BEMA 56: Jeremiah — Weeping
Transcription Status
29 Nov 22 — Initial public release
19 Sep 22 — Transcript approved for release
Jeremiah — Weeping
Brent Billings: This is the BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, we begin our journey through the Babylonian prophets, examining the famous weeping prophet, Jeremiah.
Marty Solomon: That’s right. Babylonian prophets. We’ve been through—let’s see in our graph, our diagram—we had five sections of prophetic history. We’ve been through the first two now. Remind me of the first one, Brent.
Brent: Pre-Assyrian prophets.
Marty: Pre-Assyrian.
Brent: Kind of gives it away what the second one is.
Marty: Well, yes—it’s a good hint, anyway. We had four prophets in Pre-Assyrian, two to Israel and two to Judah. Who did we have in Israel? Go backwards.
Brent: Oh, backwards?
Marty: Yes.
Brent: Well, 1 Isaiah and Micah.
Marty: Okay, so the ones to Judah? You went all the way backwards. I threw you two curves.
Brent: All right, I went all the way to the bottom.
Marty: Yes, I like that.
Brent: Backwards, Hosea and Amos.
Marty: Yes, perfect. Okay, let’s get back to normal, regular—not Backwards Land. We had Amos and Hosea, they were our Israel prophets. Then we had our two Judah ones you said were who?
Brent: Judah was Micah and 1 Isaiah.
Marty: Micah, and 1 Isaiah. We’ll talk about images here in just a moment. Then we had after the Pre-Assyrian, like you said, not rocket science.
Brent: The Assyrian prophets.
Marty: The Assyrian prophets, we have four of them. How many to Israel and how many to Judah?
Brent: A couple each.
Marty: Couple each again. Who are our Israel prophets?
Brent: Let’s see, Jonah and Nahum.
Marty: Jonah and Nahum. Exactly. Okay, and then we had two Judah prophets. Who were they?
Brent: Something and 2 Isaiah.
Marty: A something.
Brent: Something.
Marty: A something, kind of Z-zomething.
Brent: Zephaniah.
Marty: Zephaniah, that’s right. [laughs]
Brent: I did have some listeners recently explain to me how they like it when you grill me on the podcast, so this is good fodder, I guess.
Marty: [laughs] There you go. I like that too. I’m messing with people around the country. Some of them wanted to meet the great, illustrious Brent Billings. I said sometime, we’ll travel together.
Brent: I would love to travel. If anyone wants to fly me out, I’m willing to come.
Marty: [laughs] Oh, man. That’s funny. Recently came back from a trip—I guess by the time you listen to this podcast it’d be weeks ago—but I met a whole bunch of you that listen around the country. It was so cool to meet new faces, and people that I just never knew before, but they knew me and they knew our podcast. Thanks for being a part of the BEMA community.
Anyway, we are past Pre-Assyrian prophets. We are past Assyrian prophets, and today we start into what we call the Babylonian prophets. Just a reminder, we say this every now and then: there’s always debates and there’s always different ways of labeling prophetic history. Some people will call Pre-Assyrian “Babylonian prophets.” Some people will call Post-Assyrian “Babylonian.” There are so many kinds of different ways, but here, we call them Pre-Assyrian; some people call it Pre-Babylonian. We call it Assyrian, we call it Babylonian. The next two will be Exilic and Remnant are the two other sections we’ll deal with.
Today, we begin our journey into the Babylonian prophets. We’re going to have five. We’ve had four Pre-Assyrian, we’ve had four Assyrian, we’re going to have five Babylonian prophets. First one is going to be Jeremiah. It’s what we’re going to deal with today. A few just random thoughts before we dive into some text here. One of those would be just a total P.S. We’ll just throw it out there and get it out of the way. One of the things that I’ve always found interesting, a little tidbit, is Jeremiah is the prophet that seems to be incredibly dedicated to things of nature.
