Jeremiah – by Bill Banosky

Outline

I. Introduction
What is the message of Jeremiah, and what is the relation of that message to the purpose of the Bible?

II. The Book
___A. Longest prophetic book in the Bible
___B. Contains biography, history, and prophecy

III. The Prophet
___A. More information about Jeremiah than any other Old Testament figure
___B. A Prefigurement of the Life of Christ
_____1. Man of sorrows
_____2. Close Communion with God

IV. The Message
Both negative and positive; both prophecy and history; both a problem and a solution
___A. The Problem: Israel has forsaken the fountain of living waters and hewed out its own cistern.
_____1. Because they have forsaken God, destruction is soon to come.
_____2. The problem in Israel is of perennial significance.
___B. The Solution: The New Covenant
_____1. Individual
_____2. Universal
_____3. Remission of Sins

Conclusion:
Jeremiah died an apparent failure, but his life and message speak to us yet. Man’s one duty is to spend his days knowing God. When he neglects this duty, he is headed for certain failures.

Introduction

Jeremiah is best remembered as the prophet who “wept” during “the decline and fall of the Hebrew nation.” He has been called the last of the prophets of Israel. He was preceded by Isaiah, Jonah, Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Micah. He completely overshadowed his contemporaries–Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Although a few others were yet to follow, the prophetic movement culminated and reached its purest expression in his person and message. It is our assignment to examine the book of Jeremiah in an effort to assess its great message, and relate that message to the purpose of the Bible.

Discussion

The Book

It is significant that Jeremiah is the longest prophetic book in the Bible. Its literary merit has been the battleground for frequent speculative contests. He was not an artist in words, as was Isaiah, since his prophetic flights were restrained by his presentiments and his utterance was choked by tears.

Organizational excellence does not appear to be one of Jeremiah’s virtues. Perhaps for this reason his book is one of the least read and difficult to read in the Bible. No less a scholar than George Adam Smith described it as “a conglomeration of prophecies”(1). But despite the fact that the book discourages any tidy chronological analysis, its message is presented in a rather convenient combination of biography, history, and prophecy. We shall note the use of each of these literary types in the development of the salient message of the book.

The Prophet

Jeremiah has been called the most miserable prophet, the most pessimistic priest, and the most unpopular preacher that the world has produced. Yet he is also labeled, “the greatest of the great prophets of Israel”,(2), and the scholar Raymond Calkins attempted to rescue his obscurity saying, “There is no nobler, more militant or morally more splendid character to be found in the whole range of the scripture. Moses and Paul of Tarsus are the only men who can stand beside him”(3).

It is a little known fact that there is more inspired biographical information about Jeremiah than any other personality of the Old Testament. His only close rival for this significant and surprising honor is the colorful David. Unlike the other prophets, Jeremiah could not lose his own personality in his message, and he reveals so many intimate details about himself that his book is (to a large measure) autobiographical. The whole gamut of human emotions run through his lyrics like brilliant threads through a multicolored fabric. Behind his message we feel and touch the man. His writings are so closely integrated with his life that we must know the events of one before we can understand the significance of the other.

Jeremiah lived during the most vital and tragic period of the whole history of Israel. He was born into a priestly family at the small village of Anatoth, four miles (6 kilometers) northeast of Jerusalem, in 650 B.C. He was called to be God’s spokesman at the age of 24, charged with the untactful responsibility of advising his people that their sins were soon to reap a bitter harvest. He hesitated to obey the Divine injunction on the grounds of his youth, but when God said, “Behold I put my words into your mouth,” he began a pilgrimage that was to lead mankind from the valley of dry bones to the Mount of Transfiguration.

