Jeremiah had warned the people about what would happen if they did not change their ways. Hew criticized them for their lack of faith. Yet in the end, he delivered a message of mercy. He told them that God would wipe away their guilt and cleanse them of their sins.

There are times in our lives, when it is not God who inflicts guilt upon us, but we who fail to let God remove the guilt from our lives.

There is a scene in the movie, The Mission, that illustrates this wonderfully. The conquistador who has killed his brother for sleeping with the conquistador’s fiancé, gives himself the penance of dragging his suit of armor and his weapons of war with him as he heads toward the mission where he will seek to make up for all his past sins. However, the weight of his guilt keeps pulling him back. As he climbs up a rugged cliff, he falls again and again, because he cannot let go of the burden that he carries with him. When he gets near the top of the cliff, the weight of the bundle he carries threatens to pull him back one more time, when suddenly one of the indigenous people who lives above the falls cut the rope that sets him free. All the conquistador cam do is weep. He has been set free from the burden of his guilt. Not only that, but the person who set him free was the very same person who at the very beginning of the movie just barely escaped from being captured and enslaved by that very conquistador. [I had to watch the movie a second time to make sure that I had seen that right.]

The very same God against whom the people of Israel at the time of Jeremiah who had been unfaithful, was the same God who offered them mercy. Somehow, that news seems almost too good to be true, and so we carry the guilt of our sins with us. Yet Jeremiah reminds the people of his day and us that God not only seeks to cleanse us of our sins, but God also seeks to cleanse us of our guilt.