Lecture 7: The God Who Watches Over His Word: Jeremiah’s World, Themes, and Shape

The lecture, section by section

1. A world turned over in a generation

   Jeremiah demands historical knowledge even more than Isaiah does. Essex's analogy: no one in 1988 could have written the geopolitical upheaval of the following fifteen years, and Jeremiah lived in exactly that kind of day. In 626 BC, a year after his ministry began, Nabopolassar took control of Babylon, independent of Assyria once for all, and within about a dozen years the staged military collapse of the Assyrian Empire was underway, every stage pressing on Judah's leadership and on Jeremiah's response to that leadership. The course chart correlates the dated events with 2 Kings, Jeremiah, and Daniel 1, nearly a year-by-year account; keep it open on a second reading of the book, and it will serve again for Ezekiel, written against the same backdrop.

2. Watching over his word to perform it

   Where Isaiah's vision fixed on Yahweh's holiness, Jeremiah's call in chapter 1 fixes on Yahweh's word: the word of the Lord came, and in the visions that follow God declares that he is watching over his word to accomplish it. Behind everything Jeremiah will witness from 627 to 586 BC stands the active word of God, moving the nations themselves; for Isaiah 39 had already named Babylon as Jerusalem's destroyer, and when Isaiah spoke, Babylon was a mere burr in Assyria's saddle. The whole power structure of the ancient Near East had to be overturned for that word to come to pass, and Jeremiah is told: you will watch me do it, and be my spokesman while I do.

3. I myself will war against you

   The theme sounds throughout: I am bringing a nation against you from afar, declares Yahweh (5:15), and most bluntly in chapter 21, when Zedekiah, with Nebuchadnezzar at the walls, sends to Jeremiah hoping Yahweh will repeat his wonderful acts of deliverance. The answer: I am about to turn back the weapons of war; I myself will war against you; I will strike down the inhabitants of this city; and afterward I will give Zedekiah into Nebuchadnezzar's hand. Babylon is the means; Yahweh is the actor. By application, God still watches over his word between the comings of Christ, and nothing in two thousand years has happened by accident; but Jeremiah was raised up for the particular generation that would see Isaiah 39 fulfilled, and no would-be Jeremiah today can read the evening news with a Bible and announce which puzzle piece is which. Much of Jeremiah's prophecy, unlike Isaiah's, was fulfilled by the time his book was written.

4. Fourteen messages, and the temple illusion

   The second theme is the sin and judgment of Judah, cataloged at a length that would leave a one-sitting reader spiritually depressed: the MacArthur Study Bible outlines chapters 2 to 29 as fourteen messages of condemnation. Chapter 7 shows why the cataloging was necessary: will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, walk after other gods, and then stand before me in this house called by my name and say, we are delivered? Judah trusted the temple as a talisman, so Yahweh points to Shiloh, where the ark's presence did not spare Eli's corrupt house, as 1 Samuel 4 to 6 records. Even watching Nebuchadnezzar's armies encircle the city, they expected a rerun of 701 BC. And beneath every sin lies the first one, chapter 2's spiritual adultery: nations do not trade in their gods, they only add to their pantheons, yet Judah alone had traded away her God.

5. The we're-okay prophets, and why the book is in the canon

   Third theme: Jeremiah stood nearly alone against a multitude of false prophets assuring kings, princes, and people that all was well, what Essex calls the we're-okay, God's-okay prophets, a breed hardly extinct today. Jeremiah 5:30 and 31: an appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely, the priests rule on their own authority, and my people love it so; but what will you do at the end of it? When the false word failed, where would the people turn? That is why the book of Jeremiah is in the canon: when Judah finally came to its senses, the true word of the true prophet was there to guide, sustain, and nourish. Chapters 27 to 29 stage the collision directly, the false prophets promising the 597 BC exiles a quick return, Jeremiah's letter telling them to build houses, plant fields, and pray for the welfare of Babylon, for that is where they would live and die.

6. A fortified city, a pillar of iron, walls of bronze

   Fourth theme: the persecution of the prophet. God told him at the start (1:17 to 19): gird up your loins, speak all I command you, and do not be dismayed before them, lest I dismay you before them; behold, I have made you today a fortified city, a pillar of iron, and walls of bronze against the whole land; they will fight against you, but they will not overcome you, for I am with you to deliver you. Jeremiah would lament to Yahweh in Job-like complaints, even you have deceived me, but he did his complaining to God, not before the people, and God kept him strong in public for forty years. At the book's end the city lies destroyed and Jeremiah still lives: the ending is a testimony not to Jeremiah but to Yahweh, who did exactly what he promised.

7. Six verbs, and a field bought during the siege

   Fifth theme: restoration. The call of 1:10 set Jeremiah over nations and kingdoms with six verbs, four negative, to pluck up, to break down, to destroy, to overthrow, and two positive, to build and to plant. The emphasis falls on the four, but God's final word is not destruction; it is building and planting. Glimmers of restoration appear along the way and open into the great four-chapter oracle of chapters 30 to 33; and in chapter 32, during the final siege itself, Yahweh tells Jeremiah to put his money where his mouth is and buy a field, for if restoration is coming, that is valuable property. Sixth theme: the nations, plural, under the same sovereign word, gathered in chapter 25 and in the oracles of chapters 46 to 51, where Babylon, God's chosen instrument, is finally judged in language deliberately echoing what was said of Judah: a chosen vessel that turns arrogant suffers the consequences.

