Jeremiah for Everyone

By John Goldingay

In the Old Testament for Everyone series, Old Testament scholar John Goldingay addresses Scripture from Genesis to Malachi in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply and concisely. The series is perfect for daily devotions, group study, or personal visits with the Bible.

In this volume on Jeremiah, Goldingay explores the longest and most complex of the prophetic books. Jeremiah was written for survivors of war, suffering, and exile. It portrays three Babylonian military invasions and the resulting destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which Jeremiah depicts as the end of the life God's people had known. Themes in the book include questions such as: How could God allow this suffering? How did things go so terribly wrong? How could God abandon us? Can the flame of faith burn in the darkness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Oct 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611646382

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. An internationally respected Old Testament scholar, Goldingay is the author of many commentaries and books.

Book preview

JEREMIAH 1:1–19

More a Summons than a Vocation

Last week I took part in a conference on God, the church, and disability. One participant was a woman who has been ordained a priest, but she has a speech impediment that makes it hard to understand what she says, and she has had difficulty finding a position in a parish. Another was a paraplegic man who spends much of his time selling candy in the street, but he has raised thousands of dollars by doing so and has supported five needy children in India and Africa with the proceeds; he’s also visited India and Africa to meet them. He was hard to understand, too, but he had a vibrant testimony mostly given through his father. How could these people have the courage to believe they had a ministry to exercise?

The question arises for Jeremiah because he’s just a young man—maybe in his twenties, maybe even younger. A culture such as Israel’s recognizes that wisdom lies with people more senior. Who’s going to listen to someone so junior? While not disputing that Jeremiah is correct in principle, God isn’t constrained by the way things usually work. He likes to choose the younger brother rather than the older one (in the West he might make the point in the opposite way, by using someone who’s past it). What will count isn’t whether Jeremiah has had time to develop wisdom but whether God gives him things to say. The point is made vividly by Yahweh’s talk of deciding on Jeremiah before his birth, before any gifts he might develop have had a chance to form. Even then, Yahweh acknowledged him, made a commitment to him, and set him apart. Like Saul of Tarsus when Jesus appears to him, Jeremiah has little alternative to becoming God’s agent. There’s no suggestion that God’s call corresponds to the inclination of the person called. He’s the master whether the servant likes it or not.

Another advantage of choosing a young man is that he has no marital or family commitments and will be able to exercise a ministry that persists over forty years, as far as we know the longest of any prophetic ministry. The point is implicit in the opening to the book, which gives a date of 626 for his initial receiving of a message from Yahweh and indicates that it continues until after Jerusalem’s fall to the Babylonians in 587. It actually continued after that event, but the point about mentioning the city’s fall and its people’s exile is that these events were the vindication of his prophecies over all those decades.

I myself had an experience of God’s calling me to a ministry, but Jeremiah’s account of his call isn’t designed to encourage us to see our experiences as analogous to Jeremiah’s. Rather the opposite. It’s here to push people into taking seriously the prophecies that will follow. They’re not like the words of other preachers or self-styled prophets. The fact that God had to overcome Jeremiah’s unwillingness is another indication that he isn’t prophesying because he has an ambition to be a prophet or thinks he has prophetic gifts. He’s under compulsion. The community cannot afford to ignore him. God doesn’t necessarily call people because they have the appropriate gifts—again, it may be rather the opposite. Other prophets whom we’ll meet, such as Hananiah, look more gifted, but they’re not actually God’s mouthpiece.

Jeremiah is to be a prophet concerning the nations in several senses, but the expression the nations often refers to whatever is the imperial power of the day, and a major focus of his preaching will be the trouble that the upcoming great power, Babylon, will bring to Judah. It’ll be by its agency that Yahweh will destroy Jerusalem and uproot its people. Babylon will turn out to be the pot of trouble that will boil over from the north, the direction from which invaders usually came to Judah. It’ll also be by means of the next imperial power, Persia, that Yahweh will later see to the city’s rebuilding and its people’s replanting. The watcher tree is the flowering almond, which blossoms early after winter as if it’s waking up and watching for spring, so it provides a parable for what Yahweh is doing over his message, even when it doesn’t look like it.

