Jeremiah 31:27-34 - Exposition
Not many of us, I think, would ever naturally say that we have known God. The words imply a definiteness and matter-of-factness of experience to which most of us, if we are honest, have to admit that we are still strangers. We claim, perhaps, to have a testimony, and can rattle off our conversion story with the best of them; we say that we know God--this, after all, is what evangelicals are expected to say; but would it occur to us to say, without hesitation, and with reference to particular events in our personal history, that we have known God? I doubt it, for I suspect that with most of us experience of God has never become so vivid as that.
So wrote J. I. Packer at the beginning of his classic book on 'Knowing God'. What does it mean to know God? Well, of course that's the subject of the whole book; we don't have time to read it all now. But we can see it here in this passage of Jeremiah--that one day, we will truly know God and be known by him. I want to pick up on two elements of how we will know God in that one day, and how we can know God now.
The first area in which God will know man, in verse 33 and 34, is through a heart-to-heart knowledge of God and His Law. Now wait, this is written to the Israelites, who know God's Law. And if God is going to write a new covenant with His people, but He's also going to write out the Law onto their hearts, doesn't that make the new covenant, well...the same as the old one? It doesn't make sense.
One of the few things I've learnt in my study of theology is that if something doesn't make sense, you might not understand it properly. If we understand the Law as the provisions that God set out as the right conduct of His people and the measure of sin, then it doesn't make sense. Neither does it make sense for David to 'contemplate day and night' the very thing that condemns him to death! The Psalms don't make sense as hymns of praise to God's Law ...unless our understanding of the Law is different. If we understand the Law as God's love letter to His people, then it all makes a lot more sense.
What is the Law? The Law is nothing other than an expression of God's divine compassion: God reaches out to His creation purely out of grace and not of merit, God condescends to bind Himself to a covenant with those He created, God expresses His desire that His people take ownership of Him, God makes huge, sweeping and binding promises to protect and love His people in exchange for their devotion and appreciation. This is the Law that God is reaffirming here through Jeremiah. This is the Law that God wants to make central to His people again; the fact that Israel turned their back on the Law is precisely the very reason that they need to be reminded that it is God's expression of love to them. God does not reaffirm the Law despite the fact that it was broken--He reaffirms it precisely because it was broken!
That is what God wanted to really engrave on the hearts of His people: that He loves them, that He dispenses His love freely upon them and that He is prepared to swear Himself to them, like a husband. This was the principle that He really wanted them to understand. How too can we know God if we understand so little of this? Packer says that the statement in John's first epistle that 'God is love' is 'one of the most tremendous utterances in the Bible--and also one of the most misunderstood'. But then Packer devotes just ten pages of a three-hundred page book to examining this love. It's not enough. You could spend your whole life doing it. Maybe you should.
How, though? How do we come to an understanding of this love? Romans 5 verse 5 tells us that there is only one way: 'the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given to us.' This promise in the Old Testament gets carried straight through to the New Testament when God's Spirit is given to us, to release His love in our hearts. It is by His Spirit that we know Him.
And we also know Him because He brings us into relationship with Him. To really know someone is to be in relationship with them. I cannot say I know one of you if I've never spoken to you, if I've never interacted with you personally, and all I know about you is what I've read or heard from someone else. Knowing someone is personal. So it is with knowing God. To know God is to be in relationship with Him. Throughout the Bible, God has called people into relationship with Him, and it's clear here in Jeremiah that that relationship can only begin to exist through the foriveness of sin: it says that 'they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.'
Now we do not jump to the conclusion that this forgiveness was obtained by Jesus's death and resurrection--Jesus has already risen, and still not everyone knows God. God is still talking here about a time that is yet to come, when we will all ultimately know Him perfectly. The knowledge of God has broken into the world through the Spirit, but it is still yet to be complete.
Remember that God's ultimate desire is that we know Him more. This is all He wants. He wants us to be in such a relationship with Him that we know Him utterly. We know that we are limited in terms of our relationship with God; right now we cannot know God as fully as He wants. Right now, we are trapped in these bodies and cannot experience the full knowledge of God. It would blow us away. When Moses met with God, God could not meet him face to face; instead, Moses could only handle watching God's back passing by.
That was good enough for Moses, and it really should be good enough for most of us. Let me tell you that you can only see God's back passing by if God is ahead of you and you're going in His direction. For most of us who end up meeting God face-to-face and get blown away, it's because we were busy going a different way from Him.
We need to turn around; we need to follow God. We need to listen to His Spirit as He tells us about His love, about His forgiveness and His offer of friendship and relationship. He need to hold on, and seek to know Him more and more throughout our lives, until that day that He will know Him perfectly. For now we see put a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall know face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.