200. Heal Backslidings
Jeremiah 3:22 Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings. Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the Lord our God.
Return (repent) and the Lord will heal. Backsliding children are serious problems for God: those for whom God has done marvelous thing spurn that gracious love by ignoring the Lord and turning to self, to other gods, things, and people. Backsliders are considered to be on a slippery slope sliding out the door of the kingdom. But the good news is that they may return, and when they return God will heal.
The Lord is calling all to repentance since all sin; the Lord is constantly calling all to return since all backslide at some time or another to one degree or another. The Lord still loves and calls and causes the backslider to return. The promise then is that God will heal the backsliding. If it were not for this promise we would never return. Even the Prodigal Son could not initially believe the grace and kindness of the father when he returned, but he had hoped that maybe the father would take him on as a hired hand, since he knew he had rejected the father-son relationship. But Grace is surprising, even though that is God’s promise. God’s love is always greater than we can imagine.
The Lord promises to heal the backslidings. The healing involves two aspects: 1) He heals us of wanting to backslide again. We will backslide again, but the backslidings will be less frequent and not so far. It gets better once we are secure in the Father’s arms. And One Day the time will come, when we die, that we will definitely never backslide ever again for ever. 2) He heals us of the results of sliding back away from God. Backsliding always causes pain and poverty of soul. The Lord can and will heal this. We may deserve the messes sin causes us to get into, but the love and saving power of God is stronger still. He heals the sickness of soul; He repairs the broken; He restores the soul to the designed wholeness; He cleans up the mess; He puts us back on the path to life in place of tending toward death. All of this is included in the promise: “I will heal your backslidings.”
Our response to the loving kindness, tender goodness, and unconditional love of God is this: “we come unto thee.” We believe and confess: “you are the Lord our God, our Savior and Healer.” By the power of the Spirit we say: “Jesus is Lord!”