Jeremiah 3:6-8 - Have you seen what faithless Israel has done?

3:6

God now speaks personally to Jeremiah. Jeremiah is more than a mouthpiece, God wants him to understand. This is the way He works with all of us. It is not just a matter of mere intellectual assent to a doctrine, God wants us to have a heart and mind understanding and appreciation. This word was given during the reign of King Josiah. Now at this time Israel was split into two kingdoms, the North, variously referred to as Ephraim, Samaria and Israel, and the South, called Judah. So Israel here is referring to the Northern Kingdom, which had been conquered by Assyria many years earlier. Jeremiah and Ezekiel both use Israel was a lesson which Judah should have learnt from. Israel had “gone up on every high hill” and committed adultery, that is the worship of various false gods.

3:7,8

“I thought she would return to me”. Now Israel did not return to God, so God gave her her certificate of divorce and she was sent away because of her unfaithfulness. What happened in practice is that Assyria dispersed the peoples to many lands, and brought in peoples from other lands to inhabit Israel. If we take v7 absolutely literally then it would imply that God did not know the future, because He was “wrong” when He thought she would return. This would be a result of taking an over literal reading of the text. God is communicating with Jeremiah, enabling him to understand what was happening. Judah saw what happened to Israel, but did not learn from it. She was just as brazen and went off to commit her own spiritual adulteries.