GOD DIVORCED ISRAEL — SO HOW COULD HE TAKE HER BACK?
Sometimes one verse creates a question that forces us to keep reading.
Jeremiah contains one of those verses.
God says of the northern kingdom of Israel:
“I gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away because of all her adulteries.”
— Jeremiah 3:8
That's unusually strong language.
God describes Himself as a husband.
Israel has been unfaithful.
And God says:
I DIVORCED HER.
But that creates a problem.
Because only a few verses later God says:
“Return, faithless Israel.”
— Jeremiah 3:12
How can both statements be true?
GOD HAD A LAW ABOUT THIS
Jeremiah begins the chapter by referring to a law his readers would have known.
Deuteronomy 24 describes a divorced woman who marries another man.
If that second marriage later ends, her first husband is forbidden from taking her back as his wife.
Jeremiah asks:
If a man divorces his wife
and she leaves him and marries another man,
should he return to her again?
— Jeremiah 3:1
Jeremiah is deliberately drawing upon Deuteronomy 24. Scholars widely recognize that connection.
Then comes the shocking comparison.
Israel hasn't merely been unfaithful once.
She has pursued many lovers.
Yet God says:
RETURN TO ME.
DON'T MISS THE SURPRISE
If we stop with the divorce, Jeremiah sounds hopeless.
But Jeremiah doesn't stop.
God says:
“Return, faithless Israel...
I will frown on you no longer,
for I am faithful.”
— Jeremiah 3:12
Then again:
“Return, faithless people...”
— Jeremiah 3:14
And again:
“Return, faithless people;
I will cure you of backsliding.”
— Jeremiah 3:22
That's remarkable.
The same chapter that announces the divorce repeatedly calls the unfaithful people to return.
So perhaps the question isn't:
How can we find a legal technicality allowing God to remarry Israel?
Perhaps Jeremiah is showing us something much greater:
GOD IS PROMISING A RESTORATION THAT IS BIGGER THAN THE OLD MARRIAGE.
SOMETHING IS GOING TO CHANGE
Look at what Jeremiah says will happen when God's people return.
They will no longer talk about:
“the ark of the covenant of the LORD.”
It will not be remembered or replaced.
— Jeremiah 3:16
That's startling.
The ark stood at the heart of Israel's covenant worship.
Yet Jeremiah looks toward a restored relationship with God in which the old covenant arrangement will not simply be reconstructed.
Something new is coming.
And later Jeremiah tells us exactly what.
“I WILL MAKE A NEW COVENANT”
Jeremiah 31 contains one of the most important promises in the Old Testament:
“The days are coming...when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.”
— Jeremiah 31:31
Notice the people:
ISRAEL AND JUDAH.
The divided people we've been studying.
But God says this covenant will be:
“not like the covenant I made with their ancestors...”
— Jeremiah 31:32
Why?
Because:
“they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them.”
The marriage and covenant pictures come together.
Israel broke the covenant.
God promises:
A NEW COVENANT.
The old relationship isn't merely going to be patched up and restarted.
God is going to do something new. Jeremiah's marriage imagery and new-covenant promise belong to the same larger story.
THEN JESUS PICKS UP THE LANGUAGE
Centuries later, Jesus sits with His disciples at the Last Supper.
He takes the cup and says:
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood...”
— Luke 22:20
Jeremiah had promised a new covenant.
Jesus says:
THIS IS IT.
And the writer of Hebrews makes the connection unmistakable.
Hebrews quotes Jeremiah's new-covenant prophecy at length in Hebrews 8:8–12.
Then Hebrews concludes:
“By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the first one obsolete...”
— Hebrews 8:13
That's enormously important to our question.
GOD DIDN'T SIMPLY RESTART THE OLD COVENANT
The answer isn't that God ignored Israel's unfaithfulness.
Nor does Scripture say God found a loophole in His own divorce law.
Instead, Jeremiah himself points forward to something different:
A new covenant.
And the New Testament says that covenant came through:
JESUS CHRIST.
The relationship with God is no longer based upon returning to the old Mosaic covenant.
Something new has happened.
WHAT ABOUT ROMANS 7?
This is where our old study needs an important correction.
Paul does use marriage, law and death in Romans 7.
He explains that death releases a person from the legal bond of marriage.
Then he tells Christians:
“You also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead...”
— Romans 7:4
That's an important passage.
But Paul isn't explaining Jeremiah 3 or God's divorce of northern Israel.
His subject is the believer's relationship to the Law.
So we shouldn't make Romans 7 prove something Paul doesn't actually say.
It does, however, reinforce a larger New Testament truth:
OUR RELATIONSHIP TO GOD HAS FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED THROUGH CHRIST.
AND WHO CAN ENTER THIS NEW COVENANT PEOPLE?
This is where the story becomes even bigger.
The gospel didn't merely reunite scattered Israelites.
Gentiles were brought near too.
Paul says Christ:
“has made the two groups one.”
— Ephesians 2:14
And:
“His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two.”
— Ephesians 2:15
Jew and Gentile do not come to God through two different covenants or two different Messiahs.
They come through:
ONE CHRIST.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE UNFAITHFUL BRIDE?
She wasn't forgotten.
God had already promised through Jeremiah:
RETURN.
But He also promised:
A NEW COVENANT.
Then Jesus came and announced:
“THE NEW COVENANT IN MY BLOOD.”
That is where Jeremiah's story leads.
Not backward to rebuilding the broken relationship exactly as it had been.
But forward to what God had promised all along.
SOMETHING NEW.
READ FIRST. CONCLUDE LATER.
Jeremiah 3 really does say:
God divorced faithless Israel.
And Jeremiah really does say:
God called her to return.
We shouldn't erase either statement.
But neither should we stop reading in chapter 3.
Jeremiah eventually promises:
a new covenant
with:
Israel and Judah.
And the New Testament identifies that new covenant with Jesus Christ.
So perhaps the mystery isn't solved by discovering some hidden exception in Israel's divorce law.
The answer is much larger.
God did what He promised:
HE MADE A NEW COVENANT.
And through Christ, the invitation to return to God became an invitation not only to scattered Israel—
but to the world.
Read First. Conclude Later.