Jeremiah’s life bears remarkable similarities to the life of Christ. He too was denied the joys of matrimony and a home (16:2). He began to dirge at the time when Israel was buried in idolatry, and his unpopular ultimatum brought him, more than any other prophet, into conflict with the powers that be. At one point it appeared certain to the prophet that his people would “put me to death” (26:15). Solitary and forlorn, he wandered through life belonging only to God and His calling, giving us a striking prefigurement of the “man of sorrows.” Beginning to cry as a youth, Jeremiah’s tears did not cease to flow for 40 continuous years until Jerusalem was finally destroyed and the people exiled to Babylon in 586 B.C. Only Isaiah, in the whole range of the Old Testament prophecy, had so long a career as this.

Jeremiah also reminds us of Christ because of the close communion he shared with God. Many have felt that his most significant contribution is not his public message but his private life with God(4). More than mere words about God, Jeremiah left us his life with God. At the heart of the book are the scenes in which he is alone with God, talking about himself and hearing God’s answer. These moments have earned him the title, “the father of true prayer”(5) and distinguish him as the first advocate of “individual religion”(6). Jeremiah prepared for Christ by his own typical life, a remarkable waymark in the old dispensation. He has written some of the most instructive and soul stirring pages of the Bible, but his greatest poem was his life. It is little wonder that six centuries later when some people of Galilee saw in Jesus the reincarnation of “one of the prophets,” it was Jeremiah to whom their thoughts went most readily (Matthew 16:14).

The Message

Jeremiah was the product of his own volcanic age and had an urgent message for his contemporaries. His writings are historically significant as a candid picture of the internal decay of Judah. Yet, like every prophet, he was able to transcend his own environment and proclaim perennial principles that are valid in any age and vital for our own.

The Commission

Early in the first chapter God charged Jeremiah with a two-sided commission: “I have set you this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, to pull down, to destroy, and to throw down; to build and to plant” (1:10). The injunction was both negative and positive, both destructive and constructive. He preaches doom and desolation, but he also predicts mercy and restoration. In addition to diagnosing the sickness, he also prescribes the remedy. Utilizing this twofold division, we shall observe that Israel’s problem of sin contains an historical example for our age. Secondly, we shall notice that the solution to the problem unveils one of the greatest prophetic utterances in the Old Testament.

The Problem

In preaching Judah’s funeral address, Jeremiah formerly indicts his people’s spiritual rottenness on two counts: “My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, which can hold no water” (2:13). Thus the sum and substance of the charge that Jeremiah is called to make is that Israel has left God in a self-seeking search for a more exciting place to drink.

As Solomon, years earlier, had erected altars to his heathen wives’ gods while building the house of God, so now, the heart of Israel courts the filthiness of open idolatry while clinging to the legal observance of the law. To their past attempt to perform with strictest punctuality the ceremony of the law, God responded: “The burnt offerings are not acceptable nor the sacrifices sweet to Me” (6:20), because “. . . you have forsaken Me and burned incense unto other gods” (1:16). In an effort to prick a calloused national conscience God said, “I remember you in the kindness of your youth, the love of your espousals” (2:2). But now Jeremiah’s task is to procure God’s divorce from a bride that has adulterated the honeymoon, saying, “This people of Jerusalem is sliding back by a perpetual backsliding. They will not return” (8:5).

This message, uttered in the midst of social and religious conditions similar to our own, has an astonishing timeliness for our age. Modern man reveals an arrogant, self-willed departure from God, plus a self-determined attempt to live a self-sufficient life. Like Israel, we have forsaken God and hewed out cisterns of our own which we suppose will render us independent of the “fountain of living waters”. What an inconceivable act of folly! Only our humanity can explain why we should spurn the pure stream of grace that alone can quench our thirst in a mad scramble to grip the muddy mixture of a cracked well.

