“1 The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. 2 The word of the Lord came to him in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah, 3 and through the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah son of Josiah king of Judah, when the people
of Jerusalem went into exile.
4 The word of the Lord came to me, saying, 5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” 6 “Ah, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.” 7 But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. 8 Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,” declares the Lord. 9 Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth. 10 See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.””
Do you think that God has anything to do with what’s been happening in the United States of America? A poll from this past week found that 83% of Republicans believe that the nation is falling apart. The same poll says that 78% of Democrats believe that the nation is falling apart. The question of the poll was not, “do you believe that the nation is heading in the wrong direction?” the question was, “do you believe the nation is falling apart?” I’m curious as to whether you think God has anything to do with that.
Tonight we begin our study in the book of Jeremiah. We won’t be working through all of it. We will be looking at 25 passages, more or less, in which Jeremiah explains why Judah fell apart and what God was doing in the midst of it all.
Do you think God has anything to do with what’s going on in this nation today? The same God at work in the book of Jeremiah is at work in the world today. There will be similarities and there will be differences, but since the God of Jeremiah controls history, we would do well to study this book to see His purposes in history. We can know them from this book because Jeremiah speaks the words of the God who controls history. That’s the claim of this first sermon: Jeremiah speaks the words of the God who controls history.
We will study this in two points: setting the stage. Second: the call of Jeremiah. First, in verses 1-3, we see how the stage is set for the book of Jeremiah. Second, in verses 4-10, we see the call of Jeremiah.
First: setting the stage. We tend to rush over verses like Jeremiah 1:1-3 because they are filled with foreign names and places. We would be wiser to slow down. If you are reading through the first half of the Old Testament this year, slow down. Ask yourself the sorts of questions we ask in these sermons. What at first seems irrelevant might be crucial. These three verses which we tend to rush over actually set the stage for the rest of the book.
These verses were most likely added by Baruch, Jeremiah’s friend and secretary, as a description of his entire ministry; verse 1, “The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin.” Jeremiah was a somewhat common name in Judah. There are two other Jeremiahs mentioned in this book alone. You might know this name better in its English form, Jeremy. Maybe calling him Jeremy once in a while might make him seem a bit more real to us. That might break down this strange wall between “Bible times” and “our times” that we keep trying to build.
Baruch tells us that Jeremiah was from Anathoth. When Solomon became king he exiled the high priest who had sided against him to Anathoth. It’s likely that Jeremiah is connected to this priestly line. Baruch tells us that Jeremiah’s father was a priest or that Jeremiah himself was a priest depending on how you read the sentence.
Now why should we listen to Jeremiah? Was it because he was a priest? Books today give a brief biography of the author to tell us why we should listen to this particular author. “So and so has a Ph.D. from Princeton and has written numerous books on the topic.” That’s what makes her an expert. Is that’s what’s going on here? Should we listen to Jeremiah because of his priestly background? No, verse 2 tells us why we should listen to him, “The word of the Lord came to him…” We should listen to Jeremiah because Jeremiah spoke God’s words. That’s the qualification that makes any spiritual speaker worth hearing. We tend to make celebrities out of pastors. We say, “pastor so and so says…” when the only real question is, “is the pastor saying what God says?”
Jeremiah spoke God’s words and He spoke them to a particular people at a particular time. You can see that in the names and times given in verses 2-3, “The word of the Lord came to him in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah, and through the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah son of Josiah king of Judah, when the people of Jerusalem went into exile.”
First, we have Josiah. Josiah was one of the best kings of Judah. 2 Kings describes him saying, “he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left.” There was something of a spiritual revival during Josiah’s reign. People were more interested in the Lord. There was also something of a political resurgence. For a while Judah had been something of an Assyrian puppet state. When the last strong Assyrian king died, Josiah worked to separate his nation from the Assyrian orbit. Think Poland removing itself from the Soviet orbit after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The beginning of this change under Josiah marked the beginning of Jeremiah’s ministry.
Jeremiah began his ministry in seemingly encouraging times, but he was called to uncover the spiritual rot that made revival and resurgence impossible. When Josiah died trying to preserve Judah’s independence, his son Jehoiakim became king. He did evil in the eyes of the Lord. When Jehoiakim died, his son Jehoiachin became king. He ruled for only three months until the Babylonians took him away as a captive and put his uncle Mattaniah on the throne; they renamed him Zedekiah. Now ask yourself, if a foreign power can remove your king and rename your new king, who is really in charge of your nation?
