Reading: Jeremiah 1-3, Psalm 13

We come today to the second of the major prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. The first, Isaiah, called for repentance, was seriously disappointed, and was given a dramatic future vision of a faithful Servant of the Lord who would be what Israel was supposed to be. He saw the collapse of the northern kingdom of Israel, and foresaw the destruction of the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians. Isaiah died sometime during the reign of Manasseh, hands down the worst king the nation ever had. Fast forwards a couple of decades and we meet the young priest, Jeremiah, who is called by God to speak to Judah near the beginning of the reign of Josiah, Manasseh’s grandson.

The world that Jeremiah lived in was one of extreme upheaval. In Jerusalem, 8 year old Josiah’s father, Amon, had been assassinated after two years of oppressive, bloody reign. Some kind of popular movement put down the revolt and brought Josiah to the throne. He appears to have gotten good advice, possibly even from his repentant grandfather Manasseh, who had been deported by Assyria. In any event, he inherited chaos. The nation’s spiritual life was at an all time low after the reigns of Manasseh and Amon. The political situation was an extremely tenuous independence. Assyria was on the wane. It had successfully put down a massive rebellion centered on Babylon, but it had taken over 40 years and drained the strength of the empire. The Babylonians and the Egyptians were plotting new revolts, and the authority of the kings in Assyria were being challenged from outside and in. Judah had a chance to be independent of foreign rule, but was beset on all sides by larger empires that would happily use the chosen kingdom as a pawn, or swallow it whole.

This was the world of Jeremiah. During his life he would see the greatest spiritual reform in the history of the people of Israel under Josiah, but a scant few decades later would see the total collapse and destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the kingdom of Judah. He would prophesy coming judgment, beg for the people to repent, then see the judgment come about. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Jeremiah is the longest book in the Bible, and it is a cycle of disappointment and emotional suffering unequaled in human literature. Jeremiah sees the worst curses of Deuteronomy come on his people, and as is the curse of the prophet, he sees it all coming, but no one will listen to him.

We begin the book with the calling of Jeremiah as a young man, and the scene is similar enough to the call of Isaiah that I think we are supposed to see the two in parallel. God touches the mouth of Jeremiah and declares that his words are God’s words. Jeremiah is given a vision, and God explains that he is watching over his word, that is will be completed. This launches a covenant lawsuit similar to the one that opens the book of Isaiah. Jeremiah issues a challenge to Judah to repent of their violations of the covenant that they signed with God at Sinai. What is different from the message of Isaiah is that exile is now assured. The reign of Manasseh was the last straw. Josiah’s reign is a stay, but not a cancellation, of the penalty of exile. The story foretold way back in the book of Deuteronomy is going to unfold in front of their eyes.

Jeremiah’s accusations center around the primacy of the God of Israel in the life and worship of the people of Israel. He speaks of their rescue by God from Egypt, their constitution as a people by the presence of God, and even their origin as the descendant’s of Abraham as the work of God. But they had repeated Adam’s human problem and chosen independence. When that didn’t work out, they turned to natural things and called them gods. Rocks, stones, wood, sky, rivers, mountains, animals. The Canaanite religions that Judah has been adopting all through its history adopted all these as their deities. Their practices are horrifying, but the primary complaint of Jeremiah is not their awful practices- child sacrifice and ritual prostitution among them- but the displacement of the God of Israel as the authority for the life of the people. He uses the imagery of a marriage, and warns Judah that if God is the husband and they are the wife, then there is impending divorce.