the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Discovering Christ Day by Day
Today’s Reading: Jeremiah 4-5
“If Ye Can Find a Man”
Jeremiah 5:1
The two chapters brought before our eyes today reveal two things, two things we need to be reminded of unceasingly, two things set before us throughout the Book of God: the greatness of our sin and the greatness of God’s grace. Here the Lord God shows his people their iniquity, and graciously calls his fallen ones to return to him. The God of all grace calls poor, degenerate sinners, sinners who repeatedly refuse to hear him, to return to him, promising mercy and grace, pardon and forgiveness. But all God’s promises of mercy and grace depend upon one thing. — A man must be found through whom the holy Lord God may be both just and the Justifier of poor, needy sinners.
“Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.” — Blessed be the God of all grace, there is a man who has executed righteousness and judgment in the earth, the man Christ Jesus! In this world, in this sin-cursed earth, in this our spiritual Sodom, there is a man to stand in the gap and turn away the wrath of heaven, the God-man our Mediator.
Found of God
The Triune Jehovah, our great God, found in our Surety a man on whom he laid our help, “one who is mighty,” and “exalted one chosen out of the people” (Psalms 89:19). Before the world began, God found in his own darling Son a man to magnify his law and make it honorable, a man to be our ransom. He pours out his grace upon us in, by, and through that man, the Lord Jesus, our ever-blessed Christ, saying, “Deliver them from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom” (Job 33:24).
Christ Came
In due time Christ came to accomplish the work. —“When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5). — “In due time, Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). Our dear Savior came here to seek and to save lost sinners, to save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). And, let his name be praised forever, he accomplished what he came here to accomplish! By his obedience to the will and law of God as a man, our divine Mediator brought in everlasting righteousness for us. By his sin-atoning death upon the cursed tree, he satisfied all the fury of God’s just wrath as our Substitute.
By his great work of redemption, our Lord Jesus perfectly executed judgment (the just sentence of God’s holy law) by himself and upon himself. And, by mercy and truth, purged iniquity from his chosen (Proverbs 16:6).