From Adam in Eden, to a world blessed under the Messiah, man has demonstrated an incredible tendency to “worship the works of his own hands” (1:16). The cisterns of idolatry to which we dedicate ourselves reveal a stubborn desire to “walk after our own devices and everyone do the imagination of his own evil heart” (18:12). The classic story of the potter and the clay is God’s answer to our puny pride (18:2). “The way of man is not in himself: it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (10:23). Well impressed with the legions of history that support this eternal rule, most of us can still think of one exception–ourselves! Jeremiah shouts that we cannot depend upon ourselves and warns that our efforts to live without God will result in inevitable failure. “Curse be the man that trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart departs from the Lord” (17:5).

Charles Dickens novel, A Tale of Two Cities, contains a paragraph which reminds us that our modern world has been so cursed: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.” This paradoxical language precisely describes our paradoxical lives. Our standard of living floods our lives with luxury and comfort that arouses the envy of history’s princes and kings. More money runs through our fingers in a single year than our great grandfathers had earned in a lifetime. In our haste to push back new frontiers, we have broken the sound barrier and the four minute mile. We have harnessed the mighty atom and shattered the prohibitive veil of outer space. In short, we have conquered everything but ourselves!

The American people are so happy with their new cistern that 20,000 of us, having everything to live with and nothing to live for, committed suicide last year. Our tranquilizers, coronaries, nervous disorders, and ulcers testify to the intensity of our thirst. We are so well-adjusted that one million of us are chronic alcoholics, 600,000 of us are advanced narcotic addicts, and half of our hospital beds are filled with the mentally ill. In a shrinking world which makes every person in it the neighbor of every other person, we demonstrate our neighborliness by setting new records annually in sex crimes, robberies, and murders. Morals have become irrelevant, or perhaps even worse, relative. Cheating is an accepted practice in our society. While 1958 produced 208,000 unwed mothers, we continue to make such a mockery of marriage in the divorce courts that even the most ungodly are paralyzed in alarm. And in the light of all this, when 770,000 of our teenagers go to jail this year, we will shake our heads in bewilderment as if we really don’t know why.

Forsaking Jehovah, we have bowed before many heathen gods in our quest for a new fountain. We have worshiped like an amorphous mass the timeless fantasy that “Wealth produces happiness.” Jeremiah warned, “Let not the rich man glory in his riches” (9:23). In addition, a new delusive idol offering “salvation through science and education” has arisen. We freely sacrifice to worship this god who promises that the accumulation of academic degrees will enable us to climb to a happy vantage point in the ivory tower from which we can escape the misery of the great unwashed in the dust of the arena. Voltaire, who helped to mold this idol, realized its importance and said, “I wish I had never been born.” Years earlier the prophet had warned, “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom” (9:23).

But our chief god, pleasure, advises us “to eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may die.” With our excessive allotment of leisure in an affluent society, we “overeat, overdrink, oversex, and overplay”(7). We have stuffed ourselves with science and education, with better living and pleasure, with the many other things we thought we wanted, but we are still empty and bored. Our pleasure-crazed age is coming to realize that the dazzling cistern from which we dip our delight is “cracked and can hold no water”. Perhaps, above all, we are desperately afraid. The mighty mansions in which we dwell are in reality but flimsy tents of fear.

Sadly, being more afraid of Khrushchev than we are of God, we have naively assumed that our chief reliance for security rests in military preparations more devastating than those of our adversary. This haughty trust in manpower has produced a “peaceful coexistence” which is separated from nuclear war by a delicate thread based on a balance of fear. Four nations now possess bombs 1,000 times more powerful than the blast which melted Nagasaki. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we are responsible for a monster, and now shiver in the shadow of that which we have created. Our civilization has been likened to a painted face on a huge balloon. As the balloon swells, the face becomes more and more monstrous, and if we take it at its face value, we are both thrilled and terrified, excited and paralyzed by it. But in our sober moments we know that it is hollow within. One pinprick, and it is destroyed. We wonder how long a puncture can be delayed.

