Day One Hundred Sixty-Four “A Field in Anathoth”
For weeks we had been forced to jump through the unending hoops of government regulations and red tape. We were purchasing our first home through a Pennsylvania bond agreement made popular in the 1980’s, created to assist first-time home owners. Goodness, there were a LOT of hoops! Like anything government-related, we were bombarded with a cascade of forms to complete and submit, inspections to have approved, checks to be sent, all concluding with my husband camping overnight in the lender’s parking lot to be the first in line for those limited funds. The process was impossible, but somehow God worked out all the bugs and we found ourselves, after eight years of renting someone else’s land, grateful property owners. That acre of rural countryside was finally ours; we were HOME!
Just as God led us in our land-purchasing endeavor, He also directed Jeremiah in a symbolic land purchase during one of Israel’s darkest hours. A tidal wave of judgment was on a collision course with the small nation of Judah. The source God would use to rain down His punishment on His people would be the powerful Babylonian empire; Judah would be “carried away captive from Jerusalem to Babylon.” God would allow “all this evil to come upon them (Judah)” because of their willful disobedience, for they had done “nothing at all that thou (God) commanded them to do.” They were going to lose their lease on Promised Land, but God was about to enter the real estate business.
Jeremiah was born to the godly priest, Hilkiah, and his wife in the small town of Anathoth, located three miles northeast of Jerusalem. Later in his ministry, this weeping prophet was instructed by God to purchase his uncle’s “field that is in Anathoth…which is in the country of Benjamin.” He was to buy it in the presence of many “witnesses” and to take the “evidence of the purchase…and put them in an earthen vessel that it may continue many days.” Jeremiah signed the deed of purchase and paid the money as God had instructed, but why? Why would God have his prophet waste money on a piece of land that would soon be overrun by the enemy and taken from him? God was giving His people a vivid object lesson. God had made a promise to Jeremiah that someday the children of Israel would return from exile, God would “bring them again unto this place” to regain their historic possession. God would forgive, “give them one heart, and one way…and make an everlasting covenant with them.” Jeremiah was to purchase this real estate to declare boldly to his nation, I’m standing on the promises of God and He keeps His promises! We are His people, and He will restore us to our land in His time. His covenant promise is eternal.
As you peruse through those precious promises in God’s Word today, remind yourself that you can stand firmly upon those promises. God does not fail, He does not lie, nor does He forget. He is a God of “great power and out-stretched arm,” and He keeps His “exceeding great and precious promises.” His Word is faithful and true, worthy of our upmost trust and dependence.
Jeremiah 32:27 Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?
Thank You, Lord, for those “great and precious promises” that I can trust with no hesitation. Thank You for loving me so much!
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