December 1 – Jeremiah 33:10-16

Main Focus: When we behold Jesus, we learn to hope in the God who keeps his promises.

We’re calling our 2025 Advent series Behold, because we want to end our year with a long, close look at Jesus and the promise of all of his goodness. We’ll Behold Jesus and see a real foothold for those things our hearts long for: hope, joy, peace and love. And we’ll be doing that by turning to Old Testament passages that anticipate Jesus’s arrival and help us feel the way in which Jesus answers those longings in our hearts. We’ll start this week in Jeremiah 33 to talk about hope.

Initially when you read it you’ll notice the message of hope this is intended to be. Through Jeremiah, God promises a day when what feels like desolation will no longer be desolate but in fact abundant and joyful. And that’s important given the setting, which we’ll back up to Jeremiah 32:1-2 to get. God sends this message of hope precisely when Jerusalem is about to be overthrown and her people taken into exile. A conquering nation, Babylon, is laying siege to the city, and worse still, Jeremiah is in prison because no one wanted to listen to him.

For added context, Jeremiah was a prophet about 600 years before Jesus. For hundreds of years Israel has been on a slow descent into faithlessness, and God sent Jeremiah to announce a coming exile due to their idolatry. That might sound harsh, but none of this was a surprise; exile as a punishment for sin was mentioned in the Mosaic covenant (Deut 28:36) and later at the dedication of the temple (2 Chron 6:36).

But, as we’ll discuss, isn’t it remarkable that at this moment, when Jerusalem is about to be conquered, that God delivered this message of a coming hope? When they are most insecure he promises a coming age of security; when they are practicing unrighteousness, he promises a day in which his city will be known by the Lord’s righteousness. That especially helps us see that this experience of exile wasn’t arbitrary cruelty from the Lord, but purposeful and, somehow, just as caring as his word of hope.

We’ll then work on connecting Israel’s experience with our own, asking ourselves when we’re most likely to struggle with hoping in the Lord, and how God’s message of hope might answer us in our struggles. If we struggle to feel right with God, note how the Messiah, the “Righteous Branch,” is the one who leads such that the city of God can be known by the Lord’s righteousness; our righteousness is his doing. If we struggle to know that God will take care of us and provide for us, note how the Messianic age supplies all that his people need in both abundance and joy. All that we need is at his disposal, and because of this Savior, we enjoy his good pleasure.

We’ll wrap up by turning to 1 Timothy 4:6-10 to see the connection between hope in the Lord and godliness (which, note, isn’t effortless; it takes work). Hope is meant to produce obedience in our lives, a point that seems fitting giving Israel’s disobedience-unto-exile that Jeremiah addressed. We’ll finish by thinking about how we hope to grow in hope, how we would like hope in this promised Savior to affect our daily lives. Surely this hope can give us greater ballast for weathering life’s troubles, but also, perhaps we can see how the practice of godliness is an activity of hope; holiness is hope in action. That might not be our go-to answer, but at least according to 1 Timothy 4, there’s a direct line from hope to godliness, and we’ll likely find that the practice of godliness turns around and reinforces our hope in the Lord.

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