The True and Better Jeremiah

You know the loop button on music platforms that plays an album or song over and over? It’s like that. Day after day, nothing changes. You wake up in the morning praying to God that the situation will shift, even if just ever so slightly, in your favour. And then you go to bed that night with things unchanged. You wake up the next morning, and here comes that same song again.

This was the ministry experience of Jeremiah the prophet. He prophesied during one of the darkest times in Israel’s history: rebellion, hard-heartedness, and exile. Jeremiah came to the people of God over and over again with a message of repentance. God’s people, day after day, ignored him, to their peril.

When Jesus launched His public ministry, He “began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’” (Matthew 4:17). But this repentance-preaching prophet wasn’t just any prophet: “an angel of the Lord appeared to [Joseph] in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’” (Matthew 1:20b-21). Even from the womb it was determined that this man would not just preach repentance to God’s people, but also be the one to save all who repent. 

Will we heed the message of repentance from our self-centered sin? It is to our peril to persist in our sin.

If we turn away from our sin, and toward the One who came to save us, we will experience the eternal loop of waking up each day knowing that, through Christ, things are endlessly in our favour. We will go to bed each night knowing that things will never change. We will wake up the next morning, and that same song will play, again.