The Prophet Jeremiah (1-31): Expository Commentary from Sermons by Dr Peter Masters

Bible Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah

by Dr Peter Masters, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London (adapted from sermons)

Jeremiah has been called the weeping prophet. He has a long ministry, longer than Isaiah or many other of the prophets. He was a prophet who functioned in a time which bears striking similarities to our own, so there is a very great deal of direct and helpful ministry and counsel for us, as well as commands of God, and principles to follow in this great prophecy.

He was the son of Hilkiah, a priest. Anathoth, where he grew up, is just to two or three miles north-east of Jerusalem. It was a priestly village, where all apart from servants were priests, so it is likely that Jeremiah was also a priest. His father, Hilkiah, was not the same Hilkiah we read of just a little later in the 18th year of the reign of Josiah: the high priest named Hilkiah who discovered the book of the law.

He began his ministry around the 627, 628 BC. He began to prophesy in King Josiah's 13^th year, when he would have been between 20 and 25 years of age. There was a godly king on the throne at the time, but the land was in tremendous disorder, and the worship had been polluted, and idolatry was rife, and Jeremiah begins to prophesy. The people are doomed, and they are going to be taken into captivity. They are all going to be punished, and yet God sends them a prophet to appeal to them and reason with them at the eleventh hour. So they are given every opportunity to repent. These reasonings are not just put before the nation as a whole; the appeal is to individuals too; there is evangelism going on. Here in this book is so much help for us concerning how to reach souls, and how to preach to the lost. This is the weeping prophet; this is also the reasoning prophet. It was Isaiah who wrote, ‘Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord’, but it could equally well have been Jeremiah. He ministered in all probability even after the fall of Jerusalem, though the end of his ministry and his death are not recorded. He went with his people into captivity and the indications are that, for some little while after, he was still ministering – so certainly more than 40 years, and perhaps between 50 and 55 years.

Now we know that in the inspiration of Scripture, the Lord used the literary styles, the manner of presentation of the human instruments, yet in such a way that every word is that which is intended by God. Every word is significant and important as God meant it to be, and yet, remarkably, God uses the human style. That being the case, it tells us something about Jeremiah, because he was evidently the most graphic preacher or prophet in the entire Bible. Illustrations, allusions, graphical explanations just spill out of him, verse by verse, sometimes even two distinct pictures in a single verse. If you were to subject it just to a purely literary study to discern this, you would be amazed. We pass many of them over; we don't recognise them; there are just so many. That is why some people in past centuries thought that this portion of the inspired word – though exactly as God intended it to be – was more in the nature of notes of what Jeremiah said, and that he would amplify many of these illustrations in the course of his preaching.

Now some modern translations set us on the wrong track in this Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, because they have decided that it takes the form of an ancient chargesheet. Many have decided – in line with modern liberal commentaries on the book – that this is God contending against the people, accusing the people. ‘Here are the charges that I have against you’, God says. ‘All these charges are the reason why you are condemned, and why you will be punished, and why Jerusalem will be sacked and you will be taken away.’ But that is not the view of the older translators. Certainly some modern translators may be expert translators of the language, but they are not as deeply versed in the books of the Bible themselves. The older translators could see perfectly well that Jeremiah is a pleading prophet, and although the people are condemned – and these are the charges against them, loosely speaking – Jeremiah is actually pleading with them, and reasoning with them, and urging them to turn away from this. He is the eleventh-hour voice before the catastrophe, the calamity: ‘Turn back! Why are you doing this?’ He doesn't just call to them and say, ‘Turn.’ He doesn't simply say, ‘This is what you have done wrong.’ He reasons with them, and he says, ‘Look, why have you done this? After all, this doesn't make sense for this reason, and for that reason. Can't you see how ludicrous it is, how foolish it is to give up what you have got, and to turn to lesser things?’ He is appealing to them all the way through. He is interacting with them as you might with an individual friend, who was going to do something foolish and catastrophic, and you have got to talk him out of it, and you try your best, and you employ all kinds of reasons which you hope will change his mind. But sadly the modern translations have just turned it into a chargesheet. There is no appealing prophet, pleading prophet, reasoning with the people. They have lost it all. They have just taken the things he says, and listed them out as a series of accusations and charges. But if we see it as pleading, and we look at the reasoning, we say, ‘This can apply to us, and this is how God looks at people, and this is how he reasons with us, and this is how we may reason with lost sinners.’ Here are remarkable examples of the richness of illustrations and reasonings with lost souls. Now we see its riches. It is a pastoral manual, a preaching manual, and a devotional book for individuals. All that is wiped away, if it is merely a chargesheet.

Jeremiah had an assistant, a scribe, who was with him most of the time, and who acted as his secretary. And he had one or two others who we read of, one who was taken into captivity because they preached the same message as Jeremiah, and who fled to Egypt and was extradited from their and executed. There was always danger on account of the murderous inclinations of the priests and the elders, and increasingly, as time went by, the princes of the land also. There was, towards the end, the last king of Judah, who was a weak man, who wanted to defend Jeremiah at times and not at other times, and yielded to the princes and to the priests. So Jeremiah's life was always in danger. It was a very evil time with the sacrifice of infants, and worship of idols.

