“Return, faithless people,” declares the LORD, “for I am your husband.” [Jeremiah 3:14]
These are delicate words—a good medicine for a troubled conscience. Such remarkable comfort is intended to encourage the soul, and put the brightest hope on all of its prospects. The person to whom it is addressed has an eminently happy position. My dear believer in Christ, tonight Satan will be very busy with you. He will say, “What right do you have to believe that God is married to you?” He will remind you of your imperfections, and of the coldness of your love, and perhaps of the backsliding state of your heart. He will say, “Why, with all this about you, can you be presumptuous enough to claim union with the Son of God? Can you venture to hope that there will be any marriage between you and the holy One?” He will speak to you as though he were an advocate for holiness, that it is not possible that someone like you could really be a partaker of so choice and special a privilege as being married to the Lord Jesus Christ. Let this suffice for an answer to all such suggestions: the text is found addressed, not to Christians in a flourishing state of heart, not to believers on the Mount of Transfiguration with Christ, not to a spouse that is completely pure and lovely, and sitting under the banner of love, feasting with her lord; but it is addressed to those who are called “faithless people.” God speaks to his church in her lowest and most wretched condition, and though he does not fail to rebuke her sin, to express grief over it, and to make her grieve over it too, yet still in such a condition he says to her, “I am your husband.” Oh! it is pure grace that Jesus should be married to any of us, but it is grace at its highest pitch, it is the ocean of grace at its flood-tide, that he should speak in this way of “faithless people.” That he should speak words of love to any of the fallen race of Adam is very strange and wonderful; but that he should select those who have behaved treacherously to him, who have turned their backs to him and not their faces, who have been unfaithful to him, although, nevertheless, his own, and say to them, “I am your husband;” this is loving-kindness beyond anything we could want or imagine. Listen, heaven above, and admire, earth below, let every understanding heart break forth into singing, yes, let every humble mind bless and praise the condescension of the Most High! Cheer up you poor weak hearts. Here is sweet encouragement for some of you who are depressed, discontent, and all alone, to draw living waters out of this well. Don’t let the noise of the enemy keep you back from this refreshing well. Don’t be afraid lest you should be cursed while you are anticipating the blessing. If you trust only in Jesus, if you long for the once humbled, now exalted Lord, come with holy boldness to the text, and whatever comfort there is here, receive it and rejoice in it.
To this end let us carefully consider the relationship, which is here spoken of, and diligently question how much we are actually acquainted with it.
I. IN CONSIDERING THE RELATIONSHIP WHICH IS HERE SPOKEN OF, you will observe that the relationship of marriage, though very much like family, is not one of birth.
1. Marriage is not a relationship by blood or by a common ancestor.
It is contracted between two persons who may, during the early part of their lives, have been entire strangers to one another; they may scarcely have looked at each other in the face, except during the few months that preceded their wedding. The families may have had no previous acquaintance; they may have lived on the opposites sides of the earth. One may have been rich, and in possession of vast domains, and the other may have been poor, barely able to make ends meet. Genealogies don’t regulate it: differences don’t hinder it. The connection is not of natural birth but of voluntary contract or covenant. Such is the relationship, which exists between the believer and his God. Whatever relation there was originally between God and man, it was stamped out and extinguished by the fall. We were aliens, strangers, and foreigners, far off from God because of our wicked works. We therefore had no relation to the Most High; we were banished from his presence as traitors to his throne, as condemned criminals who had revolted against his power. There could be no communion between our souls and God. He is light and we are darkness. He is holiness and we are sin. He is heaven, and we are far more analogous to hell. In him there is consummate greatness, and we are puny insignificance. He fills the entire universe with his strength, and as for us, we are the creatures of a day, who know nothing, and who are easily crushed like the moth. The gulf between God and a sinner is something terrible to contemplate. There is a vast difference between God and the creature even when the creature is pure, but between God and the fallen creature—oh! who is he that can measure the infinite distance? There was only one way of ever bridging so terrible a chasm and that only by the person and passion of the Lord Jesus Christ? How could we have ever perceived the infinite design, unless it had been revealed to us as an accomplished fact, by which he has reconciled us and brought us into communion with himself, that we should be married to him?
Now, My dear Christian, just contemplate what you were, and the degraded family to which you belonged, that you may magnify the riches of his grace who chose you for his wife even while you were still a wicked sinner, and has so obligated himself with all the pledges of a husband that he said, “I am your husband.” What were you? It is a evil catalog of wicked sinners which the apostle gives in the first epistle to the Corinthians (6:9-11), I refrain from reciting the filthy vices—at the end of which he says, “But you were washed, you were sanctified.” In those crimes he enumerates, many of us had a share, no, all of us! What was our father? What was our aim? What was our practice? What were our desires? What were our tendencies? They were earthly, downward, hell-ward. We were at a distance from God, and we loved that distance. But the Lord Jesus took our nature upon himself: upon him God laid the iniquity of all his people. And why did he do this? Not merely to save us from the wrath to come, but that we, being lifted up out of our degradation by virtue of his atonement, and being sanctified and made right by the power of the Spirit, should have a relationship established between us and God which was not formed by nature, but which has been achieved and consummated by astounding grace. Let us give thanks to the Lord this night, as we remember the pit where we were pulled up from, and call to mind the fact that now we are united to him in ties of blood and bonds of love.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
