Jeremiah (1-31) 6:11 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days. ¹² And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD.’ Who is speaking? Some think it is Jeremiah, who is expressing his anguish at the message he is required to deliver, and holds back from speaking, but can do so not longer because of the persistent sin of the people. But it seems better to understand this as the Lord’s words. The first person is used in verse 11 and continues through verse 12 which ends with ‘saith the LORD’, and then carries on until the end of verse 15 where, again, it it the Lord that speaks. In this case it is the Lord himself who presents to us his feelings, as he represents himself as holding in his fierce anger out of pity for the people in what they will suffer, and yet is compelled to act because of their incessant wickedness, which no amount of warning and admonition is able to correct. In speaking like this the Lord is representing himself in human terms for the sake of our understanding. The Lord does not have passions as we do, but there is something real in him that equates to the passions that we might have, so that this holding back and bursting forth in fury is something that we can relate to some extent. God speaks like this so that we can understand his great patience and that there is compassion in him to which we can appeal. But at the same time, it shows the immense provocation that the wicked are to God, that they even manage to overcome this compassion and, as it were, force him to act in judgment. The passage describes the horrors of the punishment that is coming on the people. God will deliver them into the hands of the Chaldeans who are known for their cruelty. The Lord is full of compassion and Judah might have appealed to his mercy, and repented of their many transgressions, but now they have gone on too long, and the Chaldeans are going to be allowed to inflict the Lord’s judgment on the nation. He has chosen them to do this work because they lack all pity. The whole nation will be punished, those who in the past God has called his children. What great evil has been done by them that he should desert them! Babylon will come with a cruel disregard for their people. Not only the young men will be taken, but the enemy will rampage through the land slaughtering all, taking men and their wives, bursting into their dwelling places. They will have no pity for young or old, and will kill the aged and those who are enfeebled and decrepit. This is a mark of how futile it will be to appeal to their compassion. Judah’s enemies will enter into their most private retreats, those secluded gardens and places of solitude which they count as theirs and theirs alone, and will overrun them and take away all that they treasure. By this they will be sure that the Lord is angry with them and has punished them. Their fields and their farms, their livelihoods will be removed. Even their wives will be taken away from them, the most painful loss of all.‘For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.’ This is the reason for God’s judgment on the nation, and it is something they cannot deny. He had spoken to them both publicly through his prophets, and privately in their consciences, many times. They were characterised by covetousness, which Scripture treats as idolatry. How could they sincerely worship the Lord while they loved material things more than him, and looked to those things for happiness and satisfaction, which God says we should look for in him alone? ‘From the prophet even unto the priest every one dealeth falsely.’ The prophets and the priests ought to have been the last individuals to learn falsehood. They only existed to represent the Lord and to bring a rebellious people back to his standards. It was essential that they were not influenced by the corrupt standards that characterised the people, but kept themselves separate for the truth’s sake, otherwise the salt has lost its saltiness. But disastrously, they had done the opposite and become teachers of wickedness, and examples of evil living. There was nothing left in the nation that offered any hope. How were the people ever going to be brought to repentance when corruption had spread so far?‘They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.’ Why had they done this? Was it ignorance of how to go about the Lord’s work properly? Maybe. Maybe they knew so little that they did not know how to teach sound doctrine. But perhaps also it was too much trouble, and it was not going to be popular. Water down the message, because the undiluted word of God is going to cause offence, and these prophets and priests lived for the approval for the people. They would do nothing to put this at risk. They feared man more than God. They did not have the Lord before their eyes. ‘Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they shall be cast down, saith the LORD.’ They were not ashamed because their consciences had been so battered that they hardly functioned anymore. Shame comes from seeing ourselves as another righteous person sees us, and realising that we are exposed before that person. Above all, shame comes from realising that we stand in the presence of God, and that his eyes are a burning fire from which nothing can be hidden. It was because these so-called prophets did not see themselves this way, that they could lose their sense of shame. For this reason, God would bring shame on them that they refused to bring on themselves. They would after all experience shame, for there would still be something that they were ashamed to experience. Their shame had moved somewhere else, and the Lord would seek it out. They would fall along with those they trusted in, and they would be ashamed of their inability to withstand the force that came against them.