Like Isaiah, the beginning of Jeremiah’s message has a lot to do with the coming judgment that will take place on the people of Judah for their disobedience to the Lord. Yesterday, we heard Jeremiah picking up the notion of the people of Judah prostituting themselves before other gods, carvings and images that were made by man and had no power. Interestingly, this message comes to us right after the commissioning of Jeremiah, a commissioning that actually is representative of the greater nation of Israel as well. They were meant to be what Jeremiah is, the voice of God among the nations. They too were blessed, touched and saved by God for the work that He had for them, yet they would not and did not follow His commands, neither did they fulfill the purpose to which they were called.
Apart from the book of Isaiah, this theme of what will happen to the people of God if they didn’t follow God’s commands is covered in the early books of the Bible as well, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. As God is laying out the laws for His people, the covenant which they are supposed to follow, He lays out a section of Blessings and Curses which spells out very clearly these things that Jeremiah, and Isaiah before him, prophesied about. While it may seem like this is coming out of the blue for the people of Judah, they have been warned before and really, for the extent of their existence as a nation, they have worked under this understanding of the covenant.
This message, again like the message of Isaiah, seems so logical and calculating. God is saying through His prophet that the people have not followed His commands. They have not lived out the Shema, they have turned to other gods. He reminds them that they have been warned time and again and that they have still not listened. It all seems so emotionless, and kind of sets God up as this rather fist of iron ruler with no mercy or willingness to forgive. Clearly the people have sinned and that seems to be all there is to it. Herein lies the main thing that sets Jeremiah apart from the other prophets, emotion.
Too often, I think we take the emotion out of the message; Jeremiah doesn’t though. While he is a human and likely reacting to the visions and messages that God is giving him about his home country, we also see in him some of the emotion that God exhibits in this message as well. We always chalk God up to being a God of love, which is entirely true, but I don’t think we often give him credit for all of the other emotions that God has and clearly shows in the book of Jeremiah. This judgment isn’t simply an emotionless decision. Like a father disciplining a child, there is hurt on both sides, even if the father knows it is in the best interest of the child. God knows that his children need to learn, and we have seen in Isaiah that this punishment is part of the process of refining the people of Judah, but it doesn’t make the pain any less great for God the Father either. It is important for us to understand that, though God is indeed omniscient and knows all that is to come, the actions of punishment and judgment that He takes against His children are difficult even for God, even if He knows the punishment is necessary and the outcome will be good. These are the actions of a loving God who wants what is best for His children, a love that can be seen in an entirely different light through the emotions of Jeremiah.
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