Tomorrow People

One of the most compelling Twitter accounts i follow is 'Real Time World War II,' which post updates, as you might have guessed from this date in 1940. Slowing down a war only serves to make it more brutal. The slow, bitter invasion of Norway by the Soviets, the awful, bloody, Italian excursion into France, which gained five miles of land at the cost of perhaps 5000 men. It was during this time in 1940 that Nazi Germany overran France, and the northern part of that country was abandoned and desolate, corpses of men and animals left in the fields.

Desolate would have been a good word to describe Jerusalem during the period of exile. People panicking, abandoning property and responsibility. In the midst of all this awful drama, God comes to Jeremiah, and in chapter 32 tells him to buy a field. You can understand Jeremiah's confusion. Buy a field? What does ownership matter when the Babylonians are about to overrun us. Buy a field? What good will that do me in Egypt, surely it's better to keep my silver. But, in verses 9-12, we see Jeremiah doing everything right and necessary to buy a field. Why? For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.'

The Lord tells Jeremiah this disaster is not the end. God's people will still own God's land, and one day there will be with God there again. The Lord tells Jeremiah that there is a future, there is a tomorrow. There is always tomorrow for the Christian, in fact, Christians should be tomorrow people.

Ruth is a tomorrow person. She trusts God, and goes with Naomi because she knows God will be with her tomorrow, that God is in charge of all her tomorrows. Why could Paul lay his head down and sleep at night? Because he knew that whatever happened, God was going to give him tomorrow. Why should Jeremiah buy the field? Because God was giving His people tomorrow.

That didn't make life easy for Jeremiah. He was arrested, thrown in the public sewer and taken away from his home. Tomorrow didn't come soon. It took seventy years. But come it did, first with the physical return lead by Ezra and Nehemiah, and then finally, ultimately, with Jesus.

The best is always yet to come for Christians. We're always buying fields in besieged cities, we're always investing in ways that don't seem to make any sense, because we know that tomorrow is the Lords, and that tomorrow will come...