‘Behold, I frame evil against you.’ When you know the circumstances, so often there is some tragedy involved in this. The churches collapse not simply because dear old souls are diminished in number and finally die out. More often than not it is because some influence came in which turned the church upside down,, and turned out to be the ruin of it. It was via some calamity in some shape or form, so it could well have been a judgment. We see this in the life of Israel; it is going to happen soon with the Chaldean invasion in the life of Judah, and we note that the going into captivity after the Chaldean invasion and the destruction of Jerusalem: that was pretty well the end of Judaism. It was not the total end, because after seventy years of captivity God brought out a remnant of Jews to reoccupy Jerusalem and Judah. But what a tiny remnant, and they never really ever got their autonomy or independence or self-rule back again. They were at best only a miserable vassal state after that, always under empires until the terrible problems of the intertestamental period, all the way until Christ. So here in Jeremiah the warning of collapse: when he says it's going to be a perpetual hissing, a perpetual collapse: it was in many ways. The return of remnant is almost a prophecy and a promise of the great remnant of the New Testament revival, and the new church and the new order, the combined Jewish-Gentile church of Jesus Christ. The potter really has reformed things. He has brought an end to the old order. It is prophetic, and the vessel that he shapes in the future will be the New Testament church. The same lump of clay, if you like, who have Jewish origins and Jewish blood in it and many Jewish converts, and maybe if we understand Romans 11 correctly in this matter, a great Jewish revival at the end of time. But it will be a different thing as the apostle Paul repeatedly tells us: the church of Jesus Christ. It would be wrong to say that the church has replaced Israel. Rather, it is that converted Jews and converted Gentiles are united together in the church of Christ. Not a replacement church, but a united church, both together.