It’s an impossibly demanding task imposed on a man who doesn’t want it. But Jeremiah isn’t just pushed out into the battlefield without support. God will be with him. In the Bible, it doesn’t mean that people feel that God is with them and that things will be OK. It means God is with them in a way that brings protection, whether or not they feel God is with them.

JEREMIAH 2:1–11

On the Cliff’s Edge

Some years ago we had a visiting preacher in seminary chapel who talked about the church in the West as being in exile. In the past the church sat at the center of society’s life. Our holidays linked with Christian festivals, and the nation’s life was expected to reflect Christian values. Shops mostly closed on Sundays. But the church has been thrown out from the center of national and intellectual life. It’s in exile. The preacher was a Brit who lives in Canada, and I think his description applies to the church in Europe. The profile of the relationship of church and society in the United States has been different. Some of those marks of being a Christian nation never applied; in other ways the Christian faith has been more central to national life. Yet that centrality is disappearing fast in the United States, too. The number of people for whom the church counts and the ways in which the church counts are steadily decreasing.

While the church hasn’t been sent into exile, it’s on the verge of that happening, and it doesn’t recognize the fact. They say you can put a frog in cold water and gradually boil it, and the frog won’t jump out but will let itself be cooked. Fifty years ago the church in the United States could identify with its culture because the culture broadly accepted Christian values, but the culture has gradually become more and more secular (for instance, in its attitude to money and celebrity). The church has continued to identify with the culture and hasn’t noticed the change in the water temperature. It isn’t in exile yet, but it’s living in a time like Jeremiah’s, when the exile is near, and Jeremiah’s analysis of Judah’s position is instructive for the church.

One reason for Judah’s decline was that it had given up on its gospel. The idea of a gospel doesn’t start in the New Testament—the expression comes from the Old Testament. The gospel is the good news, the story of what God has done for us. Judah has forgotten its story. Cities are commonly personified as women, so Jeremiah can portray Jerusalem’s action as like a wife’s unfaithfulness to her husband. He will soon note that Jerusalem’s people can even teach a thing or two to evil women (women who are already involved in sexual immorality?). Turning a blind eye to some of the people’s early indiscretions, Jeremiah can draw a contrast between its stance at the beginning of its relationship with Yahweh and the infidelity that now characterizes Judah. It had been Yahweh’s special possession, and Yahweh had protected it jealously. But soon the ancestors of the present generation turned to other spiritual resources (the book of Judges tells the story).

Admittedly spiritual resources is a compliment. These other deities were not resources at all. They were empty. They had no power. The ancestors’ behavior was paradoxical. On the way to the promised land they had proved Yahweh’s capacity to provide and protect, but inexplicably they then stopped looking to Yahweh and looked in the same direction as the people of Canaan; perhaps they assumed the Canaanites knew what they were doing. They stopped asking, Where is Yahweh? In this context it’s not a question suggesting unfaith but one suggesting faith—as when we speak of seeking God, which doesn’t mean we think God is hiding. Much responsibility rests with the leadership—priests, whose responsibility included instructing people in the Torah; community leaders (shepherds); and prophets. The whole business was a mystery. You could go west across the Mediterranean and east to Arabia (Qedar) and find nothing like it. Yahweh speaks not only like an aggrieved husband but like someone who has been betrayed by a business partner and brings an accusation in front of the elders in the community court.

For the church, there’s a tragic paradox here. What we need is to be brought out of ourselves by seeing our lives set in the context of a bigger picture, a bigger story, the gospel story. But it’s possible to be so overwhelmed by our emptiness, our isolation, and our insignificance that we don’t pay attention to this bigger story. All we want to do both inside and outside of church is think about ourselves and our needs. Scripture and the gospel may seem boring and irrelevant. So we turn God into someone whose focus is on meeting those needs. We try to short-circuit the process whereby God gives content and meaning to our lives, making God a quick fix for our needs. But quick fixes don’t work. The only fix that works is the gospel story and the Scriptures where we find that story. But in worship we’ve often given up on those. We may use the same words our forebears used, the words God and Lord and Jesus, but the content we read into them comes from the contemporary context. A new age person could come into much Christian worship and be quite happy with nearly all of what we say, sing, and do. We are scratching where we itch. But when you have a serious itch, you need more than scratching to put it right.

