John Calvin Commentary Jeremiah 50:20

"In those days, and in that time, saith Jehovah, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none; and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found: for I will pardon them whom I leave as a remnant." — Jeremiah 50:20 (ASV)

As I have already said, the Prophet now shows the primary cause why God purposed to deal so kindly and mercifully with His people, namely, because He would forgive their sins. And undoubtedly, whatever is said about the forgiveness of sins is cold and meaningless unless we are first convinced that God is reconciled and propitious to us.

Indeed, the unbelieving seek nothing else than to be relieved from their troubles, like the sick who require nothing from their physician but that he should immediately remove pain. If the sick man thirsts, “Take away thirst,” he will say. In short, they regard only the symptom; they say nothing about the disease itself. Such is the case with the ungodly: they neglect the most important thing, that God should pardon them and receive them into favor. As long as they are exempt from punishment, this is enough for them. But as for the faithful, they can never be satisfied until they feel assured that God is propitious to them. Therefore, in order to free the minds of the godly from anxiety and all doubts, our Prophet says that God would be propitious, so that He would bury all the sins of Israel and Judah, so that they might no longer be remembered or come to judgment.

This passage is remarkable, and from it we especially learn this valuable truth: when God severely chastises us, we ought not to focus only on the punishment and seek only relief from our troubles, but on the contrary, we ought to look to the very cause of all evils, namely, our sins.

So David, in many places, when he seeks from God relief from evil, does not only say, “Lord, deliver me from my enemies; Lord, restore to me my health; Lord, deliver me from death;”—he does not simply speak in this way, but he earnestly turns to God and implores His mercy. And on the other hand, when God promises deliverance from punishment, He does not simply say, “I will restore you from exile or captivity; I will restore you to your own country;” but He says, “I will forgive you your sins.” For when the disease is removed, the symptoms that accompany the disease also disappear. So also it happens in this case, for when God shows that He is propitious to us, we are then freed from punishment—that is, from what we have suffered for a time, or what would have awaited us, if God, in His infinite mercy and goodness, had not spared us.

Prayer:

Grant, Almighty God, that since You have been so merciful towards Your ancient people, and however grievously You might have been offended, You yet preserved a remnant to whom You gave tokens of Your mercy—O grant that it may please You so to draw us also today; and however much we may deserve a thousand times to be condemned by You, yet deign to receive us in Your only-begotten Son. Through Him, show Yourself reconciled to us to the end of our lives, and be our Father in death itself, so that we may live and die to You and acknowledge this as the only true way of salvation, until we at last enjoy that celestial inheritance obtained for us by the blood of the same, Your only-begotten Son. Amen.

[Exposition continues from previous day's lecture]

In the last lecture, we began to explain what the Prophet says: that when God redeemed His people, He would be so propitious as to blot out all their sins. We also said that the Prophet shows that the people had been treated with severity for just reasons. Here, then, we must observe the justice of God in all His judgments.

For the Prophet reminds us that the Jews could not have been reconciled to God unless they acknowledged that they had been justly punished. And from this we also learn a useful doctrine: whenever God strikes us with His rods, we are not only to seek relief from external evils or sorrow, but also that God may forgive us.

The reason must also be observed, for the Prophet teaches us that there would be no iniquity because God would be propitious. From this we learn that there were also just reasons why God chastised His people, but that as He designed to forgive their sins, He became their deliverer.

Let us then know that we are accounted righteous before God, not because He sees no iniquities in us, but because He freely forgives them. It is, in short, the only true way of being reconciled to God, when He buries our sins, as it were, so as never to call them to judgment.

Moreover, that this favor properly belongs to the kingdom of Christ may be gathered from the thirty-first chapter, where the Prophet, having spoken of the new covenant, states this as the main point:

I will pardon their iniquities, (Jeremiah 31:34)

and he uses the same verb here. This promise, then, should not be confined to that short time when the people returned from their Babylonian exile, but should, on the contrary, be extended to the kingdom of Christ, for it was then that this prophecy was fully accomplished, because our sins do not appear before God when He is reconciled to us.

Yet the Prophet intimates that this favor would not be general, for he adds that God would be propitious only to the remnant; and it was necessary to express this, because the faithful after their return might otherwise have despaired when they saw that only a few of the people were restored.

If their restoration had been indiscriminately promised, the faith of the godly might have faltered on seeing that almost the whole people disregarded the favor offered to them. For only a part of the tribe of Judah availed themselves of the kindness of Cyrus and Darius, and the ten tribes preferred to live in Chaldea and in other places. And it was not only once that God restricted the promise given here, for as Isaiah says:

Were thy people as the sand of the sea,
a remnant only shall be saved. (Isaiah 10:21–22)

The people gloried in their numbers and boasted of what had been said to Abraham:

Number if thou canst the stars of heaven and the sand of the sea, so shall thy seed be. (Genesis 15:5)

God then shows that the Jews were greatly mistaken when they thought that they would always be in a safe state. Therefore, the Prophet says here that God would not be propitious indiscriminately to all, but to those whom He would make the remnant. And God also intimates that it was to be ascribed to His gratuitous goodness that any remained alive, according to what is said in Isaiah 1:9:

Except some seed had been left to us, we must have been as Gomorrah, and like to Sodom.

God then declares here that the remnant would not be saved otherwise than through His gratuitous mercy, as Paul also says, that the Jews were not to hope for salvation, except through the free mercy of God (Romans 11:5). And he especially noted this passage and similar passages, because the Jews then, in opposing the Gospel, raised the objection that they were the seed of Abraham and the chosen people. But Paul gave them this answer: that it was not a new thing that God gathered a small remnant from His people; and he assigns His gratuitous election as the cause.