Jeremiah is in custody when this comes to him. Not in a good season, not in a moment of clarity. Confined, in a city that is about to fall.
Call to Me, and I will answer. The invitation is not offered to somebody with spare capacity. It is offered to a man whose circumstances have shrunk to a courtyard.
The chapter says this was the second time the word came to him there, in the courtyard of the guard. Babylon’s army is outside the walls. In the chapter before, Jeremiah has bought a field in his home town, with the land about to fall into enemy hands, as a sign that the country would one day be lived in again. What follows this verse is a promise of healing and restoration for a city that currently has neither.
Then the strange part. Great and unsearchable things you do not know. Unsearchable is doing real work in that sentence. These are not answers you could have arrived at by thinking harder or reading more. They sit outside the range of what you are able to look up.
Think about how you pray on the drive to work. Three or four items, the same as yesterday. Sort out the thing with the landlord. Let the meeting go well. Let the results come back normal. They are real requests. They are also, mostly, a list of outcomes you have already decided would be acceptable.
That is worth sitting with, because most of what we call prayer is presenting God with our shortlist and asking Him to pick one of the options.
The verse suggests there is a category of thing you will only ever receive by asking. Not deduce. Not research. Ask. It does not promise which answer comes, or when. It promises that God answers, and that the answer may be larger than the question.
So ask for something today that is not on your list. Before you pray about the usual items, ask God to show you what you are not seeing in one of them. Then leave a minute of quiet before you move on.
