Have you ever cared for someone and invested a lot of time into them by helping them walk through a difficulty? After being there for this person and investing great efforts into this friendship, have you ever experienced betrayal from this person that you have loved so deeply and to whom you have invested so much of your heart?
The pain of betrayal can leave a wound that takes a long time to heal. It leaves you guarded and feeling as if you can never trust that person again and even reluctant to trust anyone again.
Broken trust and broken agreements are hard to heal and come back from. Most likely you’ve experienced this, and know exactly what I am talking about.
In Jeremiah 31 we see a people who betrayed God in this manner. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
“Behold, the days are coming declares the Lord, when I will make a NEW covenant with the house of Israel … 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 Egypt, my covenant they broke… 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…. I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more!”
God took His people by the hand and rescued them from a place where they had been slaves for 400 years. God cared for their every need and performed miracle after miracle, and yet, they broke the covenant that God made with them. God even acknowledges that they broke the first covenant as He is promising a second one. Who does that ?! Only God!
As much as you or I have felt the pain of betrayal, it pales in comparison to how our sin betrays God, and even still, He was willing to make another promise to us through Jesus! This truth should leave us in awe of this grace upon grace that we see here in this passage!
God could have stopped making promises to a people whose hearts so often wander, and He would have been justified in doing so – but He didn’t.
This is a love this world had never known.
Highlighting the hope that we have in Christ! 