The whole context of this passage is Jeremiah lamenting what has happened to Israel—the defeat, the crushing, the national calamity that befell them—and he is waxing poetical here and saying, “There is still medicinal ointment available in Gilead!” He is giving the picture of the state of the people, the defeat they have suffered, creating a picture of sickness and saying, “There is still medicinal ointment available in Gilead! There is still a physician there! Why then has my dear people not been restored to health?”

Of course, this is not just any kind of difficulty. He is talking about the whole atmosphere of Israel, the whole crushing as judgment against their sin, and he is longing for a restoration of health.

A lot of the “health,” “restoration of health,” and “sickness” language you see in the Old Testament works this way. God says this a lot. In the book of Isaiah, He mentions that “the whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint… from the sole of the foot even to the head there is no spot that is uninjured” (see Isaiah 1:5–6). The picture being painted is of sin and its result.

And that is just a constant reminder in the Old Testament. What is going to happen now? How are we going to be restored to health?

All this goes back to the Garden of Eden with the sin of Adam and Eve, where “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,” and, according to the book of Romans, “death spread to all people because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). So we are talking about a universal kind of sickness here—the sickness of sin—in which the Bible concludes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). That is the divine conclusion.

So we see the heart‑cry of this prophet: wanting a restoration, wanting a solution to be found, wanting a stop to the repeated act of backsliding by the people away from God, and then the consequent punishment. It just seems that it does not matter how much people suffer the punishment, the taste of sin is so attractive that there is no stopping the continual devolution into even worse and worse situations.

So the heart‑cry is: “Why then have my dear people not been restored to health?” And the answer, of course, is Jesus. Jesus is the answer to the heart‑cry here for the restoration of health—the restoration of peace with God, which we had in the Garden of Eden before the sin of Adam and Eve, before Adam said, “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid” (Genesis 3:10), before the shame of seeing themselves naked.

God’s mind is restoration. God’s mind is taking us from the state of sin, the state of devolution into wrong things, and taking us back to the way of truth, to walk in the right path, the path of righteousness.

You can see the refrain again and again in the writings of the prophets, where the people repeatedly fall short. And what is the solution? God said, “I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

The most powerful picture of that that we see is in the book of Ezekiel, where you have this valley of dry bones, and God asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3). Is it not too late? Sin and its effects are so pervasive, so damaging. Can these bones live? That is the question. The answer is: “O Sovereign Lord, you know.”

God, by His wisdom, worked it out. That is what we are talking about. “Christ Jesus… became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Christ became the means of God to do it.

And He said to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to these bones” (Ezekiel 37:4). It just seems trite. Just the preaching of the gospel leads people to be saved. The proclamation of the truth of God is the means of the work of God being done: the work of bringing bone to bone, the work of bringing flesh, the work of putting breath, and the work of having these people who were sick—worse than sick, dead—restored and standing like a mighty army.

God bless you.