There had been great reforms, and during the time of his prophecies there were five kings of Judah. The first was an exceedingly good king, Josiah, under whom there had been something of a revival. But it turned out to have been a shallow revival; there had been outward reformation, but the people never left off their idolatry, their worship of idols, and their terrible and awful sinful practices. Not only that, but in society in general, there was every kind of sin: the rich exploited the poor, and the Lord's rules about benevolent slavery were not maintained, and so people who were slaves were slaves forever during this period, and nobody was fair to them. When the population was prevailed on – the rich, the princes – to yield up their slaves after the sixth year back to liberty and provide for them – as they were supposed to do – they soon went back on it. So there was every kind of excess and wickedness and exploitation and violence in the community. It was a terrible period, and finally God was bringing them to justice. Jeremiah had the task of calling them in an eleventh-hour call, which he knew because God had told him so. But they would not heed and judgment would be inevitable, and in the meantime his life was in great danger. So with all that in mind, we look eagerly at the consolations that he was provided with and the comforts that he had, because these we can learn from and we can use in every day and age.

In the British Museum there is a collection of letters on display written at this very time. These letters, written in cursive script on pottery, take us back to 586 BC when Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, invaded Judah, destroying Jerusalem and its temple with great violence, and carrying multitudes into captivity. At that time the prophet Jeremiah was in Jerusalem warning King Zedekiah of the impending catastrophe. Near to Jerusalem was the fortress town of rakish (destroyed by some accurate over a century before but later rebuilt). These letters were found in 1935 and the ruins of God realm by the main gate of rakish. Twenty-one letters were found, written in joined up writing, in black ink on pieces of broken pottery. Written in alphabetic Hebrew, they are urgent messages, full of ‘eleventh hour’ tension, written as Nebuchadnezzar’s army closed in on a very apprehensive Jerusalem. The writer was Hosha’yahu (Hoshaiah), the commander of the military outpost or small town garrison. He wrote to the latest military governor, whose name was Ya’osh. One letter appears to have been written shortly after the state of affairs described in Jeremiah 34:6-7, which mentions that Jeremiah delivered a message to King Zedekiah while the cities of rakish and as a car still remain standing. The relevant leakage letter reads: May Yahweh cause my lord to hear this very day tidings of good. And now, in accordance with everything my lord has written, so has your servant done. I have written on the door everything which my lord has written to me… And I report that we are watching for the fire signals of leakage according to the directions which my lord has given, because we cannot see Azekah.’ As a car had fallen. Another leakage letter logs the departure of a deputation to Egypt, and also includes the following: ‘as for the letter of Tobiah, servant of the king, which came to Shallum, son of Jaddua, through the prophet, saying, “Beware!” thy servant hath sent it to my lord.’ Who was the prophet referred to here it is likely to have been Jeremiah. (This is the first known mention of a Jewish prophet outside of the Bible.) In another letter the cover plate is made that: ‘the words of the princes are not good but they weaken our hands and slacken the hands of those who hear about them.’ Charged which the princes made against Jeremiah when they demanded his execution – ‘let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war’ (Jeremiah 38:4). Wash Hoshaiah the outpost commander was clearly in sympathy with Jeremiah in seeing that the policy of the princes, relying on Egypt, would bring certain defeat and devastation.

Many biblical names appear in these letters. Hosha’yahu appears in Jeremiah 42:1 as pop Hoshaiah. Ya’osh means Josiah. Neriah, Gemariah and Shemaiah are also names which occur both in the latest letters and the Book of Jeremiah (Shemaiah occurs 6 times in Jeremiah). It is not likely that these people, bearing common names, where the same as those mentioned in Jeremiah, but the lake is letters obviously relate to the crisis leading to the fall of Jerusalem, confirming powerfully the historical reality of the biblical record, including the situation in the city reflected in the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah prophesied during the reigns of a number of kings until the final fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. Josiah, a godly king began to reign as an eight-year-old child (2 Kings 22:1) in 640 BC, and reigned for 31 years. Jeremiah began to prophesy in 627 BC. When Josiah died in 609 BC, the people took Jehoahaz (aka. Shallum, Jeremiah 22:1) his fourth son (1 Chronicles 3:15) and made him king instead of his father (2 Kings 23:30), but he only reigned 3 months (2 Chronicles 36:2) before being taken away to Egypt by Pharaohnechoh (aka. Necho) where he died (2 Kings 23:34). Necko took Eliakim (the brother of Jehoahaz) and renamed him Jehoiakim and made him king (2 Kings 23:34, 2 Chronicles 36:4-5) and he reigned for 11 years, from 609-598 BC. When Jehoiakim died, his eighteen-year-old son (2 Kings 24:8) Jehoiachin (aka. Jeconiah, aka. Coniah, compare Jeremiah 24:1; 37:1 and 2 Kings 24:6) reigned in his place for three months (2 Kings 24:8). (2 Chronicles 36:9 says that he was eight-years-old when he began to reign which looks impossible, 2 Kings 24:12.) When Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem in 597 BC (the second of three attacks), he took Jehoiachin to Babylon, and put his uncle Mattaniah on the throne (the brother of Jehoiakim) changing his name to Zedekiah. Zedekiah reigned for eleven years from 597-586 BC (2 Kings 24:17-18) and was the last king before the exile.

The prophecies of the Book of Jeremiah are not arranged in chronological order. Some are not dated at all, and others are dated according to the year of the current reigning king, but even those prophecies that are dated are not arranged in chronological order.