If you’re wrestling biblical text, and you’re thinking, “Oh, gosh. There is that one passage about a tree. There is that one prophet, I know there’s that one prophecy, and it involved an animal.” It’s likely, if you were to take a stab in the dark, if it’s a tree or an animal or something of nature, there’s a good chance that Jeremiah would be a really good guess. Jeremiah deals with those issues a lot more than any other prophet as far as things of nature just combined. No, you’re not going to find them, not that you won’t find them somewhere else. Habakkuk is going to talk about the feet of a deer. It’s not always going to apply. But good chance if it’s talking about nature, Jeremiah is your guy to talk about there.
Let’s see, a couple of other things. Well, we have our images. Let’s deal with the images and get them out of the way. We have talked about how every prophet has an image. Either an image that they employ in their writings, or maybe an image that drives their, uh… maybe they’re involved in a more street theater type of prophetic movement, or some kind of guerrilla movement in that way. They have themes that drive images, that drive their prophecies. Let’s go back and review our images here, Brent. Let’s see Amos.
Brent: Amos was the plumb line and ripe fruit.
Marty: Plumb line, ripe fruit; a basket of ripe fruit, ripe for God’s destruction, or a plumb line measuring the wall. How about Hosea?
Brent: Hosea was the prostitute.
Marty: The prostitute. Micah?
Brent: …is judge.
Marty: Judge. 1 Isaiah?
Brent: Warning. No, sorry, vineyard.
Marty: Vineyard. Okay, and then Jonah?
Brent: Jonah was potential.
Marty: Potential. We had a Hebrew word for Nahum.
Brent: Diyn.
Marty: Diyn. We had another Hebrew word for Zephaniah.
Brent: T’shuvah.
Marty: T’shuvah, which means, what does that mean?
Brent: Return.
Marty: Return? Repent or return; it’s that word we usually translate repent. We had 2 Isaiah, which was…?
Brent: Is that the warning one?
Marty: Almost.
Brent: No, that’s woe.
Marty: Woe, right. We got woe on 2 Isaiah. The image for Jeremiah is going to be weeping when we do our review and discussion group or on the podcast. Jeremiah’s image is an image of weeping. Really, it’s impossible to choose one image in Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a huge prophetic book. Spans many chapters, not quite as long as Isaiah as a whole, but remember, we’re breaking Isaiah up into four parts. As far as taking an entire prophet in one podcast, this is a daunting task we have here today. Jeremiah employs a million images—not literally, but he employs a lot. It would be really hard to just pick one and say, “That’s the image of Jeremiah.”
Throughout biblical teaching, Jeremiah is often called “the weeping prophet.” We call him the weeping prophet because he was given a daunting task. In fact, at one point, in Jeremiah, he’s crying out to God and he says, “You seduced me, God, and I was seduced.” That’s the word he uses in the Hebrew. “You wooed me. You fooled me. I thought I was signing up for this glorious calling of being a prophet. I thought I was going to be this great, grand thing. Instead, I found out it was this unbelievable, hard call.”
God tells Jeremiah, “You have to bring the message that I tell you to bring, and people aren’t going to like it.” Jeremiah’s message can be boiled down, I wrote some notes down here. Let’s see here. Jeremiah’s message is simple. “You have failed to repent. God’s discipline is here. The best move for all of you would be to lay down your weapons and head into captivity. There will be much less bloodshed that way.” One of the things that Jeremiah is trying to communicate to his audience is, “The time for repentance has passed. That was Pre-Assyrian, that was Assyrian days, but those days are over. Babylon is here, and there’s going to be no winning this. You’re not going to turn the tide. This is what God’s telling you. At this point, your discipline is here. The best thing to do is just accept it and humble yourself. Let this thing run its course because there’s going to be no turning back.”
We’re going to have no Hezekiah moment here in Jeremiah. That is a hard message to bring because people don’t want to hear it. Jeremiah spans this huge breath of time. He’s prophesying before Babylon gets there. He’s prophesying as Babylon gets there. He’s prophesying as Babylon is there. He’s prophesying after Babylon gets done. He’s prophesying as everybody gets carted off to Babylon.
