Chapter 23

I could go into the role of the leader here again, but that isn’t really the point of Jeremiah 23.

Although he does mention the problems with leaders, this is in fact only the first few paragraphs. After this we move onto a topic I have not discussed before in this commentary, and it is time to give this concept a look.

I refer here to the reliability of prophecy.

Jeremiah reports on God’s heartache when He sees people who have no relationship at all with Him, who then go around saying “This is what the Lord says.” It’s not only a lie, it’s an incredibly damaging lie – for example, when God is saying that He will destroy Jerusalem (escape while you can!), these people could be saying “God is going to deliver His people again”. In other words, this lie could conceivably cost peoples’ lives.

Not surprisingly, God takes a very dim view to this indeed. He promises stern punishments on those who do this particular misdeed. A prophet must be the one God chooses, and if that person is not the designated prophet, then to claim oneself to be so is a serious matter indeed.

Well, it’s the 21st century now, so people are unlikely to go “Thus saith the Lord!” today, right?

Maybe, maybe not.

How many times have we seen people who claim to have spectacular Spiritual gifts?

I wonder how many of those people genuinely do?

Now, of course, God still can (and I believe still does) give those gifts to some. But in some cases a temptation exists to pretend one has gifts when in fact they don’t.

We live in an era of Grace, and God probably won’t strike you dead for such a thing now. But a read of Jeremiah chapter 23 is enough to tell us that He doesn’t like it even so.

We need to make sure that we are honest with each other about the gifts God has given. They are all important. Some are more visible than others, but God needs people gifted with administration just as much as He needs prophets or tongues – speakers. Don’t pretend. Instead, give your gift back to Him, whatever it happens to be, and He will take that and build it into something amazing.

Chapter 22

So what is it that Jehoiachim has done that has God so upset?

I wasn’t sure, so I googled it. Turns out that Jehoiachim was involved in some dodgy dealings, especially having his brother taken out of the way so that he could have the throne.

So we’re talking a fairly nasty dude here, and God isn’t turning the blind eye.

In fact, this passage is basically a dissertation on how God will apply justice, not only to the people involved in the incident itself, but to those in charge, to leaders.

There is little else that can be said about this passage – it uses a lot of flowery language to say the one basic point – that God is in no way going to let leaders have special treatment. In fact, they are facing harsher punishment than the people under their command. They should have known better, and it is to their great shame that they did not lead the people of Israel to follow God, but instead taught them to go against Him.

We can apply this, even though most of us (all of us reading this?) are not ever going to be kings or queens. The fact is that we’re all going to be leaders at some point or another, and it is important for us to understand that a leader is responsible for those under their care.

Leaders have so much more to lose than others. Yes, leadership is a noble role, and it’s one that we certainly shouldn’t shirk. But we need to go into leadership with our eyes open. As well as the rights of leadership we need to remember the responsibility.

In this case, Josiah HAD lead well, but his sons less so. So God pronounces the judgement on them.

Ask yourself one simple question: If you were one of the leaders of Israel at that time, would you be one of the ones God would criticize?

Chapter 21

You want to know how you can tell that Jeremiah’s messages come from God?

If you have a look at the name of the guy sent by the King to plead his case to Jeremiah, and to ask Jeremiah to pray for his victory, it may seem familiar.

That’s right! It’s the same guy who ordered a whipping for Jeremiah in yesterday’s chapter!

Now, if Jeremiah were simply doing his own thing, he’d milk that moment for all it was worth. Here’s the big bad, having to crawl to him! Who wouldn’t love that? I can certainly think of a number of people who have hurt me over the years. What I wouldn’t give to see them crawl at MY feet! I’d drag that moment out as long as I can.

Maybe that’s why the King sent him. Maybe the king was thinking “I’ll send the very guy who ordered Jeremiah scourged to talk to him. Once he’s humiliated the man, I can go to him personally.”

But Jeremiah isn’t going to respond normally. This is because he’s unable to do so. God has once again taken charge of him, and Jeremiah will once again give God’s response to the Priest (and through him, the King).

In passing, we might just note that the King is being pretty cynical. It’s not as though Zedekiah has been faithful all his life and is asking God for help as a result. It’s not even an example of a person finally reaching the point of repentance and calling God to forgive him.

No, it’s straight up and down a person looking for an ace-in-the-hole. Zedekiah realizes he’s in trouble when he hears reports of the size of Nebuchadnezzar’s army, so he simply asks for God’s help.

God is (rightly) furious at this. Nobody likes a user.

So He decides to ensure that the King knows in no uncertain terms that He (God) will not be backing HIM (the King!).

But God also knows that not everyone in the city is disobedient. So what God does is to announce that there is an escape clause. The escape clause, though, is one that few self-respecting Israelites could stomach – that is, they’ll need to surrender to the Babylonian army.

There are is something I’d like to highlight from here.

Firstly we have the unwise nature of trying to sweet talk a prophet of God. Honestly, he should have known better! What did he expect was going to happen?

Then, of course, we have the challenge for the royal line of Israel/Judah. They are to humble themselves, and look after the poor, and MAYBE God might come back to listening!

