Jeremiah (1-31) 5:14 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Jeremiah (1-31) 5:14

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‘Wherefore thus saith the LORD God of hosts, Because ye speak this word,’ – this is addressed to Jeremiah – ‘behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire.’ Because you are faithful and you speak the word, your word will be fire, ‘and this people will be wood, and it shall devour them.’ It will be a word of righteous indignation. Here is another indication that Jeremiah’s message will on the whole not be accepted by the people. He must not be discouraged by this. God still wishes him to speak, for the message also serves another purpose: it takes away any excuse that they might have had, and leaves them fully responsible for their rejection of God’s gracious offer of forgiveness.‘Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from far, O house of Israel.’ This is the Chaldeans again. ‘It is an ancient nation, a nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what they say.¹⁶ Their quiver is as an open sepulchre, they are all mighty men.¹⁷ And they shall eat up thine harvest, and thy bread, which thy sons and thy daughters should eat: they shall eat up thy flocks and thine herds: they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig trees: they shall impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst’, as a last resort.’ That is exactly what the Chaldeans did. It is a dreadful prospect for Israel. They might as well abandon all hope of resistance right now. All their worst fears are about to be fulfilled, and the prophecy is that there will be nothing left to them of all the good things in the land which the Lord had given them and which they had failed to appreciate. They will come with their unrecognised tongue into the most holy places of the Jews, and do what they like, and the Lord will, as it were, stand back and not intervene. Their quiver spells death and destruction; their arrows will certainly find their mark. They are men of war and they know the latest strategies of war. Those good things which the Lord had given to his people will be stripped from them, and they will see the withdrawal of his protection.

Application

If we look at the present time, you can see a parallel running through the verses. What is come upon the churches today? and we are thinking about Bible believing churches. It is a mighty nation. It is the world, of course. It is an ancient nation. There have always been the two kingdoms battling it out: Satan's kingdom in which he is the prince of the power of the air, and the kingdom of God. ‘A nation whose language thou knowest not.’ Well we, God’s people, are not skilled in all the arguments and the ologies of this vain and passing world. And they have flooded in, and you find churches adopting completely worldly and wokish kinds of ideas and methods on every hand, swamped by them. ‘Their quiver is as an open sepulchre.’ You have only got to look on the Internet for that, to see how many anti-Christian videos there are, and how many different approaches they take, and how many different levels they work at. The devil's quiver is not like a quiver; it’s like an open sepulchre, and it is full of demon ideas and suggestions and attacks and criticisms, undermining everything. It is almost an avalanche. ‘And they shall eat up thine harvest’, and they do. We preach and we reach people, and almost as fast as we reach them, the arrows or the antagonisms of Satan have penetrated in some way, and it is all coming through this vain world which has got into the churches. They will eat up your harvest, your bread, your flocks, your herds, your vines, your fig trees, everything.

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Jeremiah (1-31) 5:14 Commentary and Bible Study