We’ve got a whole bunch of time covered in the prophecy of Jeremiah. This whole time he has to keep giving this message. In fact, Jeremiah is so pro-Babylon, you might say, like his message is, “Just surrender. Lay down your fighting, lay down your arms, and just head to captivity.” That message is so pro-Babylon that when Babylon gets there, they actually leave Jeremiah behind, rather than cart him off to captivity. With all the people that are left behind, they’re like, “Hey, this guy is on our side. We’re just going to leave him here, and let him do his thing.”
It’s a really interesting turn of events. It is a hard call. It’s not one that’s going to win him many friendships, or get him a lot of accolades. Jeremiah ends up being known as the weeping prophet. Now, maybe a couple more things before we move into looking at some text. Jeremiah spans this huge breadth of history. It is a lot of chunks, little bits, and pieces, maybe a little bit of story here, maybe a prophecy there. A lot of little—“The word of the Lord came to me,” here you go. “The word of the Lord came to me,” here we go. It is a lot of history being spanned, in kind of a collection, and really, if you read Jeremiah, it ends up being a re-collection, because at one point the scroll gets burned.
We are told about the scribe, his name is Baruch. And Baruch, his job is to write down everything that Jeremiah tells him to write. I would assume he probably follows Jeremiah around, almost like a little pet journalist, a note-taker, listening to all the different messages that he gives and he jots them all down, catalogs them. We don’t know exactly how it all gets packaged, or why, if there’s a method to the madness, but he has a scribe and his job is to take the messages, record them, and be able to put them out, particularly in a collection, a scroll.
There is a book I would recommend. There’s a guy by the name of Alan Rabinowitz. Alan helped us lead a trip once in the past and he had a really great grasp of this period of history. He loved the book of Jeremiah, and he wrote a little historical fiction book and I loved it. It’s not a riveting piece of literature but if you like historical fiction, it really helped me get a grasp and understand and appreciate the prophecy of Jeremiah a lot more. I just really loved how I put that together. It’s $4. I believe it’s an ebook only. You looked it up, right, Brent?
Brent: Yes, ebook only.
Marty: Ebook only on Kindle. It’s a whopping $4 for this book. It’s a hefty book. You said 300-some odd pages. That’s not just like $4 for 40 pages, we’re talking $4 for—it’s a fun read if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s called The Disciple Scroll. The Disciple Scroll by Alan Rabinowitz, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Just something that I recommend taking a look at to understand things a little bit better. Anyway, I say we dive into some texts and wrap this thing up. Let’s do it. All right, we got a little bit of text. Not a lot, but a little.
Jeremiah starts off, I want to go through maybe the first few just flip through some of the first few chapters here of Jeremiah. Again, it’s really hard, how do you do Jeremiah in one 20-minute discussion? How do you choose which parts? There’s 50 chapters here. There’s a lot going on. Jeremiah starts off, talks about his call and then all of a sudden in chapter two, one of my favorite passages, I think we talked about this, back in session one when we talked about the desert.
We referenced this, but, The word of the Lord came to me, go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord, the first fruits of his harvest, all who devoured her were held guilty and disaster overtook them,” declares the Lord. Chapter two starts and Jeremiah employs this image that we talked about in session one with Torah and the book of Exodus and this marriage, and then a desert honeymoon in the book of Numbers.
Jeremiah is employing a lot throughout the prophecy of Jeremiah. He’s going to talk about God’s people as a bride and God as their lover. Midway through chapter two, let’s see here.
Obviously, you could look at verse 13. My people have committed two sins. They have forsaken me, the Spring of Living Water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold water. As you’re reading Jeremiah, you’re going to notice that Jeremiah sees everything through the lens of covenant relationship.
The key problem for Jeremiah is that you have broken relationship with God. It’s not about abstract theological concepts or just pure idolatry as an abstract idea or even injustice as a concept. It’s about a relationship. You are God’s bride and you’ve broken relationship. It goes on. Let’s see here a little bit later. I’m going to jump down to verse 20. Long ago you broke off your yoke and tore off your bonds and you said, “I will not serve you.” Indeed on every high hill and under every spreading tree, you lay down as a prostitute. I had planted you like a choice vine of sound and reliable stock. How then did you turn against me into a corrupt wild vine?
