Jeremiah (1-31) 12:10 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard’ – the word ‘pastors’ can also be translated rulers or shepherds, is are mostly taken by interpreters to refer to the foreign rulers who were about to invade Judah: the Chaldeans. They have destroyed God’s vineyard – Israel is pictured as a pleasant vineyard planted by the Lord – and trodden down the portion which God had made his own, the one nation with which he had made a covenant. What was a land of pastures, a land of milk and honey, has been ravaged, its trees cut down, its cities besieged and sacked. ‘They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto me.’ It is as if the Lord cries out to God in tears for what it has been turned into by the ravages of the enemy. The Lord who gave Israel this land is moved with sorrow by these tears, but the judgment must go ahead. As a father punishes a stubborn and unruly child, and as a kind-hearted judge passes sentence on an incorrigible criminal, so God must judge his people and – for seventy years, al least – take away their inheritance. The discipline of the nation has now reached this pitch, because milder disciplines were ignored. Those who treat lightly the correction of the Lord better brace themselves for harder stripes. God is watching their response, and he knows what is in their hearts: refusal to hear, justification and minimising of their offences, determination to carry on in their own way if they can. ‘To lay it to heart’ would be to take it very seriously, to ask the cause that such a thing should be allowed to happen to God’s own people. When we refuse to listen to correction, we keep the reality of what is happening well away from our hearts. We do not give the facts a fair hearing; we harden our hearts and are not prepared to mourn before the Lord or humble ourselves before him.^‘The spoilers are come upon all high places through the wilderness:’ – the Chaldeans are pictured as already come, attacking all places in their path so that nowhere is safe – ‘for the sword of the LORD shall devour from the one end of the land even to the other end of the land: no flesh shall have peace.’ The Chaldeans are themselves the sword of the Lord, because, though they are not even aware of it, they are sent at his command to do his work. They have their own motivation in coming, and God allows greed and cruelty to energise them. That makes them fit scourges for such a severe judgment on Israel, but they carry out a task secretly assigned them by the Lord. How many ways God has of bringing about his will! He uses his enemies to fight for him. How can any do real harm to his cause, when he has surrounded them with his knowledge? The Chaldeans will receive their own punishment in due time. There will be no place to escape. They will do their work thoroughly and leave no stone unturned. This is a judgment that will affect everyone, even the remnant.‘They have sown wheat, but shall reap thorns.’ This may be understood literally – they have sown wheat expecting to reap a harvest, but the disruption of the land by the invaders has meant that agriculture has been abandoned and the fields left uncultivated, and they have become overgrown with thorns and scrub. ‘They have put themselves to pain, but shall not profit: and they shall be ashamed of your revenues because of the fierce anger of the LORD.’ This seems to continue with the same thought. The effort that the people have made will fail to bring about the desired end. This could be a metaphor for a more widespread failure to achieve anything that they wanted to achieve, because the Lord has frustrated all their ambitions. The word ‘revenues’ means increase generally and refers here to the produce or crop yield that will fail to achieve. This is all due to the anger of the Lord, who intervenes constantly, and is constantly, though not yet finally, judging the works of men.