It’s pretty heavy stuff (And yes, the escape clause does apply to the leadership). The people of Israel are going to be exiled, destroyed, and nothing is going to prevent that now.

So where are we with all this?

I think for me the lesson is about the difference between lip-service and actually following hard after God.

When I was a kid, I knew the words to a dozen and more hymns in the Believers’ hymn book. I could recite verses from the Bible, I could rattle off common prayers.

But it wasn’t until I was about 12 that all this started to gel. From that point, my lip-service began to take on substance.

Jeremiah’s faith has substance. He will do whatever God asks of him (and let’s face it, none of us would change places with him!).

Contrast that with the King. A cynical, cupboard-love situation.

Maybe the words are the same, but there’s a world of difference between the two heart attitudes.

Which one is closer to your attitude, and which is closer to my attitude?

Chapter 20

So Jeremiah is getting attention, but it’s not the fun kind of attention. The priests have noticed his predictions, and presumably the public have been a little disturbed. So he’s been whipped and put on display in front of the Temple.

The priest comes out to let him go the following day. And Jeremiah, with calm dignity, walks away without a word. . .

. . . No, scratch that. He gives the Priest a new nickname – Danger Everywhere!!! – and informs him that the coming battle, all his friends would die, but he’d live on, to be dragged into exile where he would live out the rest of his miserable life.

O-kay, that’s a bit daring.

Or is it?

It actually comes from God, and Jeremiah isn’t all that thrilled about it. We read in verses 7-10 how Jeremiah complains to God about the words that he’s required to say. In all he does, the prophet simply is unable to stop himself speaking God’s word!

The irony of this is that prophecy is a gift that I once craved. I wanted to be the person who walked up to strangers and told them that God Has A Message For You!

Here we see the dark side. You may have God’s words – but you need to SPEAK God’s words, whether you want to or not.

And the thing is, in a sinful world, God’s words can get you into an awful lot of trouble.

Once again, we see the freedom of Jeremiah’s relationship with God in that he feels that he can say ANYTHING to God. When I was growing up, I would probably have been reprimanded by my mother for being irreverent if I was sarcastic towards God. Yet check out verse 13 – either Jeremiah is breaking the mood for one verse and then getting back into his tirade, or he’s actually being sarcastic IN A PRAYER!

But Jeremiah is not finished. He continues, cursing the very day he was born.

There’s an internet meme at the moment – “Ever get so angry?” What you do is you take a photograph out of context that appears to show someone doing something extremely amazing, and put the context “Ever get so angry that you prodded a bear with a stick?” or “Ever get so angry that you kicked a Russian cop?” or whatever.

Here Jeremiah could be a part of that. . . .


And yet – God doesn’t destroy Jeremiah (and there’s another 32 chapters of this to go!). We’ll find out how God responds tomorrow, but it’s not the instant kill one might expect.

Meanwhile, what lessons can we learn from this?

I’ve already talked about Jeremiah’s openness with God, so we’ll give that one a rest. I think maybe the best way to describe this is to simply say “Be careful what you wish for.”

Many people want to be used powerfully by God. We may even ask to be a part of the miraculous stuff that God does. Yet I wonder if we’d be so keen on volunteering to be in the plan if we really knew what it entailed. If you had the chance of doing what Jeremiah was doing – involuntarily pulling a wedgie on various powerful leaders – I’m not sure most of us would be happy about that.

More than that, we need to be aware that sometimes God will ask us to do things that are really uncomfortable. He means us to CHANGE the world. And that might mean discomfort for us.

The good news is that God loves us, and wants the best for us.

So what? I hear you thinking. Well, so if God asks you to do something, the WORST CASE SCENARIO is for you to face trouble temporally, then be exalted when God comes into His kingdom.

That means that it’s worth doing whatever and saying whatever God asks.

Chapter 19

Note - if you happen to have read this via email before and haven't received a second email with an updated version, this is what last night's commentary SHOULD have looked like if I hadn't fallen asleep several times at the keyboard!

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I have mentioned the Valley of Hinnom (or the valley of Ben Hinnom) before in my commentary. This dark and evil place had been the site of temples to Molech and Baal[1]. Now Jeremiah is saying that it will become a place for discarding rubbish and burying bodies.

To be sure, we know that this one happened. The Valley of Hinnom indeed became a place of horror, with the fires to burn the bodies of the dead, and various nasty biting creatures.

But when Jeremiah writes, this is still in the future.

In the future, moreover, where the city of Jerusalem is to be destroyed.

Whilst a lot of this book is heavy going – the full scale of the destruction is heartbreaking, and Jeremiah’s gloomy predictions just keep on coming – this chapter at least is quite understandable, and one is left thinking “Well yeah, that’s fair enough.” I mean, Human sacrifice – especially the sacrifice of babies – is reprehensible, and most of us would be quite against it.

Once again – here we have a running theme – God would cease His judgement if the people of Israel would simply repent.

Really, they’re choosing the hard way. But make no mistake, it’s what they choose. So generally we say “Well, God, yeah – fair enough.”