Jeremiah tells people they need to turn back. We need to turn away from our preoccupation with ourselves and our individual journeys to God and God’s journey. We need to turn from our preoccupation with ourselves to God and turn from our individual stories to God’s story. Jeremiah wants the people to do so, to remember their gospel story again and see how it relates to their needs. He isn’t saying, Forget about your needs, about the need for your crops to grow, and just think about God. He’s saying that they need to bring their needs and the gospel story together.

JEREMIAH 2:12–37

Looking for Spiritual Resources

I just read about a couple who traveled to India because they couldn’t have a baby. The British medics were puzzled about the reasons, as both husband and wife seemed to be physiologically OK. In India the couple sought some traditional treatments, but they were also told that the problem was their lack of faith and their lack of prayer. They were advised to visit the shrine of a great Sufi saint in Delhi, where they tied a ribbon to the saint’s mausoleum and wept at the shrine. A few months later the woman conceived and gave birth to a healthy baby.

People in Judah in Jeremiah’s day would understand the longing to have a baby, the willingness to go some lengths to succeed in doing so, and the willingness to explore alternative spiritual resources in this connection. Indeed, a Judahite couple would feel the point more strongly. Having children wasn’t only the fulfillment of a natural human instinct but also key to their future as a family and to Judah’s future as a people. Indeed, it was key to fulfilling their religious vocation. To put it in Christian terms, if Judah dies out, there’ll be no people from whom a messiah can be born. In Jeremiah’s day, the point is sharper than it has been previously because the Northern Kingdom of Ephraim to which most of the twelve clans belonged had ceased to exist (in Jeremiah, the name Israel often refers to Ephraim). Jeremiah himself came from Anatot, only three miles north of Jerusalem but across the border into the area of the clan of Benjamin, which was technically part of Ephraim. So Jeremiah is in a strong position to draw attention to the price Ephraim paid for its behavior. The people of Yahweh is shrinking rather than growing. Was Israel originally like a bond servant, someone who had had to sell himself into service or someone born to a family whose members were already servants? If not, why is he being treated as somebody who doesn’t count?

The Ephraimites had known that they needed to grow as a people and that they needed food to eat, and the pressures of their needs made them turn from Yahweh to the Masters, the traditional gods in their culture who had a reputation for making families, crops, flocks, and herds grow. Jeremiah’s image for their action is that they made two mistakes, committed two evils. They abandoned Yahweh, who’s like a well of fresh water, and dug themselves water cisterns, which people relied on if they had no well or the well ran dry. Cisterns collected rain water, which was by no means as nice as fresh water, and anyway they might leak—with devastating implications, deathly implications. Your water is gone, and it may be months before it rains. How stupid it would be to give up a natural spring and choose to rely on a cistern, and specifically a cistern that leaks.

Not that people saw themselves as seeking the help of other gods rather than Yahweh. In theory they saw these other gods as Yahweh’s servants or underlings. So they blithely accompanied their temple worship by journeys down into the nearby Hinnom Ravine, the place whose name eventually generates the name Gehenna. It was a hellish place, all right. They engaged in rites there designed to make contact with dead family members, to seek their advice and help. These rites included the sacrifice of children, a costly offering indicating a commitment that might win a god’s help. Jeremiah calls it shedding the blood of innocent people, which usually denotes action such as the execution of a prophet or of a person such as Naboth in order to appropriate his land (1 Kings 21). If someone is killed when committing a robbery, it counts as manslaughter rather than murder. In this context Jeremiah is making a sardonic comment about human sacrifices. They were acts of murder.

Won’t Judah learn the lesson? It’s advancing hell-bent toward the same cliff from which Ephraim jumped. Memphis (one of the greatest of Egyptian cities) and Tahpanhes (the first big Egyptian city you reach when traveling from Judah) stand for Egypt as a whole. Judah had long been playing politics in seeking support from Assyria or Egypt and changing sides when it seemed a good idea. It constitutes another form of unfaithfulness to Yahweh. He was supposed to be the one they trusted for their political life as well as for their crops and their fertility, but it was hard to live that way.

JEREMIAH 3:1– 4:4

Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage