“For the time is coming,” says the LORD, “when I will place a righteous Branch on King David’s throne. He will be a King who rules with wisdom. He will do what is just and right throughout the land. And this is his name: ‘The LORD Is Our Righteousness.’ In that day Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety.” - Jeremiah 23:5-6
Many of us look back to the good old days. But Israel was told by Jeremiah to look forward to the good new days that lay ahead. Jehovah himself would provide not only a lamb for an atoning sacrifice, but a hope for the future. Psychologists tell us people cannot function without hope. Yet many people today feel a hopelessness that never seems to go away.
Without Christ there is no hope for the future because he is the future. God holds the future as surely as he holds the past and the present. He is working his purposes out. He knows the plans that he has for us: plans of good and not of disaster. Without God, without Christ, without hope, we are lost people groping in the dark for some meaning to life.
“The time is coming,” says the Lord, when he will provide one who will put all things in their proper place. Rights will be respected and wrongs redressed. There will be salvation and security for God’s people. This is our hope. There’s a new day coming for the believer.
Jehovah-Tsidkenu gives us that new day, that hope, that future. Do you feel hopeless? “Hope in God” (Psalm 42:5).
For Further Study: Jeremiah 23:1-8
Excerpted from The One Year Devotions for Women, Copyright ©2000 by Jill Briscoe. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. All rights reserved.
For more from Jill Briscoe, please visit TellingtheTruth.org.
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