God will restore
by Marlene Cooper
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‘I will build you up again, and you, Virgin Israel, will be rebuilt’ (Jeremiah 31:4).
Many centuries before the birth of Jesus, God’s chosen people were suffering cruelly under exile and captivity in a foreign land. It seemed to them that they had lost everything. In their misery, they wondered if they had finally reached the ‘tipping point’. Had God’s covenant favour been utterly withdrawn? Had God finally given up on them?
But God had not forgotten his people. Through all the long years of waiting, God had been doing his gracious work, planning for them, drawing them to himself with longing, moving them out of despair and preparing them to trust his promise. Jeremiah brought them God’s word of hope and a vision for their future. It was a message of restoration: ‘I will build you up again, and you, Virgin Israel, will be rebuilt’. Here was their God, speaking to them as of old, addressing them as his beloved.
God was calling them to his time (verse 1). First, the time of their return and restoration to their land and city but also to a future time of promise, the ‘fullness of time’ (Galatians 4:4), when God would unite them with all nations under a new covenant of grace and forgiveness through the coming of the Saviour, God’s own beloved Son. Jeremiah describes this time of God’s favour through the remainder of our reading – a time of rest and gathering, of joy and dancing, of planting of crops on their own land and beyond, and the enjoyment of harvest. Best of all, their watchmen would again call them to worship from the city walls, ‘Come, let us go up to the Lord our God!’
We who have been making our pilgrim way through the season of Advent are living in this new time of God. The birth of Jesus ushers in a new era of hope, peace, faith and love. Now that same watchman’s call of old can be heard among us: ‘Let us go up to worship! The newborn King is with us, and God has come to restore his people!’ With singing and joy, we anticipate through worship the fullness of God’s time, when the restoration of Israel and all people together has been made known and appeared on earth when Christ was born in Bethlehem and God came down to live among us.
Gracious God, you have loved us with an everlasting love and drawn us to yourself with unfailing kindness. As we approach the holy time of our Saviour’s birth, fill us with joy and hope to welcome him as our Redeemer promised long ago to Israel and the whole world. Amen.
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