Jeremiah 50:1-46; Hebrews 12:1-29

Thought from Today’s Old Testament Passage: In those days, and in that time, saith the LORD, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and weeping: they shall go, and seek the LORD their God. They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the LORD in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten. —Jeremiah 50: 4, 5. I will not talk much with you concerning the Chaldeans and the Jews, but I would speak concerning ourselves. We, too, by nature are in banishment. We are not what we ought to have been, for the Lord did not make us to be sinners, but to be His happy and obedient creatures: our present lost estate is not our true state, we are banished through coming under the power of our great adversary; sin has carried us into captivity, we are in the far country, away from the great Father’s house. It is a great blessing when the times come, and they have come, when there is an opportunity and an invitation to return. Today the power of the adversary is broken, and we may flee out of the Babylon of sin. A greater than Cyrus has opened the two-leaved gates, and broken the bars of iron in sunder, and proclaimed liberty to the captives. We may now return to our God and freely enjoy the holy and happy associations which belong to the City of our God. Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of the Bible, Vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1962), pp. 174-175.