“Although you wash yourself with soda, and use an abundance of soap, and the stain of your guilt is still before me,” declares the Lord. How can you say I am not defiled, I have not run after the Baals? See how you have behaved in the valley. Consider what you have done. You are a swift she-camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind. In her craving and her heat, who can restrain her? Any males that pursue her need not tire themselves. At mating time, they will find her. Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry but you say it’s no use. “I love foreign gods and I must go after them.” As a thief is disgraced when he is caught so the house of Israel is disgraced. They, their kings and their officials, their priests and their prophets, they say to wood, “You are my father” and to stone, “You gave me birth.”
Which source do we have here? Is this going to be idolatry or injustice?
Brent: Injustice.
Marty: What do you think here? I don’t know. I hear a lot of broken relationship. I hear a lot of, “I have not run after the Baals. See how you behaved in the valley.”
Brent: That’s true.
Marty: Then what we just read there, “They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone, ‘You gave me—’ ”
Sounds to me like we’ve got really clear references to idolatry to begin with.
Brent: Okay. All right.
Marty: It’s a little source A going on here. I want us to throw Source A some love. I’m so pro-Source B.
Brent: I thought Source B was the default.
Marty: I know. It is, but I gotta be honest, I suppose. I suppose. Let’s see. They have turned their backs to me and not their faces. Yet, when they’re in trouble, they say, “Come and save us.” Where then are the gods you made for yourself? Let them come if they can save you when you are in trouble. For you have as many gods as you have towns, O Judah, why do you bring charges against me? You have all rebelled against me, declares the Lord. In vain I punished your people. They did not respond to correction. Your sword has devoured your prophets like a ravening lion. You of this generation consider the word of the Lord.
Have I been a desert to Israel or a land of great darkness? Why did my people say, ‘We are free to roam. We will come to you no more.’ Does a maiden forget her jewelry? A bride, her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me. Days without number, how skilled you are at pursuing love. Even the worst of women can learn from your ways. On your clothes, men find the lifeblood of the innocent poor. We just have a reference to source B out of nowhere. Yet in spite of all this you say, ‘I’m innocent. He is not angry with me,’ but I will pass judgment on you because you say, “I have not sinned.”
Why do you go about so much change in your ways? You will be disappointed by Egypt as you were by Assyria. You will also leave that place with your hands on your head for the Lord has rejected those you trust you will be helped. You will not be helped by them.” Last little bit. Let’s see here. I’m jumping ahead. Chapter three verse 14, Return faithless people, declares the Lord, for I am your husband. I will choose you one from a town and two from a clan and bring you to Zion, then I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.
In those days when your numbers have increased greatly in the land, declares the LORD, men will no longer say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. They will never enter their minds or be remembered. It will not be missed, nor will another one be made, at that time they will call Jerusalem the Throne of the Lord, and all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord. No longer will they follow the stubbornness of their evil hearts. For in those days, the house of Judah will join the house of Israel, and together they will come from a northern land to the land I gave your forefathers as an inheritance.
This talk of broken covenant really, “I am your husband, you were my bride.” One of the driving images is going to carry through the prophecy of Jeremiah. Now, of course, I just want to keep reading but that would be like five hours from now we’d get to the next section. How about we jump ahead?
Brent: Perhaps I can offer something from chapter 7.
Marty: I would love that. How about you read us the first… we got 11 verses or so.
Brent: Yes, we’ll see what source comes out ahead here. This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, stand at the gate of the Lord’s house and there proclaim this message: Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, who come through these gates to worship the Lord.
Marty: First of all, let me just stop you. Can you imagine having to do this? God says go up to the gates of the temple and give this prophecy. Forget just reading it as the prophecy. Imagine Jeremiah having to go, and Baruch having to stand next to him, shaking as he writes this down, as he stands in front of the gate, in front of corrupt priests and false prophets. Anyway, go ahead, keep going.
