Jeremiah (1-31) 8:1 Commentary and Bible Study

It is the eleventh hour for Jerusalem; the Chaldean invasion is shortly to take place. Nebuchadnezzar will destroy everything and take most of the population into captivity in the Chaldean empire, and the people cannot believe that this is going to happen to them. Jeremiah is given the task of warning the people – the final warning, the last call to repentance – and of urging them to seek God's help and salvation. He has been told by God that his ministry will outwardly be largely fruitless, that the people will ignore him, so his appeals are interspersed with his prophecies concerning the inevitable doom of Judah and the city of Jerusalem. But nevertheless, there will be a remnant. The hint is given again and again in the narrative, that a tiny remnant will listen and will be saved and will be warned to flee south when the invasion occurs and take refuge in the outermost, southernmost parts of Judah and across the border into the wilderness of Judaea. Jeremiah is preaching to all, but he is preaching particularly to individuals, and the astonishing number of illustrations that he uses to try to persuade the people provides arguments for us in New Testament times also, as we plead with souls. At the same time it is a chapter of lamentation at the failure of the people to respond in any meaningful way to the word of the Lord.‘At that time, saith the LORD, they shall bring out the bones.’ They will smash up the burial places and strew the bones in the fields. What are they doing that for? What are they emptying the graves for? Rifling the graves? Well there may be a reconstruction reason. They've decided, that graveyard can go. It's a wonderful place to site Babylonian homes or houses. So the graves are in the way and unsightly. and they don't want them there. But why take the bones out first, and why start with the king and the princes? Because it is to be an act of humiliation of the nation. It is taking the guarded remains of the most honoured in the land, and exposing them for all to see. It is spreading them over the fields, and in effect using them as bonemeal for the ground, for the cultivation of plants. The king's bones are just going to be left like refuse to decay on the face of the earth. They will use them as fertilizer; they will do it for the enriching of the ground. This is the ultimate shaming of Jerusalem: that the noble burial places mentioned first, the kings, the princes, the priests, the prophets even – the false prophets particularly are in mind, and there have been so many of them – will be broken up, and their remains abused, and cast on the ground just for the lowest possible common purposes. That is the Chaldean invasion, crushing the people of Jerusalem and making them worthless in the eyes of the nations. To the ancients, how humiliating, how crushing this was! Everybody would be a little bit sensitive to this, but we today somehow, in our scientific age, do not have anything like the sensitivity to this that the ancients had. That the bones of all the great men would just be crushed and laid out in the open to dry, before they are heaped into some sort of sack and turned into fertiliser – how humiliating! What is more, their remains will all be spread out under the gaze of the imaginary gods: the sun and the moon and the stars – the gods that Israel has worshipped in its idolatry. Your gods that you trusted in: what will they do to help you? They are inanimate; they are lifeless: the sun, the moon, the stars, the heavenly bodies. Jeremiah is going to any lengths to wake them up, to make them think. How many false gods man trusts in, which are incapable of helping him in his day of trouble! The very gods of the heavens who were behind the idols that they have worshipped, whom they have loved rather than God, whom they have served and sought out! So in the very sight of the so-called gods that couldn't help them and couldn't deliver them, they will be debased. That is the warning.