biblical "promises" that were likely preached all around you?

But here God is speaking for himself. He addresses the battered survivors as those who survived the sword, making it clear that they were not magically shielded during the events that unfolded. He acknowledges that those who managed to escape on their own are living in the wilderness, making it clear that they lost the homes they felt secure in. And he promises them a blessing in a faraway land, not the one that was originally promised to them, the one they were forced out of. He's not sugarcoating anything.

He assures them that he has been faithful to them and will continue to be. He offers them rest and peace. He promises to manifest himself to them.

If we're not in complete denial of reality, most of us will occasionally or eventually find ourselves in difficult circumstances of some kind or another, even if we have really devout faith. It's not because we didn't simply believe hard enough that everything always would go perfectly and that we would never experience pain. There are things we will enjoy and things we will not. Some of us will experience horrific things. All of these are part of God's work in the world.

The thing we need to remember is that God's love is eternal. A moment or season or lifetime of hardship doesn't mean that God doesn't care or doesn't want to help. What we need to focus on instead of the difficulty is the fact that he will eventually bring us to peace and safety. 

Jesus suffered on the cross so that there would not be an eternity of suffering for us without end. There will be favor and peace awaiting us in a faraway land, just as there was for Israel.