One of the most comforting passages in the Bible reads, “The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” (Jeremiah 31:3).
What is commonly appreciated about this passage is its description of the everlasting nature of God’s love—steadfast, unshakable, and enduring. However, when I read it recently, I was drawn to the word drawn. I had always assumed that it meant that God draws us in the sense that we are illustrations of God’s being—that He creates, delineates, and forms us. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, describes this sense of being drawn in the Christian Science textbook: “Immortal men and women are models of spiritual sense, drawn by perfect Mind and reflecting those higher conceptions of loveliness which transcend all material sense” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 247).
But the Hebrew word for drawn in Jeremiah 31:3 has a different meaning; one definition of it is “to draw to one” (Gesenius’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures). This points to the loving omni-action of God that draws us toward Life and Love.
