Jeremiah 30:17
“For I will restore health to you, and I will heal you of your wounds, says Yahweh; because they have called you an outcast, saying, It is Zion, whom no man seeks after.”
Where this sits
Spoken to a people about to go into exile. The reason given for the healing is not their condition but what others have said about them.
Reflection
The reason clause is the strange part, and it is easy to skip.
God does not say: I will heal you because you are wounded, which is what the sentence sets up. He says: because they have called you an outcast, saying, It is Zion, whom no man seeks after.
The healing is prompted by the taunt. Someone said a cruel thing about this people — that nobody wants them, that no one is coming for them — and God takes it personally enough to act. The insult is treated as a claim about him, since a nation abandoned reflects on whoever was supposed to be their God.
That is a small window into how these things are seen from the other side. We tend to assume God responds to need, which he does. Here he also responds to slander, and specifically to slander about whether anyone cares.
And the wound in question was not undeserved. Read the surrounding chapter: a few verses earlier God says the wound was incurable and that he had struck them himself, for the greatness of their iniquity. So the same passage holds both — a punishment God says he administered, and a healing he undertakes because of what outsiders concluded from it.
Which means the exile did not mean what the neighbours said it meant. That is the actual promise here.
- Theme:
- Healing
- Book:
- Jeremiah