Brent: All you people of Judah, come through these gates to worship the Lord. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says, “Reform your ways and your actions and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’ If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and did not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, then I will let you live in this place in the land I gave your ancestors forever and ever.”
“Look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless. Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known. Then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, ‘We are safe to do all these detestable things.’ Has this house, which bears my name, become a den of robbers to you but I have been watching, declares the Lord.”
Marty: That passage might come up later too. Whole den of robbers thing, little extra credit. Might hear some Jesus in there, but alas I digress.
Brent: We got some B and some A.
Marty: We definitely do, and what you’ll notice here is that Jeremiah combines the two. At this point in the podcast, I’ve been doing this whole tongue-in-cheek throughout the Pre-Assyrian and Assyrian prophets, which sources are source A and source B. We’ve definitely had some of both, but I feel like one’s been winning. Which one is that, Brent?
Brent: Mostly source B.
Marty: Alright. I proved my point or didn’t prove my point, but I’ve made my point. I’ll let you decide if I proved it or not, but I’ve made my point. At this point, we’re going to put that fun little tongue-in-cheek reference to rest because Jeremiah does a wonderful job of pulling both of these together. You don’t pick, it’s not source A or source B. It’s really the two together and in the passage you just read, Jeremiah 1-3 was very much driven by a concern about idolatry. There were a few references to injustice, but he really has a concern about idolatry. Now in Jeremiah 7, he’s really drumming on false religion and the fact that their religious devotion isn’t producing a care for others.
It’s not producing mishpat. It’s not producing justice, but then he connects it right there—quite deliberately in verse 9—to their idolatry, because their idolatry is what’s driving their injustice. It made a couple of different references to the Baals. Does Baal care about, does he invite people to trust the story? Does Baal ask people to look out for the needs of other people? Absolutely not. Baal’s concerned about profit and well-being. Baal is the god of agricultural fertility, commerce, and economy. It’s definitely not concerned with other people.
What about the Asherahs? Asherah—Jeremiah’s going to talk about how they spread themselves before all the Asherah poles. Is Asherah going to be concerned about other people? Probably not. We got the idolatry that they—let’s go to our world. Let’s get a little personal here. How about the god of consumerism? The thing about the idols we bow down to in our world, the god of consumerism. Brent, does the god of consumerism invite us to care about other people?
Brent: Not too much. Occasionally, you’ll have something like a Toms or a Warby Parker where you buy something and a second whatever you bought goes to someone else in need.
Marty: Somebody trying to infiltrate this consumeristic world with maybe a little bit of conscience, but generally speaking, the God of consumerism…?
Brent: You go to Walmart, you buy a bag of chips and nobody else is getting chips.
Marty: Yes, that’s right. In fact, I’m usually buying chips quite cheaply at the expense of other people. We’ve talked about that before, I believe, on our podcast in session one. Like our empire, our idolatry comes at a cost. The gods of greed, the god of security, I’m not going to get political, but I think of the whole conversation that just continues to come in and go out and be revived about refugees. If you bow down to the god of your own self-security, it’s going to come at the expense of the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow and we’re going to have all of sudden the problem. Idolatry feeds the injustice.
If we were to talk about the god of comfort or the god of leisure, what does that come at the expense of? Our idolatry is directly connected to our injustice, and injustice feeds our idolatry. It becomes this catch 22, which is why God tried to teach us in Deuteronomy to reverse that, do a reverse catch 22. You can do the exact opposite, which is look out for the alien, the orphan, the widow, and let them remind you of the appropriate story and the appropriate maybe what James would call “pure and undefiled religion,” rather than the false religion that we see here in Jeremiah.
That’s one. We could just keep going, but there is something that shows up, let’s see here, in chapter 7, I’m going to jump down to the end. Chapter 7 verse 30. There’s a little section. If you have subtitles, it probably calls it the “Valley of Slaughter.” Well, before I even read it, there’s this idea about hell. Now it’s going to be a while. We’re going to talk about hell later, mainly because hell doesn’t show up in the Old Testament. It’s not a word that shows up in Hebrew. It’s a word that shows up in Greek. The word is used 12 times, 11 of them are used by Jesus. Jesus is the one that really spends all of his time talking about hell.
