God is in the Restoration Business

“They shall be carried to Babylon, and there shall they be until the day that I visit them, saith the LORD; then will I bring them up, and restore them to this place.” (Jer 27:22 AV)

 

The ‘they’ and ‘them’ are the vessels and other items of the temple.  When Nebby and his armies conquered Judah, they carried away all the precious metals to Babylon.  This included all the gold used to plate everything in the temple.  Once stripped, the temple was then destroyed.  While reading this passage, the mind went to efficiency and logistics.  Wouldn’t it be easier to simply start with new?  The wagons that must have been employed to carry all that pertained to the temple from Babylon to Jerusalem were not insignificant.  It must have been an undertaking.  Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply raise a levy on the occupants of Palestine?  The levy could be used to craft new materials for the repaired temple.  Why bring the old back and restore them?  Why not start fresh.  After all, the items of the temple have spent years in the halls of conquest erected by the Babylonians.  The pagans had drooled over them for decades in a belief their god was greater than the God of Israel.  They were compromised.  They were sullied.  They were no longer holy.  Why bring them back?

I have hanging on my wall a restoration project.  Years ago, when Lisa and I visited Berea, Kentucky, we visited a luthier’s shop who fabricated Appalachian dulcimers.  This wonderful fella gave me a brief music lesson and watching him play this instrument, decided I could handle the challenge.  However, his hand-made works of art were out of my price range.  Arriving home, I began my search for a used piece.  The LORD provided one rather cheaply and off I went.  It was wonderful.  However, not content to stop with the basic instrument, I began looking at six-string concert size instruments.  These were out of the price range of Rockefeller himself.  So, the LORD lead me to find a used and rather beat up one on eBay.  Bidding on it, I won it for only twenty dollars.  The problem was, it was truly a barn find.  Hand-made by an average luthier at best, this instrument was a mixture of different types of wood and a finish that would make a journeyman sick.  It has so much old lacquer on it, it was peeling off like sunburnt skin from a beach comer.  With an investment of less than forty more dollars, we restored this piece to better than new condition.  A new fretboard, fret bars, tuners, strings, and finish, and it looks like a museum piece hanging on my wall.  Restoring the old was far more satisfying than buying new.

God created everything new in six full days.  Brand new everything.  Since then, He has been in the restoration business.  Although the LORD creates individual human souls, the LORD is primarily in the restoration business.  These items restored to their rightful place are a good picture of what the LORD does with the saint.  We were created in our parent’s nature.  We came to the age of accountability and were dead in our sins.  When Jesus saved our souls, it began a restoration project with His created beings to bring them again into a condition of Christlikeness.  Adam and Eve threw away perfection.  We participate in the same by our choices to sin.  Yet, the LORD doesn’t care to destroy the entire human race and start over.  Rather, He desires to redeem all who wish to be and restore them to the place He had always intended.  This restoration project is bathed in the blood of Christ.  Sometimes we get impatient or we seem to be cast down at the failures that we fail to see the restoration project underway.  When I applied the finish to my dulcimer, I had to wait days in between coats.  Not minutes or hours.  Days.  Multiple thin coats over weeks until it was the way I wanted it.  Before that, sanding, sanding, and more sanding.  Here a little, there a little.  The whole project of restoration took almost six months.  But it got done.  The LORD requires our lifetime for restoration.  But I am glad He is in the restoration business.  If He wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here nor would I ever have the privilege to know Him!