Jeremiah

In King Josiah’s 13th year God told a young man from Anathoth that He had chosen him before birth as a prophet to the nations. Jeremiah answered, “I surely do not know how to speak, for I am only a child!” God told him not to say it because he must go wherever God sent him. He touched Jeremiah’s mouth and put His words in it.

Next God showed him an almond branch, the first tree to blossom after winter. Its Hebrew name sounds like the word for watching, and God was watching over His word to make it happen (Jeremiah 1:11-12). He promised that Jeremiah’s enemies would fight him but never overcome him.

Early in King Jehoiakim’s reign God sent Jeremiah to warn the people in the temple courtyard, in the hope that they would turn. They oppressed widows and orphans and burned incense to Baal, yet trusted the temple to keep them safe. Unless they changed, God would make the temple like Shiloh, where His house had first stood until He abandoned it because of the wickedness of His people (Jeremiah 7:12-14).

The priests and prophets seized him, shouting, “You must surely die!” The king’s officials ruled that he did not deserve death, because he had spoken in the LORD’s name. Another prophet named Uriah gave the same warning and fled to Egypt when King Jehoiakim tried to kill him. The king had him brought back and put to the sword (Jeremiah 26:20-23). Jeremiah escaped that end because a royal official named Ahikam stood by him.

Jeremiah took a clay jar to the Valley of Ben-hinnom, where people had burned their children as offerings to Baal. Because of that, God would shatter the city “like one shatters a potter’s jar that can never again be repaired”, and he smashed the jar to show it. When he repeated the warning at the temple, the priest in charge had him beaten and put in the stocks overnight.

Afterwards he prayed, “You have deceived me, O LORD,” and told God that His word had made him a laughingstock all day long. Yet whenever he tried to keep quiet, God’s word became “a fire burning in my heart, shut up in my bones” (Jeremiah 20:9). The same prayer turns to trust, “But the LORD is with me like a fearsome warrior,” and ends in praise of God, Who “rescues the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers” (Jeremiah 20:11-13).

In King Jehoiakim’s fourth year Jeremiah dictated to his scribe Baruch everything God had told him since Josiah’s day. God wanted the people to hear it, turn from their wicked ways and be forgiven. Jeremiah sent Baruch to read the scroll aloud in the temple on a fast day the next winter.

Officials who heard it told Baruch and Jeremiah to hide, and took word to the king, who had the scroll read to him by his fire. Each time three or four columns were read, Jehoiakim cut them off with a knife and burned them, though three of his officials begged him not to (Jeremiah 36:23-25). He ordered Baruch and Jeremiah arrested, but “the LORD had hidden them”. Jeremiah dictated every burned word again, and many more like them.

King Jehoiakim was dead, and Babylon had carried off his son King Jehoiachin with thousands of Judah’s people and made Zedekiah king. God then had Jeremiah wear a yoke as a picture of Babylon’s rule, and Jeremiah urged Zedekiah to serve Babylon “and live!”

The prophet Hananiah announced that within two years God would break that yoke and bring the exiles home. Jeremiah answered, “Amen! May the LORD do so!”, but warned that time would tell. Hananiah broke the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck. Jeremiah told him he had made the people trust a lie and would die that year, and two months later he was dead (Jeremiah 28:15-17). God did promise to bring the exiles home, but after 70 years, not two (Jeremiah 29:10).

King Zedekiah rebelled against Babylon after all, and in 588 BC its army laid siege to Jerusalem. When the Babylonians pulled back for fear of an army from Egypt, Jeremiah warned that they would return and burn the city.

As he set out for his family’s land in Benjamin, an officer of the guard at the gate seized him, saying he was going over to the Babylonians. “That is a lie,” Jeremiah answered, but the officer took him to the king’s officials, who beat him and shut him in a dungeon (Jeremiah 37:13-16).

Zedekiah later sent for him in secret and asked, “Is there a word from the LORD?” Jeremiah warned that the king himself would be handed over to Babylon. Then Jeremiah begged not to be sent back to the dungeon, where he would die, and the king moved him to the courtyard of the palace guard, with a loaf a day “until all the bread in the city was gone”.

Jeremiah was a prisoner in the palace, with Babylon’s army round Jerusalem, when God told him that his cousin Hanamel would offer him the family field at Anathoth. Hanamel came, and Jeremiah paid 17 shekels of silver for it.

He signed the deed before witnesses and gave it to Baruch to keep in a clay jar, because God had promised, “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:15).

Then he prayed, “Nothing is too difficult for You!” Yet his prayer ended on the siege ramps against the city, and on the field God had told him to buy anyway. God answered, “Is anything too difficult for Me?” The city would fall for turning to idols, but He would bring His people home and make an everlasting covenant with them.

Though a prisoner, Jeremiah kept telling the people that whoever surrendered to Babylon would live, until four officials told the king, “This man ought to die, for he is discouraging the warriors.” Zedekiah answered that he could do nothing to stop them. They lowered Jeremiah on ropes into a cistern, a deep pit for storing rainwater. It held no water, only mud, “and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.”

An African palace official named Ebed-melech went to the king and warned that Jeremiah would starve, because the city had run out of bread. The king sent him with 30 men, and he let down old rags for Jeremiah to pad the ropes under his arms and pulled him out (Jeremiah 38:10-13).

Jeremiah told King Zedekiah that if he surrendered, his family would live and the city would not be burned. Zedekiah held out, because he feared that the Babylonians would hand him over to be abused by the Jews who had deserted to them (Jeremiah 38:19). In 586 BC the Babylonians broke in. They caught Zedekiah as he fled, killed his sons and burned the temple and the city.

At Ramah, Babylon’s captain of the guard found Jeremiah in chains among the captives being taken to Babylon. He freed him, told him that the LORD had done as He said because the people had sinned, and offered to look after him in Babylon or let him go wherever he liked (Jeremiah 40:2-4). Jeremiah stayed with the poor left in the land.

Babylon made Gedaliah governor of Judah, and Jeremiah lived with him at Mizpah until a man of the royal family named Ishmael murdered Gedaliah. The captains of Judah’s scattered army feared Babylon’s revenge, so they begged Jeremiah to ask God what they should do, and promised to obey whatever God told them. After 10 days God answered that if they stayed, He would build them up and not tear them down, and they need not fear the king of Babylon (Jeremiah 42:10-11).

But they had already set their hearts on Egypt. They called Jeremiah a liar and took him and Baruch to Tahpanhes in Egypt. Centuries later the preacher John Chrysostom saw mercy in this, because God sent His prophet along “so that they might not after all suffer total wreck”.