Brent: Wouldn’t it be Session 3 when we get to that?
Marty: Yes. Session 3, yes. We’ll start—we’ll introduce some of those thoughts here because it’s a big conversation to understand hell from a Jewish perspective and a contextual perspective. In the first century, when Jesus is talking about hell, the word is gehenna. Gehenna would not have conjured up images of eternal destination, of a place where everybody goes when they die if they’re on the wrong side, and they burn for all of eternity. Hell was an actual place. The word “hell”—gehenna—actually comes from the Hebrew phrase Gei Hinnom. Gei Hinnom would be “valley of Hinnom.” It was an actual valley outside of Jerusalem.
Obviously, the most famous recent conversation about this is in, here’s another book you can throw on there, Love Wins by Rob Bell—the big controversy. This is when all the controversy started. He talked at length about hell, gehenna. What was gehenna? You can also put the other book if we want to represent the whole conversation, which I do. I like wrestling. Let’s represent the other side. Francis Chan wrote a book called Erasing Hell—we can share a link to that too. Of course, I’m not ready to talk about that book here, but nevertheless, we’ll put a link to it anyway. I want everybody to be able to read the whole conversation.
He responded to this and talked about how we have no archeological evidence that the Valley of Hinnom was actually a trash dump or that any of this stuff actually existed—which technically is true. We drove through the valley of Hinnom last summer, Brent. It was full of houses. That is why we don’t have a bunch of archeological evidence. That’s not a place where we’re doing a bunch of archeological digs. We don’t usually pay a lot of money to dig in the trash dump. That’s not typically something we’re going to move houses and buy property to do a bunch of digging there.
Brent: Not that archeology is very sexy in any form, but that is definitely not sexy archeology.
Marty: That’s right. That’s probably not where we’re going to spend all of our time. Of all the things we’re going to try to dig up in Jerusalem, as crowded as it is already, that probably ain’t going to be where we spend a bunch of our time, but he had another problem that he never really dealt with. As Chan talked about that and talked about the lack of evidence, what he didn’t deal with was the biblical references to exactly what historians tell us existed, the trash dump in the valley of Hinnom. It shows up right here in Jeremiah, whether Jeremiah is foretelling it or whether Jeremiah is written late enough to understand that’s what’s happening.
However, you want to view that. I want to read the passages here. This is what Chan never dealt with in his book. The Bible talks about this. The people of Judah have done evil in my eyes, declared the Lord. They have set up their detestable idols and the house that bears my name and have defiled it. They have built the high places of Tophet. Tophet was the ancient word for the valley of—you’ll see that later here in a moment—the valley of Ben Hinnom it’s going to be called, but the other word they had for it was Tophet.
They have built the high places of Tophet and the valley of Ben Hinnom to burn their sons and daughters in the fire, something I did not command, nor did it enter my mind. Beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call it Tophet or the valley of Ben Hinnom but the valley of slaughter; for they will bury the dead in Tophet until there is no more room, then the carcasses of this people will become food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. There will be no one to frighten them away.
I will come, I will bring an end to the sounds of joy and gladness to the voices of bride and bridegroom in the towns of Judah, the streets of Jerusalem for the land will become desolate. At that time, declares the Lord, the bones of the kings and officials of Judah, the bones of the priests and prophets, and the bones of the prophets of Jerusalem, will be removed from their graves. They will be exposed to the sun and the moon and all the stars of heaven, which they have loved and served and which they have followed and consulted and worshiped.
They will not be gathered up or buried but will be like refuse lying on the ground. Wherever I banish them, all the survivors of this evil nation will prefer death to life, declares the Lord Almighty. A picture, a prophecy, a teaching about the valley of Ben Hinnom, gehenna, hell, and this trash dump. It’s not the only reference we’ll look at, but if we keep flipping through.
Brent: That was the end of chapter 7, right?
