Jeremiah 16:5 I have withdrawn my peace from this people

Sometimes the biggest lessons in the Bible are in places you didn’t expect and therefore they’re often missed.

In the book of Jeremiah, the nation of Judah is on the verge of being destroyed by the Babylonians.  Sometimes that can be hard for a Christian to swallow, God being so angry with His people that He judges them. 

But this was hundreds of years in the making.  Some Bible teachers note that this destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. seems to have cured the Jews of idolatry. 

We could talk more about that, but then, again, we would be missing the bigger point.  As is so often the case.

In our verse above, God tells Jeremiah not to mourn or lament for these people.  And that will grab our attention, and we will miss the point of the whole thing.

Jeremiah 16:5 For thus says the Lord, “Do not enter a house of mourning, or go to lament or to show grief for them; for I have withdrawn My peace from this people,” declares the Lord, “the lovingkindness and the compassion.  [translation mine]

The people of Judah defiantly resisted the laws and Word of God and insisted on worshipping the gods of the other nations.

So what happened to them?  Not the destruction but before that.

“I have withdrawn My peace from this people,” declares the Lord, “the lovingkindness and the compassion.”

First some notes on the text.  Peace in Hebrew is the word ‘shalom,’ which is not just the absence of strife and hostility, but the positive senses of tranquility, wholeness, completeness, and fulfillment.  The words ‘lovingkindness’ and ‘compassion’ here seem to be descriptive of that shalom, like those are the parts of it that God wanted to emphasis here.

In other words, the normal state of Israel before they went out and forsook God for false gods and false religion was a condition of shalom characterized by God’s lovingkindness and compassion on them.

Do you, as a believer, think of God shining down on you His lovingkindness and compassion?  The only picture I can imagine in my mind for this is a parent or a grandparent with their young children.  They don’t love their older children any less, but they are far more reserved in showing their lovingkindness and compassion.

I think this is critical here.  Children in humans take far longer than any other living thing to achieve adulthood.  Why is that?  I think a big reason is that God wants to firmly implant in us this adult-child experience.  To God, we are always His children-children.  We like to think of ourselves as adults, but I think God still thinks of us like we think of our YOUNG children. 

Are you able to think of God as being kind to you, loving you, and being compassionate to you? 

I really believe that this is a, if not the, reason why God not only created the family structure, but I also think that apart from rare situations, like Paul the apostle, God wants us all to have that experience, on both ends.

The first time around, we are the children and hopefully we learn what it is like to know lovingkindness and compassion from our parents.  But then we get to see it from the other side when we are the parents, and we feel that lovingkindness and compassion for our children.

I have been a Christian for a very long time, and learning to see God as having lovingkindness and compassion for me has been my biggest challenge.  I suspect that many other believers have that same challenge.