How far are we from the exact position of Israel when Jeremiah said, “Evil appears out of the north, and great destruction” (6:1). In language reminiscent of his flaming voice, one world leader after another has prophesied the doom of our self-glorying civilization. Our President, reflecting our confusion, recently appointed a special commission to “rethink our national goals.” Life Magazine’s stimulating five-week debate on “The National Purpose” saw eight outstanding Americans express concern in words similar to these: “Unless a moral fiber is put into the structure of our nation, we are headed for disaster”. One contributor to the series, historian Clinton B. Rossiter, thinking of our “peculiar past” and our frightening future, even likened us to “the children of Israel”(8).

In Jeremiah’s age, as in our own, the severity of the situation was compounded by the sugar-coated sermons of the false prophets who stilled the ears of the people and dulled the sharp edge of truth. “From the prophet even unto the priest, everyone deals falsely. They have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, ‘Peace, Peace,’ when there is no peace” (6:14). Similarly, many have attempted to gloss over our spiritual crisis by advocating “positive thinking”. Our sedentary society has devised a therapeutic theology offering peace of mind and popularity with eternal life as one of the fringe benefits. The resulting “revival” in church attendance is little short of a self-centered glance in God’s direction in search of happiness and relaxation, much like we might take out an insurance policy or buy a box of aspirin. “Aspirin tablet religion” will not solve our problem because our disease is more severe than a spiritual headache. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (13:23). Thus, says Jeremiah, are our chances of “healing the hurt” of our hearts by “crying ‘Peace, Peace’ when there is no peace.” Besides, who really believes it?

Jeremiah thus exposed Israel’s spiritual condition in words to plain to need comment: “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests rule at their direction. And my people love to have it so. But, what will you do when the end comes?” (5:30-31). Is this an outdated, unjust charge? Ponder it carefully to see if it be too severe for our world. The same sickness that brought God’s people to ruin in Israel brings us so near the brink of disaster that fear is the nightmare that rules our lives. The circumstances of time and place are, of course, very different, but the symptoms are shockingly similar, and the disease is tragically identical. God will surely hold us accountable if we can watch unmoved, even at a distance of 2,500 years, the agonizing death of a people who lived as our “examples”.

Thus, the weeping prophet had reason to cry, and his tears are blended with those of his God: “Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes were a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for . . . my people” (9:1). No other poet has so completely captured the agony of man and the anguish of God. Jeremiah understood his people’s sin because he had lived with it. He understood God’s sorrow because he had shared it. After cursing the day of his birth, the darkest gloom of his calamity is reached in the hopeless moan that is heard in our age: “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?” (8:22).

The Solution

Jeremiah’s cry stirred the heart of God to reveal a prophecy of Christianity that hardly has its equal. As we turn to the 31st chapter, the apex of Jeremiah’s book and perhaps the high water mark of the Old Testament, the prophet’s tears suddenly become those of joy. The black picture of sin is but the ebony background against which this great solution to man’s problem stands out in bold relief:
“Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah—not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (31:31-34).

Jeremiah has viciously rooted out and torn down that he might prepare a new soil in which “to plant and to build.” This thrilling confluence of the many streams of Old Testament thought combines the plan of God and the hope of man into a single ray of brilliant light that illuminates the coming of Christ into the world. In it all the struggles and dreams of mankind since Adam turned his back on Eden are woven into one meaningful web. The Hebrew writer recognized the integral position which it plays in the scheme of redemption and quoted it verbatim. And the hour before His death it was to this doctrine of the New Covenant that the Master went to most naturally as a forecast of His own sacrificial work. The prophecy, that sprang from seeds in Jeremiah’s heart and was watered by the tears and sweat of his spiritual agonies, was fulfilled that historic and tragic night that God’s Son said to his little group of friends, “This cup is the New Covenant in My blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:19). An examination of the passage reveals three characteristics of the New Covenant: individuality, universality, and remission of sins.