Marty: That was the end of chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8. I read 7:30 through 8:3. Now I think you have our next reference. If we were flipping through, we don’t want to just flip Jeremiah 17, we’re going to, but remember we talked about that in session one in the desert, we talked about the Ar’ar bush. That’s another passage that’s going to come up with some Jesus references. Jeremiah is going to be really important. If you want to understand your Jesus, I recommend reading news from Jeremiah.
There’s going to be a lot of references from Jesus referencing the book of Jeremiah, so chapter 17—16, 17—is going to be a big deal. But I think you have a reference from 19. Brent, do you have that?
Brent: 19? Yes, starting verse 10, Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching.
Marty: Okay, so I need to probably set this up because we have a breaking jar. Well, I’ll break the jar. God tells Jeremiah, “I need you to do some gorilla theater. You’re going to take part in some street theater here in order to prophesy. I want you to take a big jar. I want you to take it out in front of the people and you’re going to break the jar. You’re going to shatter this jar as a symbol, as an image of what I’m going to do.” Go ahead and pick up where you started.
Brent: Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching and say to them, “This is what the Lord Almighty says:’I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Tophet until there is no more room.”
Marty: Okay, there’s that same reference to that same valley.
Brent: “This is what I will do to this place, and to those who live here, declares the Lord. I will make this city like Tophet. The houses in Jerusalem and those of the Kings of Judah will be defiled like this place, Tophet. All the houses where they burned incense on the roofs to all the starry hosts and poured out drink offerings to other gods. Jeremiah then returned from Tophet where the Lord had sent him to prophesy and stood in the court of the Lord’s temple and said to all the people, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says, ‘Listen, I am going to bring on this city and all the villages around it, every disaster I pronounced against them because they were stiff-necked and would not listen to my words.”
Marty: Yes. I just wanted to point that out as we go past that, because eventually we’re going to get to Session 3. Eventually we’re going to start talking about hell and we’re going to get into this conversation—and for some of us we’ve heard it, we’ve studied it, we’ve read it. We’re going to be good. We’re going to be ready to rock and move on. Then there’s going to be some of us that have never heard of this. It’s going to be brand new information.
I want to make sure we haven’t missed some of the references that existed even centuries before Jesus is going to talk about it, which is—there is a place outside of Jerusalem where they made it into a trash dump because Jeremiah said, “God is going to make this area desolate. It was this valley that you used to burn your children to Moloch. You used to engage in idolatry here. I hate the garbage that goes on here so much that I’m going to turn it into a garbage dump.” Later in their history, after they return from Babylon, it’s exactly what they did. They turned that area into the garbage dump. Jesus uses that as his driving image for what is hell.
Hell is the utter desolation of choosing to not be a part of what God’s doing. It’s going to be a very present image, a very present tense image, but we’ll talk about that more later. Didn’t want to miss the opportunity to set it up here as we walked past it in Jeremiah. Nevertheless, we got one more thing. Man, we’re only going to get to the first half of the book and then we’ll move on to the next book in our next podcast. Much more we could talk about, but Jeremiah 25 is a prophecy of Judah’s captivity. I wanted to read that and then and then show a connection in another place that we’ve already examined.
Jeremiah 25, The word came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Joachim son of Josiah king of Judah, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. Jeremiah the prophet said to all the people of Judah and to all those living in Jerusalem “For 23 years from the 13th year of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah until this very day, the word of the Lord has come to me and I have spoken to you again and again, but you have not listened. Though the Lord has sent all of his servants and prophets to you again and again, you have not listened or paid any attention.
“They said, turn now, each of you, from your evil ways and your evil practices, and you can stay in the land the Lord gave to you and your fathers forever and ever. Do not follow other gods to serve and worship them. Do not provoke me to anger with what your hands have made and then I will not harm you, but you did not listen to me, declares the Lord. You have provoked me with your hands you have made for you have brought harm to yourselves. Therefore, the Lord Almighty says this, ‘Because you have not listened to my words, I will summon all the peoples to the north and my servant, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, declares the Lord.”