8. Why the crowds guessed Jeremiah

   In Matthew 16:14 the people's guesses about Jesus are John the Baptist, Elijah, or Jeremiah, the one named prophet of all the others. Feinberg's comparisons in the Expositor's Bible Commentary suggest why: similar historical settings, Jerusalem in each case nearing destruction; both predicted the fall of city and temple; both confronted formalism in worship, hearts far from God; both loved the people to whom they ministered and wept over Jerusalem; both condemned the commercialism of temple worship; both were accused of political treason, tried, persecuted, imprisoned; both were rejected, tenderhearted, acquainted with loneliness, and enjoyed unusual fellowship with God. The New Testament never draws a strict typology, and Essex will not take it that far; but this side of the cross, Jeremiah cannot be read without echoes of the Gospels. And since the one thing churchgoers know of the most unknown, least preached prophet of the twentieth century is that he is the weeping prophet, a sermon on the echoes of Christ in Jeremiah makes a fine door into preaching the book.

9. The purpose of Jeremiah

   The purpose is far easier than the structure, and the commentators substantially agree. From chapter 1: out of the north the evil will break forth on all the inhabitants of the land, families of kingdoms setting their thrones against Jerusalem's gates. The foe is described from chapters 4 through 10, an ancient, enduring nation, but not named until chapters 20 and 21: Babylon, exactly as the reader of Isaiah 39 expects. The destruction comes because of Judah's spiritual adultery and all its ensuing sin, spelled out at length for a stubborn people; yet Yahweh's future rule stands assured, through the Davidic covenant, chapter 23's righteous Branch raised up even though Coniah, Jehoiachin, goes to Babylon with no son to sit on the throne, and through the new covenant of chapter 31, drawing the Abrahamic and, by extension to the nations, the Noahic promises toward fulfillment. More words fall on destruction than restoration, but both are the book's purpose.

10. A chronological roller coaster

    On structure there is no unanimity; it has been said the book's arrangement is as disjointed as Jeremiah's own spiritual ups and downs. What is universally agreed is that it is not chronological: Charles Dyer's chart in the Bible Knowledge Commentary, one of the two best works in that volume along with his Ezekiel, plots the dated oracles into a chronological hopscotch. Chapters 2 through 20 come without dates; from chapter 21 on, many oracles are precisely dated, but out of order, chapter 21 in the final siege of 589, chapter 22 back under Jehoiakim, and so to the end, chapter 52 closing with Jehoiachin raised up in Babylon about 561 to 560 BC. Where the Spirit led Jeremiah to date an oracle, the historical circumstance belongs to its meaning.

11. Blocks, echoes, and the scroll of chapter 36

    Nearly every commentator sees the same blocks: a third-person introduction (1:1 to 3) answered by the third-person fall narrative of chapter 52; chapters 2 to 29, the condemnation messages, with the foe from the north sounding in chapters 4, 5, 6, and 10, the prophet's persecutions and complaints concentrated in 11 to 20, and the dated messages in 21 to 29; the restoration unit of 30 to 33 standing between the blocks; chapters 34 to 45 opening with dated messages to Zedekiah in the siege, mirroring chapter 21, then recording in 36 to 45 the historical fulfillment of the word; and the oracles against the nations in 46 to 51, where chapter 50 echoes chapter 6 and chapter 51 echoes chapter 10, Babylon's doom told in Judah's own vocabulary. Essex adapts Dorsey's analysis as suggestive, not as the law of the Medes and Persians; and chapter 36's scroll, dictated to Baruch, burned by Jehoiakim, rewritten, gives the working image of how Jeremiah himself, around 580 BC, gathered his forty years of oracles into the purposeful book we have.

12. Hard hearts to the very end

    Chapters 34 to 45 prove the word and the people at once. Jerusalem falls exactly as Jeremiah said; he is permitted to remain in the land with the remnant under Gedaliah the governor, and calls the people to be faithful to him; within two months Gedaliah is assassinated. Jeremiah warns the survivors to stay, since defying the king of Babylon invites retribution, and they respond by fleeing to Egypt, dragging Jeremiah along. The reader who reaches chapter 45 is glad for the restoration oracles, for by any human measure both Yahweh and his prophet had cause to be done with this people; yet Jeremiah keeps ministering the word to them even in Egypt. The appendix of chapter 52 then certifies him: what he said came to pass, which is why continuing generations read his book and not the books of the false prophets. And they need to keep reading it, for Israel remains stubborn, still needing the new heart that comes only by the new covenant, whose mediation, the course will see, has already been provided.

13. The Jeremiah shelf

    Jeremiah is a book wanting in resources; these are the best available, none earning a stellar commendation. J. A. Thompson's NICOT is adequate and interacts well with prior work, its practical exegetical footnotes usefully at the bottom of the page, though Thompson holds a Deutero-Isaiah view elsewhere and assigns the book's final form to Jeremiah's ministry if not entirely his hand. R. K. Harrison's Tyndale volume is a brief summary; Huey's NAC is more substantial and, though he maddeningly declines to take positions, he compiles the views on each controversy so well that for a basic exegetical paper he sometimes outdoes Thompson. And Philip Ryken's recent exposition, sermons from the late 1990s at Tenth Presbyterian, preached Jeremiah as his first series there, courage worth honoring; Reformed and amillennial, which in Jeremiah matters chiefly in chapters 30 to 33, he knows the book well and applies it pointedly, with a single closing sermon on Lamentations.

1. Jeremiah's generation trusted the temple as a talisman while living however they pleased. What in your life functions the way the temple did for them, a religious fact you lean on in place of repentance?

2. The false prophets told people what they loved to hear, and Jeremiah's true word only proved itself at the end. How do you test the voices you listen to now, before the end makes it obvious?

3. God told Jeremiah to complain to him rather than before the people, and sustained him publicly for forty years. What would change if your discouragements went first and fully to God rather than to your audience?