Individuality

“I will put my law in their inward parts and write it on their hearts.” To the Jews worship had been a relationship between a great chosen people and its great national God. Jeremiah faced a national solidarity in which the priest introduced man to God. When the decayed crust of this national religion gave way under the prophet, he fell to the deeper level of the individual heart, where he found soil for the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not cease to be the patriot, the civic conscience of the people, but he visited himself more with the attitudes, habits, sins, and responsibilities of the individual. In the verse preceding the New Covenant prophecy, the old proverb “that the fathers have eaten a sour grape and the children’s teeth are set the edge” is blasted. “Everyone shall die for his own iniquity. Everyone that eats the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge” (31:29). From this platform of individual responsibility the New Covenant is announced.

“I will give them a heart to know Me that I am the Lord” (24:7). The one duty of each man is to know God for himself–a knowledge which thrives apart from the second-handed relationship dependent upon some church paper, book, building, or preacher. Jeremiah declared that even the destruction of the Temple and the leveling of Jerusalem would not destroy God. He announced that “God dwells not in temples” but in hearts.

Even after Jesus made it clear that faith is born not in public ceremony but in individual hearts, there have been many tragic lapses. Modern Christendom is markedly characterized by creedal systems as substitutes for a personal knowledge of the Savior. Religion is corporate, external, informal rather than individual, internal, and intimate. With all our talk of devotedness to the Lord, it is still difficult for the individual soul to avoid a burial beneath elaborate church machinery. Faith is measured by the regularity of church attendance, and service is marked by the performance of certain external works. In many quarters family or private worship has been surrendered while the more important public assembly continues to be revered. Fearing a mystical relationship, we have fled from the phrase “Christ is my personal savior” to the idea of “salvation by congregation”.

In answer to medieval scholastic logic which attempted to prove God and fit him neatly into the existing ecclesiastical structure, Martin Luther retorted, “The most important thing about the existence of God is that He exists for you and me.” The young Christian who understands church doctrine well but has never met God will have little defense in a moment of temptation.
When we are strangers to God six days a week, the service of the seventh day will unavoidably reflect our long-felt worship weaknesses. As we think in brotherhood terms of the church universal, and exist in the atmosphere of a congregation unit, let us cautiously remember that the unit in religion is one soul, and religion is an intimate communion between that soul and God.

Before Jeremiah, the unit in religion had been the nation. It seems almost as if God tore him, sad and complaining, from the life of his nation, that he might find God by himself and announce to the world that this could be done by anybody, anywhere. A dozen times his book says, “I will be your God, and you will be My people” (30: 22). From here to the final page of the Bible, this principle of fellowship echoes: “The tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God” (Revelation 21:3). Man’s greatest need is to admit that he cannot be satisfied in himself only from himself, by drowning self in the fountain of living waters. The Creator made us for Himself, and we shall never find completeness apart from fellowship with Him. David uttered this insatiable longing: “My soul thirsts for God, yes for the living God” (Psalm 42:2).

“And this is life eternal that they might know You . . .” (John 17:3). This is the condition for blessing. One day, all alone, you will lift your eyes to see if you know God “face to face as friend to friend.” To be separated from God, in Christ, and to dream that you can live without Him is to doom yourself to the eternal pangs of a quenchless thirst.

Universality

“They shall all know Me . . .” Though the New Covenant was specifically a contract with Israel and Judah, its impact was destined to break its nationalistic boundaries and become the Magna Charta of personal religion for the entire world. In the death agony of his own dear nation, Jeremiah foretold the resurrection of the entire world to a better life. Though affliction was heavy, the time would surely come when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). Jeremiah is not simply a man speaking to all men. This is the hope of all men speaking through one man. Later the reason for that hope, the Messiah, was to charge us with the responsibility of carrying forth the universal mission of the “testament sealed in blood.” As with the prophet, may this word “be in our hearts as a burning fire shut up in our bones” (20:9).

Remission of Sins

“I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” The New Covenant was to make possible that which the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish. The sin of Judah, which had been “written with a pen of iron and with the point of a diamond,” (17:1) could be pardoned forever. Only one thing His holiness demands: “Only acknowledge your iniquity” (2: 13).

