Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 43 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This shorter session works closely through Jeremiah's opening oracles. Dr. Essex argues that chapters 2 to 6 root in Josiah's reign, when Judah's return to Yahweh was outward and deceptive, and that the temple sermon of chapter 7 belongs to the first year of Jehoiakim, where chapter 26 shows it nearly cost the prophet his life. Listen for the image of the broken cisterns, for the strange mercy of a divorce that is not final, and for the moment God tells his own prophet to stop praying.
Jeremiah 1:1 to 3 gives the third-person introduction: the prophet's word began in the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 to 626 BC, continued through the days of Jehoiakim, who reigned 609 to 598 BC after Jehoahaz was carried to Egypt within months of Josiah's death, and ran to the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, Jehoiachin's uncle, installed by Nebuchadnezzar in 597, until the destruction of 586. Jehoiakim and Zedekiah were both sons of Josiah, the south's last good king; Jehoiachin, the eighteen-year-old between them, goes unmentioned in the superscription. The call of 1:4 to 19 falls in Josiah's thirteenth year, so Jeremiah's ministry of the word begins under the reforming king.
Chapters 2 through 6 resist division: it is hard to tell where oracles begin and end, and harder to date them. But 3:6 explicitly places its word in the days of Josiah, and the thrust of the whole section fits that setting: outwardly a great reform, a return to the Torah led by a king whose own repentance was real, while the people's return did not penetrate the heart. The unit opens at 2:1 with the word of the Lord coming to Jeremiah, a formula that recurs at 7:1 to mark the next unit, and its theme is the apostasy of Judah.
The key verse is 2:13: my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. Yahweh is a spring that bubbles up continually, sustenance without interruption; a cistern is a hole hewn in limestone to catch runoff against the dry season, and these, the gods Judah has turned to, are cracked and hold nothing. They traded a perpetual spring for containers that cannot even store what falls into them, and, as the preceding verses observe, no nation in history had traded away its own god; nations add deities, they do not discard their own. Judah alone had done the unheard-of thing.
Chapter 3 opens from the law of Deuteronomy 24: if a husband divorces his wife and she becomes another's, he does not take her back. That is what God is doing with Judah; and yet the astonishing note sounds at once, will he be angry forever?, and the chapter moves toward a restoration beyond the divorce, precisely what Deuteronomy 24 disallowed among men. Then in the days of Josiah (3:6 to 11) Yahweh compares the sisters: faithless Israel played the harlot on every high hill and was sent away with a writ of divorce; treacherous Judah watched it all, feared nothing, and played the harlot too, returning to Yahweh under Josiah not with all her heart but in deception. So faithless Israel proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah, faint praise indeed, meaning only that the north sinned without the south's graphic object lesson before her eyes; and once Josiah passed, Judah's unchanged heart would simply vent itself.
Jeremiah is then sent to proclaim toward the north, toward the exiles carried to northern Mesopotamia by Assyria: return, faithless Israel; I will not look on you in anger, for I am gracious; only acknowledge your iniquity. The promised restoration culminates in Zion: one from a city and two from a family brought back not to Bethel and Dan, whose shrines will not be resurrected, but to Jerusalem, aligned again with the Davidic king their fathers rejected, given shepherds after God's heart, multiplied in the land. At that time Jerusalem will be called the throne of Yahweh, and all nations gathered to it; the house of Judah will walk with the house of Israel, and together they will come from the land of the north, a phrase that quietly assumes Judah too will go into exile. And 4:1 and 2 attaches the old promise: if Israel returns in truth, justice, and righteousness, the nations will bless themselves in Yahweh, the restoration Isaiah also foresaw.
Turning back to Judah, 4:3 and 4 gives the double image: break up your fallow ground, do not sow among thorns; circumcise yourselves to Yahweh and remove the foreskins of your heart, lest wrath go forth like fire with none to quench it. The return in deception must become a changed heart. But 4:5 onward already sounds the trumpet of invasion, assuming what chapter 5 confirms: Yahweh sends Jeremiah roaming the streets and squares of Jerusalem to find one man who does justice and seeks truth, and the city will be pardoned for his sake; there is none. They say, as Yahweh lives, and swear falsely; struck, they did not weaken; consumed, they refused correction; they have made their faces harder than rock. So chapters 5 and 6 unfold the impending siege and desolation.
The pattern that governs the whole book appears: opportunity to repent, held open even as the blows fall, met by refusal that hardens with every blow, until Yahweh three times tells Jeremiah not even to pray for this people. Asked how God is involved in the refusal, Essex points to the Torah: Deuteronomy 29:4, to this day Yahweh has not given you a heart to know; and to the pattern of Pharaoh in Exodus, who hardened his own heart through the early plagues until God hardened it, confirming the sinner in the process he began, that the full weight of judgment might be displayed. Jeremiah must be read against the Torah throughout: the descending judgments track the covenant curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, and the circumcised heart itself is Moses' language. The idolatry indictment never rests, hammered in chapters 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, and 19, with chapter 10's oracle against the dumb idols standing beside Isaiah 41 and 44.
Chapter 7 carries no date, only the command: stand in the gate of Yahweh's house and proclaim. Essex, differing here from the note in the MacArthur Study Bible, takes chapter 26 as the same occurrence, and 26:1 dates it: the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim, 609 BC, the deception of Josiah's days carrying straight on under his son. The sermon itself echoes Isaiah 1: you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, walk after other gods, then stand in this house and say, we are delivered. Unless you amend your ways, this house goes the way of Shiloh, where the ark's presence did not save Eli's house; I will cast you out of my sight as I cast out all the offspring of Ephraim.
Chapter 26 supplies the response chapter 7 withholds: the priests and the prophets demanded of the officials a death sentence for this man, for he has prophesied against this city. Certain elders rose and cited precedent, Micah had prophesied the same under Hezekiah and was not killed, and Jeremiah escaped by the skin of his teeth. The same chapter records that the prophet Uriah, preaching the same message, was hunted down and executed; over Jehoiakim's years the true prophets were cut down one by one until Jeremiah alone remained.
In the sermon's wake comes the first of three such commands: do not pray for this people, for I will not hear you. The die is cast; why should God answer intercession for a people whose words are wholly deceptive? The command is unprecedented: Moses interceded again and again and was heard, even when the exodus generation was sentenced to die in the wilderness; Samuel counted it sin against Yahweh to cease praying for rebellious Israel (1 Samuel 12). Now the prophet of repentance is forbidden to intercede, and 7:20 pours the unquenchable wrath on this place, on man and beast, the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground. Chapters 2 to 10, rooted in Josiah's days and Jehoiakim's first year, thus show Judah irreversibly under judgment even while the call to amend remains.
Against that background, chapters 11 and 12 supply the covenantal basis. Yahweh commands: speak the words of this covenant; cursed is the man who does not heed them, the covenant commanded when he brought the fathers from the iron furnace of Egypt, saying, listen to my voice and do all I command, so you shall be my people and I will be your God, confirming the oath to give the land flowing with milk and honey; and Jeremiah answers, Amen, so be it, Yahweh. The Mosaic covenant was the stated means by which Israel would enjoy the promises given through the Abrahamic covenant. But the fathers did not obey, walking in the stubbornness of their evil hearts, and now a conspiracy is found in Judah: they have returned to the iniquities of their ancestors, gone after other gods, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant. The covenant stands broken, a dead letter, no longer the means of blessing, which sets the stage for the promise the course reaches next: the covenant Deuteronomy 30 anticipated, and Jeremiah 31 will name new.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fifteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. In whose reign did Jeremiah's ministry begin, and in what year?
2. What relation were Jehoiakim and Zedekiah to Josiah?
3. Why does Essex root chapters 2 to 6 in Josiah's reign?
4. What are the two evils of Jeremiah 2:13?
5. Why is the cistern so devastating an image for the idols?
6. What law stands behind the divorce language of Jeremiah 3:1, and how does God's dealing exceed it?
7. In what sense was faithless Israel more righteous than treacherous Judah?
8. Where does the promised restoration of the north culminate in Jeremiah 3?
9. What was Yahweh's offer in the search of Jeremiah 5?
10. Which Torah text does Essex place beneath Judah's inability to respond?
11. How does Essex date the temple sermon of Jeremiah 7?
12. What precedent did the elders cite to spare Jeremiah's life in chapter 26?
13. What became of the prophet Uriah, and what does it show?
14. Why is the command not to pray for this people unprecedented?
15. What does Jeremiah 11 declare about the Mosaic covenant?
All fifteen correct. Lecture 8 is complete.
Jeremiah 2 pictures sin as trading a spring for a cracked cistern of your own hewing. What have you labored to carve out for yourself that holds less than what you left, and what would returning to the fountain look like this week?
Judah returned to God under Josiah in deception, conforming outwardly to a leader's real repentance. When revival or renewal moves around you, how do you tell whether your own response is heart-deep or borrowed?
God searched Jerusalem for one person doing justice and seeking truth, and would have pardoned a city for that one. What weight does that place on the ordinary faithfulness of a single believer where you live and work?
The indictment at the head of the book, Jeremiah 2:13 as the lecture expounds it: my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
Keep the course's Jeremiah chronology chart beside chapters 2 to 10, and compare the temple sermon of chapter 7 with its narrative frame in chapter 26. Next session: the images and complaints of Jeremiah 11 to 20, and the road to the New Covenant of chapters 30 to 33.