Jeremiah (1-31) 26:4 Commentary and Bible Study

Here are the hard words that Jeremiah must speak to the people; here is the very real warning that he must give. Perhaps he would have liked to have stopped after the positive part of the message, but it all had to be delivered. There was no excuse for their failure to carry out God’s commandments. They had been set before the people in the plainest terms, and repeatedly, for this was the constant message of the prophets. They called the people to repentance and obedience. God’s law was set before them so that they could only fail to keep it deliberately and knowingly by opposing their own consciences. Again, God says that the prophets have spoken, rising early, an expression which shows their zeal to carry out their commission from the Lord, which Jeremiah uses more than ten times.‘Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.’ Shiloh was where the ark was, generations earlier, when the Philistines seized it and took it away. In other words, I will make this present temple just like that former house of God and it will be ransacked, ‘and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.’ What happens to Jerusalem will become a byword for a nation that has been cursed. This was the threat that God gave through Moses to the nation if they persisted in their disobedience (Deuteronomy 28).‘So the priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the LORD.’ What was their reaction? How dare you say such things to us that this temple should be torn down, that we will be forsaken and delivered into the hands of the Chaldeans? Don't you know we are God's people? Don't you know we are not sinners? This is outrageous.