Before You Began

It is around 627 BC, in Anathoth, a village of priests a few miles north of Jerusalem. A priest's son named Jeremiah is told that he will spend his life saying things nobody wants to hear. He will do it for about forty years. He will be beaten and put in the stocks, he will be let down with ropes into a muddy pit, and he will still watch Jerusalem fall.

At the very start God says to him, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee." Take that sentence apart slowly, because each part does its own work. "Knew" is the language of a covenant, the close bond between God and His people. God is claiming a relationship with Jeremiah that is older than Jeremiah himself. "Sanctified" means set apart, marked off for a special use. "Ordained" comes from the Hebrew word for "given," so it means appointed. All three of these verbs describe something already done. Each of them was finished before Jeremiah had a personality, a reputation, or an opinion of his own.

Jeremiah's objection was practical: "Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child." God did not give him a pep talk about his potential. He sent him: "Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee." In the same chapter God tells him plainly, "they shall fight against thee," and then adds at once, "but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee." Being known before birth was never a promise of an easy road. It was the solid ground under a hard one.

So this verse does not tell you that some hidden greatness is waiting to be found in you. It tells you something better. What God knows about you was settled before you could add anything to it. That is why it does not rise and fall with your reputation, your age, or how useful you were this year. The God who knew Jeremiah before he was born, and stayed with him through every hard year, knows you just as surely.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 34 is God With Us (Matthew 1:23).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna