Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 90 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session carries Jeremiah from the certainty of exile to the certainty of restoration. Dr. Essex works carefully through the seventy years of chapter 25, laying out how commentators divide over literal and symbolic readings and why 2 Chronicles 36 settles the question for him, then follows the confrontation with Hananiah and the letter to the exiles into chapters 30 to 33, where God answers the false hope of the false prophets with the true hope of a new covenant. Listen for how the famous verse about plans for welfare, a future, and a hope reads inside its own context.
The unit running from chapter 21 through 29 concerns the certain exile. Three waves carried Judah to Babylon: 605 BC under Jehoiakim, 597 BC when the eighteen-year-old Jehoiachin was taken and his uncle Zedekiah installed as a ruling governor more than a true king, and the final destruction of 586 BC after Zedekiah's rebellion. Chapter 21 belongs to the final siege, begun around 589 BC, when Zedekiah sent to Jeremiah hoping for a word like the false prophets gave and received instead the command to surrender. Chapter 22 gathers oracles against the kings after Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, and Jehoiachin, into a mosaic, ending with the word against Jehoiachin, also called Coniah: no physical descendant of his would sit on David's throne.
Jeremiah 23:1 to 8 assures the Davidic dynasty even so: God will raise up the righteous Branch, already introduced in Isaiah 4 and coming again in Zechariah 6, whose reign of justice and righteousness answers everything Isaiah said about the ultimate Son of David. The curse on Jehoiachin's line is resolved through the virgin birth: Jesus is not part of Jehoiachin's physical line, since Mary descends from David through another son, not the Solomonic kingly line, while the throne right comes legally. Essex observes that the New Testament helps us put together what the Old Testament was already saying, and that Israel, seeing as through a tunnel, could not always combine Scripture with Scripture to see what God would do.
Chapter 24, dated after 597 BC, gives the vision of two baskets. The false prophets were saying the captivity would be broken quickly; Jeremiah says the reverse. The good figs are the captives already in Babylon: God has sent them out for good, will set his eyes on them, bring them back, build them up, and give them a heart to know him, which already prepares for chapters 30 to 33. The bad figs are Zedekiah, the remnant in Jerusalem, and those who fled to Egypt: they face sword, famine, and pestilence, becoming a terror, a reproach, a proverb, a taunt, and a curse. It is better, says Jeremiah, to be in Babylon now than in Jerusalem now, and he says it while standing in Jerusalem; the vision is not about ultimate salvation but about where God's future lies.
Chapter 25 steps back chronologically to 605 to 604 BC, the fourth year of Jehoiakim and the first of Nebuchadnezzar. Jeremiah has prophesied for twenty-three years and Judah has not listened, nor did they listen to all the Lord's servants the prophets before him, who called them from idolatry back to Yahweh. Therefore God will send Nebuchadnezzar, whom he startlingly calls my servant, where Israel the called servant has failed, to make the land a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation; a hissing, Essex explains, is the whistle by which people are summoned, here armies summoned to desolate. And it is not Judah alone: the cup of the wine of wrath in verse 15 goes to all the surrounding nations listed in verses 18 to 26, since Babylon must come through other lands to reach Jerusalem.
These nations shall serve Babylon seventy years, and when the seventy years are completed God will punish the king of Babylon. Is the number literal or symbolic? Ryken says he can go either way; Thompson takes it as symbolic, probably a lifespan, on the pattern of Psalm 90:10 where seventy years is the span of a man, as one generation passed in the wilderness so the next could enter the land; others read it as an appropriate or complete period of punishment. What presses the symbolic reading is arithmetic: Babylon rose in 605 and fell in 539, two years short, so Harrison treats seventy as a round number. Liberal interpreters go further and rule out predictive prophecy altogether, treating the number as words placed in Jeremiah's mouth after the fact.
Later Scripture does not treat the number symbolically. 2 Chronicles 36:21 says the land kept sabbath until seventy years were complete: Israel had failed to keep the sabbatical year seventy times, and the sabbatical year is no symbol; you can count sevens on a calendar. The number was therefore purposed, not arbitrary. Daniel in chapter 9 prays his great prayer of confession precisely because, in Babylon with a calendar, he could see the seventy years ending. Essex, with the Expositor's Bible Commentary and the Bible Knowledge Commentary, takes the years as specific: 605 BC to 537 BC by inclusive reckoning, since Cyrus defeated Babylon in 539, decreed the return in 538, and the exiles were back in the land, altar reestablished, by the fall of 537, with the first crop in 536. The seventy years concern captivity from the land and its desolation, not the temple's destruction and rebuilding, which chapter 25 and chapter 29 never mention.
Chapter 26 records the opposition to the temple sermon: king and princes sought Jeremiah's death, elders rose citing Micah's precedent under Hezekiah, and the prophet Uriah was executed around 609 to 608 BC for the same message. Then in chapters 27 and 28 Jeremiah confronts the false prophets in Judah. Early in Zedekiah's reign, around 596 to 595 BC, God commands Jeremiah to make a wooden yoke and wear it: every nation that will not put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon will be punished with sword, famine, and pestilence. Zedekiah is called to submit, which he refuses to do.
In the fourth year of Zedekiah, 593 BC, the prophet Hananiah declares that within two full years God will break Nebuchadnezzar's yoke and return the captives. Jeremiah answers with sarcasm and seriousness together: amen, may the Lord do so; yet the prophets before us prophesied war, calamity, and pestilence, and the prophet of peace is proven only when his word comes to pass. Hananiah tears the wooden yoke from Jeremiah's neck and breaks it. The further word comes: Hananiah will die this very year, and two months later he is dead, a pointed indication of who spoke for God. By 591 BC the two-year claim had failed publicly, yet Zedekiah continued the rebellion that brought the final siege.
Chapter 29 shows false prophets among the exiles too, Ahab, Zedekiah the prophet, and Shemaiah, even sending letters back to Jerusalem, which prepares us for Ezekiel's ministry among the same captives. So the true prophet in Jerusalem sends a letter to Babylon: you are not coming back soon; build houses, plant fields, marry, settle in, and seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you, and pray for it, for in its welfare you will have welfare. When seventy years are complete, God will bring them back, for he knows the plans he has for them, plans for welfare and not calamity, to give a future and a hope. Essex is direct about the famous verse: the hope in context is not getting through seminary or finding a wife or a good church; it is Israel's restoration, first the remnant's return and ultimately the complete restoration, though the principle that God works for his people's well-being stands as application.
The Book of Consolation is God's answer through Jeremiah to the false prophets of chapters 27 to 29. Write all the words I have spoken to you in a book, for days are coming when I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel and Judah and bring them back to the land I gave their forefathers. Jeremiah looks past the small remnant that would return under Persia to the great, total restoration ahead, as Isaiah had. Essex divides the four chapters with three p's: the promise in poetry (30 and 31), the promise in parable (32, the field), and the promise in prose (33). Echoes of the Abrahamic covenant frame the whole: the land given to the forefathers at the start, and at 33:26 the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with the fixed order of day and night, the Noahic pattern, standing as guarantee.
Chapter 30 moves through images. The nation is chastened but not completely destroyed, and on the future day God will break the yoke from their neck, deliberately recalling Hananiah's broken yoke: what the false prophet promised falsely for his generation, God will truly do in the end. The nation is sick, the wound incurable with none to plead the case or heal, the imagery of Isaiah 1 again, yet God says: I will restore you to health and heal you of your wounds. Desolation gives way to prosperity as the fortunes of Jacob's tents are restored, and the tempest of the Lord's wrath purges the wicked before the restoration. Chapter 31:2 to 22 addresses the northern kingdom, Ephraim my dear son, over whom God's heart yearns; verses 23 to 26 turn to Judah, farmer and shepherd dwelling together at peace.
At 31:27 the first behold, days are coming, promises sowing with the seed of man and beast, and as God watched over them to pluck up and destroy, so he will watch to build and to plant. In that day the proverb will cease: the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Those in the siege and in exile were blaming their fathers' sins for their judgment; in the restoration each will die for his own iniquity and reap what his own obedience or disobedience brings. Ezekiel 18 will take up the same proverb among the exiles at much greater length.
Behold, days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, both historical nations, all the seed of Abraham. It will not be like the covenant made with the fathers, my covenant which they broke, pointing straight back to chapter 11's broken covenant. Its terms: I will put my law within them and write it on their heart, an internalization of Torah; I will be their God and they shall be my people; all shall know the Lord, an experiential and intimate knowledge, from the least to the greatest; and I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. Forgiveness grounds the whole, and corporately Israel will finally be what God called the seed of Abraham to be.
Answering a student, Essex clarifies: after Jeremiah 11 the Mosaic covenant is broken, irreparable, no longer the means of blessing; it has become for Israel an instrument of curse, culminating in scattering among the nations. The remnant that returned from Babylon still lived under that broken arrangement, as Ezra and Nehemiah show; the new covenant was not established at the return. Historically, at the cross the law came to an end, Romans 10:4, and Hebrews 8 speaks of the old covenant becoming obsolete, the new covenant's foundation laid in the death of Christ: this is the new covenant in my blood. Yet Israel, the veil still over their eyes as 2 Corinthians 3 says, continues to live as though the Mosaic covenant governed their relationship to God, seeking a righteousness by works, until in the future distress the law finally does its work of exposing sin and the nation turns in repentance, with the very words of repentance already written for them in Isaiah 59 and Hosea 14.
Chapter 32, in Zedekiah's tenth year, 587 BC, during the siege when Babylon held all the land except the city itself, God tells Jeremiah to buy his cousin's field at Anathoth by right of redemption. Jeremiah, honest as ever, essentially asks why: the land is already Babylonian territory. The answer: the city will fall and the land lie desolate, but houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land; the purchase is faith in promised restoration, God telling his prophet to put his money where his mouth is. Chapter 33 then reaffirms it all a second time: in the restoration God will fulfill his covenant with David, a righteous Branch to reign, and his covenant with the Levitical priests through Phinehas in Numbers 25; and if you can break the covenant of day and night, only then will these covenants fail. Every sunrise stands as God's pledge that what he has said for Israel he will do.
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 twenty-one are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What were the three waves of exile to Babylon?
2. How is the curse on Jehoiachin, that no physical descendant would sit on David's throne, resolved in the Messiah?
3. In the vision of chapter 24, who are the good figs?
4. What does God call Nebuchadnezzar in Jeremiah 25?
5. Why does the cup of wrath in chapter 25 extend to the surrounding nations, not Judah alone?
6. Which reading of the seventy years does Thompson favor?
7. What later passage supplies the rationale for exactly seventy years?
8. How does Essex date the seventy years?
9. Why did Daniel pray his great prayer of confession in Daniel 9?
10. What was Jeremiah commanded to wear early in Zedekiah's reign, and what did it signify?
11. What happened to Hananiah after he broke Jeremiah's yoke?
12. What did Jeremiah's letter instruct the exiles in Babylon to do?
13. What, in context, is the hope of Jeremiah 29:11?
14. What are chapters 30 to 33 an answer to?
15. How does Essex divide the Book of Consolation?
16. What image in chapter 30 deliberately recalls the Hananiah episode?
17. In that future day, what happens to the proverb about sour grapes?
18. Which of these is NOT one of the new covenant's terms in Jeremiah 31:33 to 34?
19. According to Essex, what is the state of the Mosaic covenant after Jeremiah 11?
20. Why was Jeremiah told to buy the field at Anathoth during the siege?
21. What stands as the guarantee of the covenants with David and the Levitical priests in Jeremiah 33?
All twenty-one correct. Lecture 9 is complete.
Essex insists on reading Jeremiah 29:11 inside its context before applying it. What is gained by that discipline, and what is lost when a promise to exiled Israel is lifted straight into personal circumstances? How would you use the verse well?
Jeremiah told the exiles to seek the welfare of Babylon, the very empire that destroyed their city, and to pray for it. What did that demand of them, and what might it look like for believers living as strangers in their own cultures?
The test of a prophet in chapter 28 is whether his word comes to pass, yet Hananiah's hearers had to wait while Jeremiah's hearers had to endure. How do you weigh comforting messages against hard ones when both claim to speak for God?
The new covenant promises the law written on the heart rather than on stone. From this lecture, what difference does internalization make, and where do you see the difference between outward conformity and a changed heart in your own obedience?
God told Jeremiah to buy a field in occupied territory as an act of faith in promised restoration. What would it look like for you to put your money, or your plans, where your professed hope is?
Jeremiah 31:33
Read Jeremiah 25, 29, and 31 in one sitting, watching how the seventy years decreed in 25 become the settled horizon of the letter in 29 and how the new covenant of 31 answers the broken covenant of 11. Then read 2 Chronicles 36:15 to 23 and Daniel 9:1 to 19 to see how later Scripture counts Jeremiah's years. Next session: the course continues in Jeremiah, following the prophet through the fall of Jerusalem and its aftermath.