They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s, shall he return unto her again? shall not that land be greatly polluted? but thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the LORD.
God’s grace is scandalously lavish. He forgives so much and so often it offends our sense of what is right and reasonable.
Most of us are not so bad that we reject the idea of forgiveness altogether. Even unbelievers practice something that has, at least, a faint resemblance to forgiveness. The restaurant server accidentally spills water on our lap and after a moment’s irritation, we realize it was really just a small thing and so we forget all about it. In more serious cases, we victims might try to repair the damaged relationship with some measure of humility and patience. But when offenses are very hurtful and deliberately repeated, we think it would hardly be right to show any more mercy and so we harden our hearts. We rationalize that if people aren’t made, at least sometimes, to pay for their sins, this world would surely careen to disaster.
The Lord asserts the infinite supremacy His thoughts and ways over ours in a context about His showing astounding mercy to the wicked by abundantly pardoning their most grievous sins (Isa 55.6–9). The gospel is so great it is hard, if not impossible, to believe, so the Lord assures us that He is far more merciful than we are, and that He forgives far more than we would.
Jeremiah 3.1 presents most forcefully the wonder of God’s outrageous grace to sinners. The original readers in Israel had a better knowledge of ancient Jewish marriage law and attitudes than we do. An important passage in their God-given code was Deuteronomy 24.1–4 which absolutely forbad a husband remarrying his former wife if she had married someone else. Part of it reads, “her former husband, which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after that she is defiled; for that is abomination before the LORD” (v. 4). This law illustrates that God hates divorce (Mal 2.16) and wanton partner-swapping. This statement in Deuteronomy was doubtless intended to dissuade husbands from rashly divorcing their wives since the marital estrangement could become permanent.
All this is assumed in Jeremiah 3.1. The questions are rhetorical with obvious answers.
1) “If a man put away [i.e., divorce] his wife, and she go from him, and become another man’s [i.e., marry him], shall he [the first husband] return unto her again?” No he shall not return to her again (i.e., remarry her) under any circumstances.
2) “Shall not that land be greatly polluted?” Yes, it would be. If first husbands remarried their former wives after their former wives had married another man, the “land” (i.e., the people of that society) would have greatly sinned against the Lord and incurred spiritual defilement in His holy sight.
This is to remind the readers that such remarriages were wrong for them and deeply offensive to God.
But something even more scandalous than that is on display in the Lord Himself. He describes it in the metaphor of marriage, justified divorce, and the offer of marital reconciliation. The Lord is the Husband of His people who suffered the spiritual infidelity of their gross idolatry. Like a brokenhearted husband who is the victim of an immoral wife’s treachery, He put her away (Jer 3.8). Instead of repenting of her sins, she became even more spiritually promiscuous, worshiping all kinds of false gods without shame or contrition. Israel was like a woman who had been married to one lover after another after another in succession. She was not only “greatly polluted” (like the land after a single violation of the Deuteronomic prohibition); her soul became a toxic waste dump! She had nearly extinguished any vestige of her humanity.
“Yet,” wonder of wonders, the holy God of Israel, the LORD, calls upon her to return to Him for the purpose of reconciliation and spiritual remarriage! In human society this would be to make a travesty of the institution of marriage, but God’s supply of mercy is so cosmically vast that it calls the shameless harlot back into the marriage bed of communion with Him! Of course that is a call for her to repent of her sins and trust in the Lord, and an implicit promise that He will take her back. We ought to be deeply impressed that even after she has contemptuously trampled in the dust the marriage covenant, the Husband of Israel was pleading with her to come home! “Although in accordance with legal regulations, I ought, not to receive you, yet I say, Return to me.”1 Contrary to the opinion of some interpreters, “God is not indignantly rejecting the possibility of her return. We must never forget that God, as He wills, exercises grace beyond the law.”2 Matthew Henry wrote on this text, “God has not tied Himself by the laws which He made for us, nor has He the peevish resentment that men have; He will be more kind to Israel, for the sake of His covenant with them, than ever any injured husband was to an adulterous wife; for in receiving penitents, as much as in any thing, He is God and not man.”3
I must state the application to us very concisely. My fellow Christian, no matter how often or how grossly you have sinned against your Savior Jesus Christ, I insist with great pleasure and His authority: He still wants you! Ω
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1 Lange, J. P., Schaff, P., Nägelsbach, C. W. E., & Asbury, S. R. (2008). A commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Jeremiah. Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software.
2 Gaebelein, F. E., et al., (1986). The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel (Vol. 6). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.
3 Henry, M. (1994). Matthew Henry’s commentary on the whole Bible: complete and unabridged in one volume (p. 1225). Peabody: Hendrickson.