“I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants and against all the surrounding nations. I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn and an everlasting ruin. I will banish from them the sounds of joy and gladness, the voices of bride and bridegroom, the sound of millstones, and the light of the lamp. This whole country will become a desolate wasteland and these nations will serve the king of Babylon 70 years. But when the 70 years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of…” Now what’s always included in every prophet, Brent?
Brent: Hope.
Marty: A little bit of hope.
Brent: A little bit.
Marty: When the 70 years are fulfilled, I will punish the king of Babylon and his nation, the land of the Babylonians for their guilt, declares the Lord, and will make it desolate forever. I will bring upon that land, all the things I’ve spoken against it and all that are written on this book and prophesied by Jeremiah against the nations. They themselves will be enslaved by many nations and great Kings. I will repay them according to their deeds and the work of their hands. Jeremiah says, “This is what’s coming. Here’s the captivity.” And as you read this in Jeremiah, you really get the impression that, “You didn’t listen to my warning. God sent you other prophets and you didn’t listen.”
“They said, ‘Don’t worship other gods. Don’t worship other gods. Don’t turn your hearts away.’ but you did. Because you haven’t done what God said.” It feels very source A, but I really want to show you the combination of source A and source B. There’s a reference to this prophecy in the book of 2 Chronicles, which we said was written much later and we’re going to prove that it’s written later because the chronicler is going to reference the prophecy of Jeremiah and you have that verse.
It comes just a few verses before the very end of the 2 Chronicles, which remember that’s going to be the very end of the whole Hebrew scriptures. It’s the very end of Tanakh. Just a few verses from the end, you have a couple of verses. What do you have?
Brent: 36:20–21
Marty: 2 Chronicles 36:20–21. Go ahead and read those. Let’s see what it says about this period of captivity.
Brent: He carried into exile to Babylon the remnant, who escaped from the sword and they became servants to him and his successors until the kingdom of Persia came to power. The land enjoyed its Sabbath rest. All the time of its desolation it rested until the 70 years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah.
Marty: Okay. Now, referencing this passage, Chronicles says that the land got its what, Brent?
Brent: It’s Sabbath rest.
Marty: It’s Sabbath rest, and what I find so interesting is Chronicles, which we said was written later with all kinds of what, Brent?
Brent: With perspective.
Marty: Perspective. Now with all that perspective, Chronicles, again for the umpteenth time, has brought perspective to this conversation and said that the key issue was Sabbath rest. Injustice. We had disrupted shalom, and in this case, Chronicles connects it to the land itself, not just people themselves, but people as they would be a part of the land. Like the whole land was not giving-- Apparently, they weren’t observing their Sabbath years. They weren’t observing shmitah. They weren’t observing the Year of Jubilee. They weren’t doing some of the things that really pushed for economic justice, looking out for those on the bottom.
They weren’t doing those things. Chronicles adds perspective to what we’re reading in Jeremiah and shines light on again, this combination between their idolatry and the injustice. That’s one of the things that I really wanted to hammer as we looked at Jeremiah. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, has to give this, and I don’t think we’d ever find this—God’s people will never find a Jeremiah message a fun message. They’re never going to listen to it and go, “Yes! *fist pump* Tell us some more!” It’s a hard message to bring. It’s a hard message to confront God’s people with sin and impending, unchangeable, inevitable, imminent doom—but that was Jeremiah’s job. There we have it.
Brent: All right. Well, obviously there’s a lot to talk about with Jeremiah.
Marty: Whew, man. How’d we do? 40 minutes. Good little ditty right there.
Brent: We covered half of it.
Marty: Yes.
Brent: Ish. About half.
Marty: Barely. We skipped across the first half.
Brent: Yes, so get in a discussion group, definitely. We’ve got them here on the Palouse. We’ve got them around the country. You can find details about that at bemadiscipleship.com. We’ve got a map. If there’s not one in the area, you’re welcome to start one. We’ll help you out with that. Get a hold of us one way or the other. You can find Marty on Twitter at @martysolomon. I’m at @eibcb. You can contact us through the website. You can find the BEMA Discipleship Facebook page. There’s all sorts of ways. Get in touch. We want to help you guys wrestle through this. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA Podcast and we’ll talk to you again soon.