THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD

D. L. Stewart

Jeremiah 33: 15–22; 35: 18, 19

What has impressed me in reading these chapters is the thought of faithfulness. That “God is faithful” is one of the outstanding statements of Scripture. The reference in this section to His covenant in respect of the day and His covenant in respect of the night, and His covenant with David, and with the priests the Levites, is a four-fold reference to God’s faithfulness.

His covenant with the day and the night would go back to Noah’s time when, after God had come in in judgment because of the sin and lawlessness that had manifested itself in mankind.

He declared that certain things would be continued all the days of the earth (Genesis 8: 22).

We might say that this covenant was for man, but, even so, what was in mind was that there would always be conditions so that God could work out His own thoughts. These are the conditions in which He has worked creationally, we might say, but also morally—seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. These are all part of the divine arrangement in view of God’s work going on in view of a result for Himself. The Lord says,

“The night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9: 4), but that does not mean that God does not work. He can work overnight and change things completely as we see in the book of Esther. She asked for one more day and God worked overnight.

This chapter comes in at the very darkest time in Israel’s history. Jeremiah was shut up in the

court of the guard, yet that beloved servant of God must have spoken to the nation time after time. The thought of faithfulness would be seen in him at any rate. He held nothing back. He spoke and he spoke and he spoke, like John the baptist who kept on speaking to Herod (Mark 6: 18). In a sense it is like our own day, the end in sight, things broken down so much that there will never be any betterment publicly, yet the Spirit of God goes on speaking. The reference to the Branch, or Sprout, is an allusion to Christ as the One by whom God’s end will be reached with Israel. In the area of devastation God will work by means of the Sprout, the introduction of life, in a day yet to come. It is put down here to God’s faithfulness to David, His covenant with David His servant. God loved David for he set himself to better conditions for God in the midst of Israel, and God never forgot that. God would think much of this too in relation to ourselves, where there is a heart for Him that would seek to provide in our localities conditions in which He can find pleasure. “There shall never fail to David a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel”; that is God’s faithfulness to David. It does not relate to the history of the breakdown since Solomon’s day, it relates to what is in the mind of God and how He is going to finalise things, and yet it is put on the basis that it is because of David’s faithfulness.

Then it says, “neither shall there fail to the priests the Levites a man before me to offer up burnt-offerings, and to burn oblations, and to do sacrifice continually”. The reference to the Levites would go back to the faithfulness of Levi when Israel broke down in the wilderness so quickly and resorted to the golden calf. The call was for faithfulness and Levi separated himself to Jehovah. Nothing is said in Exodus about a covenant but it says in Deuteronomy 33: 9, 10, “They have observed thy

word, and kept thy covenant. They shall teach Jacob thine ordinances, and Israel thy law: they shall put incense before thy nostrils, and whole burnt-offering upon thine altar”. God never forgot the faithfulness of Levi and His covenant which He speaks of in Malachi and He is yet to purify the children of Levi as gold and silver and they shall offer unto Jehovah a pure oblation. It relates in our own day to God’s faithfulness to the recovery in which we, through mercy and grace, have part. In it there have been these features of fidelity to God in observing His word and keeping His covenant. The recovery, of course, has been broken into disastrously time after time. The enemy has largely secured his end in the breaking up of things publicly, but God would have in mind that this feature of fidelity that was in the beginning of the recovery will be maintained to the end. His side of it is His faithfulness to His own word to see things through to conclusion. In the end, in spite of all that appears publicly, He is to have, for His pleasure, the kind of manhood that was seen in David as a type, of course, of Christ and the feature of fidelity as in Levi.

In Jeremiah 35 it is remarkable what comes to light in the Rechabites that represents the principle of fidelity. They were tested in the house of Jehovah, in the chamber of the sons of the man of God, yet maintained their fidelity and were faithful to their father’s word. God takes account of this principle of fidelity with them and says, “There shall not fail to Jonadab the son of Rechab a man to stand before me for ever”. The Lord Jesus speaks about those who keep His commandments and who keep His word. He has His eye upon them. No matter how testing the circumstances, He would have something of that character maintained. It is really an answer to Him who, as the hymn writer says, was ‘faithful amidst unfaithfulness’.

May

there be something of this feature of fidelity secured and maintained among the Lord’s people, for His name’s sake.

Word in meeting for ministry, Lossiemouth
25 September 1984