Jeremiah 33:3
“Call to me, and I will answer you, and will show you great things, and difficult, which you don’t know.”
Where this sits
Spoken to Jeremiah while he was shut up in the court of the guard, with the Babylonian army already besieging the city.
Reflection
The setting is the part that makes this verse difficult and useful.
Jeremiah is under arrest. The city is surrounded. He has spent his career telling people this would happen and has been beaten and imprisoned for it, and now it is happening exactly as he said. There is no version of his situation in which things are about to improve quickly.
And into that, God says: call to me, and I will answer.
What is promised is not release. Jeremiah stays in custody. What is promised is information — great things and difficult, which you don't know. The word behind difficult suggests things fenced off, inaccessible, beyond reach. It is not a promise of clarity about his own circumstances. It is an offer of things he could not have worked out.
And what he is shown, in the rest of the chapter, is the restoration of a city that was at that moment being demolished. He is given, in prison, a description of streets he would never walk.
That is the shape of the promise. Not a change in the situation, but access to something larger than the situation — offered to a man with nothing to do but call, because everything else had been taken away from him.
- Theme:
- Prayer
- Book:
- Jeremiah