Jesus With Us Church

The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.—Jeremiah 31:3.

This tender and gracious assurance appears here in a somewhat unexpected connexion. The Book of Jeremiah, taken as a whole, is a sad book; it consists in the main of warnings, expostulations, and prophecies of doom; and these prophecies areshown in process of fulfilment almost while they were being uttered. It is a sombre picture of human life which is presented to us in these vivid pages. And yet here we have, in the very midst of all this darkness and all these oracles of stern judgment, the sweet utterance which forms the text: “The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore withlovingkindness have I drawn thee.” With lovingkindness? Loved with an everlasting love? Nothing could have seemed less like it just then. Fierce, terrible, merciless were the ways of God to Israel so far as appearances went, and not without cause. Love was about the last word that could describe the relations of these suffering people to their offended God.

The world is temporary for each person, since every person dies. The physical earth is also temporary, since God will make a new earth in the end (Revelation 21—22). As a result, the desires of this world are also temporary. Believers are to resist evil desires, following the example of Jesus (Matthew 4:1–11).

This is the only place where the apostle John mentions the "will of God." However, this phrase has a rich usage in the New Testament. Jesus stated, "For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:35). Romans 8:27 notes, "the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." Romans 12:2 adds, "be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God." Doing God's will or desires is to be the goal of the believer.

Doing God's will cannot save us, of course—no good works can overcome our sin. We are saved by Christ's sacrifice, when we put our trusting faith in Him (Ephesians 2:8–9). However, a natural outcome of salvation is a desire to do God's will (Ephesians 2:10). This is a hallmark of the believer, and only the believer will live with God forever. More immediately, John is explaining that a life lived in fellowship with God will go on forever, while earthly things will someday be gone.