Chapter 1

The first impression I get of Jeremiah is “hmm . . oddly specific.”

The first verse tells you that this message from the Lord went to “Jeremiah, son of Hilkiah of the family of priests who lived in Anathoth in the Country of Benjamin.” Now, if Jeremiah had been a better-known person, he might have been able to start with “Sup dudes, you got Jeremiah here.” Or even “I am Jeremiah, you may remember my Father Hilkiah”.

So right away, the fact that we have to use multiple layers of zooming in tells us that this Jeremiah is a nobody. He’s a regular guy.

Contrast this with the King, Josiah, who is also mentioned in the early part of the book. I think this may be deliberate – ensuring that you can see the difference between the boy who was born to rule (and in fact began to do so at the age of 8!) and the kid from the backward sticks of Benjamin.

Yet God is making it very clear from the beginning that HE was the one who created Jeremiah, and created him with plans.

Jeremiah protests – “Hold it, Master God! Look at me! I don’t know anything! I’m only a boy!”

God shoots right back that he’s NOT just a boy, he is God’s chosen person. God will Himself tell Jeremiah what to do. In a vision, God touches Jeremiah’s mouth, and declares that His words will flow from Jeremiah.

God doesn’t seem to be asking if Jeremiah WANTS to be a conduit for God’s words; he’s getting them, whether he wants them or not!

We then get a glimpse of Jeremiah’s first visions. They are:

• A walking stick. The message interprets this as “I’m sticking with you,” which is not only a terrible pun, it raises the question of whether or not this pun works in both Hebrew and English! More likely, though, it’s compensation for a different pun, one which I can’t check at the moment because, out here in the barbarian Bush, I can’t access any more versions than my Message dead tree edition!

• A boiling pot, tipped towards Judah/Benjamin. This one, at least, is fairly easy to understand; Judah will face enemies from the North, who will be overwhelming in size and skill. This is described as judgement for “walking out on” God, for courting other gods.

The last section of the book consists of God encouraging Jeremiah, outlining how God is going to take him and build him into a prophet par excellence; he will be prepared to stand his ground against kings and princes; When his enemies fight against him, he will be covered with armour and unscratchable.

So where does this have value for us today? After all, these particular prophecies don’t seem to apply to us right now. We can draw comparisons or extract general principle, perhaps; but the main thing that I can see immediately here is much simpler than that.

It is this: God will choose whom He will choose to do His work. Although we get to say “yes” or “no” to Him, we don’t choose whether or not the call comes to us. Just as Jeremiah was the person God picked, so we are each called to do certain things for Him.

Of course, we all have a call. The question is simply this – what is our particular call to do?

On the other hand, this is anything but a hopeless mission. Just as God grants Jeremiah all that he will need to perform his mission, so too God will grant us all we need to perform our own.

God grants us gifting appropriate to our mission. Take heart – if you don’t have the ability to do something (for example, public speaking), either you don’t need that skill to do whatever God asks of you, or God will grant you the ability and the desire to do it when the appropriate time comes.

Jeremiah was ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, he was, that we need a long list of his relations and his position in the clan just to avoid confusing him with all the other Jeremiahs around.

Yet once God takes a hand, Jeremiah becomes anything but ordinary. And once we accept God’s call, our ordinariness is subsumed beneath the Glory of God, and our lives reach the greatest greatness they can possibly reach when we totally submit our totally ordinary selves to Him.