Because of his sobering predictions of doom, critics have coined the word “jeremiad”, a synonym for lamentation, as a monument to an irredeemable pessimist. However, a truer meaning of his name is “appointed of the Lord,” indicating that his salient character is not surrendered but assaulted. He is not a pessimist but a realist. Among his many emotions we finally hear the lift of laughter. Nowhere is there the hopelessness that permits men to bow submissively before an ironical fate of fatalism. As real as the people’s sins, just so real must be their acknowledgment of it.

Jeremiah said more about repentance than any other prophet, and things have changed very little. The “old paths” (6:16) for which he pleaded stopped at Pentecost where they merged with the footprints of Jesus; but it is still repentance that is man’s pathway to salvation. It is a commentary on life’s greatest tragedy that when all these words were proclaimed, so seared would be their conscience that they should ask: “Wherefore has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? Or what is our sin that we have committed against our God?” (16:10). The hardening effect of sin is its most appalling result. May those of us that number ourselves among “the few” remember that even when the Son of Man shall come in his glory, there will be some who, with amazing effrontery, shall ask, “When saw we You hungry or thirsty . . .?” (Matthew 25:44).

“Turn, oh backsliding children says the Lord for I am married unto you, and I will take you one day and I will take you one of a city and two of a family, and I will bring you unto Zion” (3:14). The motto of Jeremiah’s book is summed up in his people’s answer to God’s mercy: “We will not . . .” (6:16). When our Savior left the ivory palaces to be tacked to a tree, man’s most incredible mistake was framed in the words: “. . . and you would not” (Matthew 23:37). Yes, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul. Think! For 2,000 years God’s shed blood has not moved a world to come that they might be healed. From the silent centuries the voice of Jeremiah cries out: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (8:20).

Conclusion

So Jeremiah’s struggle in the end was the same it had been in the beginning. Michaelangelo has painted him, an old man, bewildered and broken, sitting on the ruins of the devastated city, his noble head resting sorrowfully on his hands and bowed down so that he cannot see the miserable failure of his preaching. Yet the prophet knew that the removal of the things that were shaking was so that which cannot be shaken might be illuminated.

In an age of change, convulsion, and revolution, Jeremiah, with unhesitating faith, proclaimed the certain progress of the eternal plan of God. His immediate reward was scorn, persecution, and ingratitude. But Jeremiah will stand forever as a mighty cornerstone in the foundation of the prophets upon which is reared the majestic building of the church of God.

Footnotes

1. George Adam Smith. Jeremiah. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923.
2. Rudolph Kittel. Great Men and Movements in Israel. New York: the Macmillan Co., 1929.
3. Raymond Calkins. Jeremiah the Prophet. New York: the McMillan Co., 1930.
4. H. A. Ironside. Notes on Jeremiah. New York: Loizeaux Brothers, 1928.
5. Harold C. Case. The Prophet Jeremiah. New York: n.p., 1953.
6. H. W. Robinson. The Old Testament, Its Making and Meaning. Nashville, Cokesbury, 1937.
7. Life Magazine, “Our National Purpose.” June 6, 1960.
8. Life Magazine, “Our National Purpose.” May 31, 1960.

Questions For Class Discussion

1. Why might Jeremiah be called the “last of the prophets of Israel”?
2. Why is he called “the weeping prophet”?
3. In what ways does Jeremiah present a preview of the life of Christ?
4. Discuss Jeremiah’s commission.
5. What is the great sin of Israel that Jeremiah attacks?
6. Discuss the ways in which Israel’s spiritual situation is a prefigurement of our modern world.
7. Discuss the important characteristics of the New Covenant.
8. In what ways is God to be “our God and we, His people”?
9. Was Jeremiah an irredeemable pessimist and a failure?
10. Discuss the great message of this book and its relationship to our lives.