But there’s a point which deserves a little consideration – It is hard for us to think whether or not we would have accepted the deal or not. Do you sacrifice your child in return for blessing? Or do you take the stand that requires you to go against others when their minds are made up?

I want to think I’d have been in group 2 above, but realistically I have to ask if I really would have done so. You see, I have a tendency to be a coward. Generally I’m happy with that description. I’d rather people said “He IS a coward” than “He WAS very brave”.

Yes, what the people of Israel were doing was horrendous. How can you get otherwise normal parents to be so devoted to a god that they’d be willing to literally place their screaming infant onto the white-hot hands of a specially heated statue – killing the child! How could they do that?

Or, to put it another way: Can you imagine how powerful must be any social pressure great enough to make that happen?

Okay. NOW we are in the right place to ask ourselves whether or not we’d do what the people of Israel did. It was still evil, it still is unbelievable that people would let things get to this place (and incidentally, it also helps us to understand the depth of God’s anger against His people, that they’d leave HIM behind, and sacrifice their very children to this horror of a God!); but we now understand that the pressure to conform would have been enormous.

NOW you may understand the cost to stand up against it. Evil though it was, I suggest that many of us might have gone along with it anyway, simply because it takes a lot of guts to stand up and be counted. One may also say that it takes Him.

To live a life willing to go against the mainstream in such a big way requires supernatural intervention. More than that, in this case, one would be risking not just their social standing but potentially their life (bear in mind that priests willing to sacrifice babies would have no compunctions killing an adult who resisted them!).

To do this takes strength that comes from God.

What things might we face in our own life that needs US to take a stand against? I’ll leave that to your own mind, but I’ll bet there are things that all of us would see as great injustices. How many of them do we ignore because we’re afraid?

Time to pray. What would God have us take arms against?

[1]The word “Baal” is Aramaic for “Lord.” There were three or four gods worshiped under this title, but the most popular (and therefore the one that we assume is intended in most of the Bible’s references) would be Baal Melqart, a lightning God. This would seem to fit with Elijah’s challenge to the Prophets of Baal, given that the contest was to bring down fire from heaven!

Chapter 18

A potter and clay is a potent image. And curiously, while many things have changed over time, the image still works today. The wheel is generally electrically powered now, rather than simply kicked into motion; the wheel therefore generally turns somewhat faster than its ancient ancestor; and potters have access to better clay, of far greater consistency than that available to the ancients; nevertheless, every technique used by ancient potters is easily recognized by potters (or even students of pottery) today.

So it is that Jeremiah’s prophecy comparing God to the potter and Israel to the work God produced connects deeply even now.

It’s hard to understand why God has the right to do some of the things He does. It’s tempting to say “God, hands off. Stop interfering with my life. Let me be.” But that’s not how it works. To say such a thing overestimates our own significance before God considerably – remember, using the clay metaphor, we are in fact the creation, not the creator.

Put bluntly, God as our creator has the right to do as He pleases with us. We are His creation! If God looks at us and does NOT like what He sees, He has the right to take the same lump of “clay” and make it into something else!

In the same chapter we also catch up with something else – Some of the big end of town dislike the things that Jeremiah has been saying. Apparently they have found that a can get rid of him. More about that in a few days’ time.

So what is our cash value? What can we learn from this passage?

I think that the fact that God shapes our lives, like a potter shapes a pot on a wheel, is a really encouraging image. Not only does it give a reason for some of the events that happen from time to time, it helps you to recognize that such incidents are necessary in the process of bringing each one of us to the highest degree of perfection God can bring us to.

Chapter 17

The book of Jeremiah is prophecy, of course – written by one of the great prophets. But some parts of it read like biography, some like a letter, and some – including this part we will examine tonight – even sound like Proverbs.

Although God doesn’t wander from the theme of the previous verses – namely, that God’s people have failed to follow Him, and therefore they will be exiled as punishment – the tone of this passage is just a little less dark than previous chapters. And as I previously said, there is the hint of wisdom literature here.

In the process, Jeremiah gives us some really good hints on how to understand the nature of God. The main concept we have is that of where we place our dependence.

People are pretty good value – MOST OF THE TIME. Usually they are kind and decent. Yet sometimes when you depend on them, the bottom line is that you’d be wiser not to do so!

But each of us have our weak spots, and without His guidance, presumably many of ust may otherwise be the same – that is, headed for justice, which in this case would have meant separation from God – maybe permanently.

We know that we can trust some things and some people, and not others; that’s just the way of things. God Himself compares relying on humankind to building on a tumbleweed (at least in the “Message” translation!)!

Let’s be honest – that’s pretty common. Yet somehow bad experiences with trusting Humankind rather than God Himself doesn’t stop us from doing it again

Contrasting this, we have a line which is popular amongst Christians of all stripe – “Blessed is the man who trusts in me.” And Jeremiah compares THIS person with a tree with deep roots.

When everything is going well, it’s easy to stand on one’s own feet. But what about when things are going badly?

If you’re relying on humankind, a turn for the worst in your luck is awful. Humans won’t know what to do. But if you’re relying on God, you are still safe. Things may hurt, but they can’t destroy you. You have something beyond the visible, and you are safer and stronger than anyone around you might otherwise believe.