Jeremiah 33:16 “In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. This is the name by which it will be called: The Lord our Righteousness.”

When we think of being saved, we think especially of the cross. We think especially of the blood of Jesus’ paying for our sins. We think of God’s grace forgiving every fault and sparing us of the hell we deserved as a gift of his love, and rightly so. This is what Jesus came to do for us.

But when Jeremiah wrote, those were not details the Lord had shared with his people yet. They had hints and pictures of it in the prophecies and in the sacrifices of their temple worship, but the details of Jesus saving us would still wait hundreds of years to be seen.

So Jeremiah pictures God’s saving work another way. You may remember that he is writing at a time when the Babylonians had taken over the land of Judah and surrounded the city of Jerusalem. God’s people were under attack. It was not a safe time to be a Jewish citizen.

This future King from David’s line, however, would make God’s people safe again. The Hebrew word for “saved” pictures a person being delivered to a wide a spacious place, where you are free to move and roam. There are no threats, no enemies to be seen anywhere around. The Hebrew word for “safety” describes a person so free from any danger that they have this absolute sense of confidence and trust. That is just about the opposite of the experience of the Jewish people to whom Jeremiah wrote, surrounded by their enemies.

Since that time, neither Judah nor Jerusalem have literally been so “saved” or “safe.” After the Persians let them go back home, Alexander the Great and the Greeks swept through and subjugated them. At the time of Jesus, it was the Romans. To this day the literal land of Israel is surrounded by enemies who would like nothing more than to squeeze them out of existence.

But if this is a picture of the work of King Jesus, then we aren’t talking about a national, political safety anyway. This is a spiritual picture of the results of Jesus’ work. Under Jesus we are safe from the enemies of our faith, safe from sin, safe from death. That’s why the people of God will be called “The Lord our Righteousness.” We are righteous and safe from sin and hell because Jesus has taken it all away. And ultimately, this is the safety all God’s people will have on the day that is coming, when Jesus returns to take his people home to the New Jerusalem in heaven.