The cultural deterioration continued until, “the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah son of Josiah king of Judah, when the people of Jerusalem went into exile,” as verse 3 puts it. The entire book of Jeremiah leads up to that moment. The exile is like the hole at the bottom of one of those coin donations funnels at the mall. You put a coin in the shoot, it rolls into the funnel travels faster and faster in ever tighter circles until it is almost a blur at the bottom, and then it just falls. That’s the book of Jeremiah and the exile to Babylon is the center of gravity into which it falls.
Jeremiah spoke as the coin was making its rounds. He spoke as the nation was rolling its way down the funnel. The people didn’t want to believe the situation was as bad as Jeremiah said. After all, they had just had a spiritual revival and political resurgence. They were, in fact, a very religious people, at least outwardly. The nationalists in Judah called his words treasonous.
Almost no one listened to Jeremiah, which begs the question, why speak at all? Commentator Jack Lundbom gives the answer, “When people finally become sobered to the reality of evil times and to the magnitude of the death that has befallen them, they will likely wonder whether God has not totally abandoned them and left them without a communicating word. Here it says that God’s word did come during the worst of times.” When people recognize the extent of the rot around them and see the bonds of society splintering, they will wonder, “where is God?” The book of Jeremiah is just part of the answer.
One last word on this introduction before we turn to Jeremiah’s call to ministry. Notice that the dates are reckoned by the reign of the kings—“the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah”, “the eleventh year of Zedekiah son of Josiah.” That might seem like a strange way to calculate dates. We don’t call 2010, “the second year of Barack Obama,” or 2019, “the third year of Donald Trump.” Hopefully, however, this calculation of dates by reference to a Davidic king doesn’t seem truly strange to you because we calculate dates in exactly the same way. Baruch spoke of, “the eleventh year of Zedekiah,” we speak in terms of the year of our Lord 2021. You could accurately describe what we are doing tonight this way, “in the two-thousandth and twenty-first year of our Lord Jesus, some subjects of king Jesus met to study what happened between the thirteenth year of King Josiah and the eleventh year of King Zedekiah.” This is our history. Do you want to understand king Jesus? Then you need to understand king Zedekiah. It’s all one history. It’s our history. It’s the history of the world.
Jeremiah spoke the word of the Lord during the reigns of these particular kings. He was called to speak in a time and place as real and complex as our day. That’s our second point: the call of Jeremiah. This call of Jeremiah reminds us that God was already doing something in the world, and Jeremiah was simply entering into it. We keep trying to manufacture works of God rather than rather than seeking to enter into what God is already doing. We see that in verse 4, ‘The word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”’
God didn’t respond to the decay in Judah by looking around for someone with sufficient political savvy to understand the situation. He chose Jeremiah before Jeremiah knew anything about politics. He chose Jeremiah before Jeremiah knew the alphabet. He chose Jeremiah before he was born. This language of knowing—“ before I formed you in the womb I knew you”—is all about choosing. God isn’t saying that He was aware of Jeremiah before Jeremiah was born. He was saying that before Jeremiah was born, He had set the man apart for this particular purpose. God was doing something already and Jeremiah was just entering into it.
Jeremiah was most likely very young at this point. The word he uses to describe himself implies that he was certainly under the age of 20, some say as young as 12-13 and at most 15-16. That’s what’s going on with verse 6, ‘“Ah, Sovereign Lord,” I said, “I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.”’
Jeremiah was a boy. Just as a side note, I would encourage you not to talk about children and young people as the church of the future. They are just as much a part of the church today as the adults and if the adults give the youth the sense that they aren’t needed or useful, they will go where they feel needed and useful.
Jeremiah was a boy. God didn’t deny what Jeremiah said. He simply thought it was irrelevant; verse 7, ‘But the Lord said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a child.’ You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.”’
God doesn’t seem to think our weaknesses are barriers to our usefulness in His purposes. As John Thompson says of this verse, “Human inadequacy and inexperience provide the occasion for divine enablement.” We will see that’s how it goes in Jeremiah’s experience. God will give him what he needs to speak to kings. God will give what He needs to speak the truth as he’s called a traitor. If you’ve answered a call to ministry, you know that’s how it goes: “Human inadequacy and inexperience provide the occasion for divine enablement.”
If you believe that your inadequacies or inexperience are valid reasons to avoid answering the call to become a Sunday School teacher, a deacon, a Cadet counselor, a committee member, or an elder, please recognize that God sees your inadequacies and inexperience as irrelevant in your situation as He did in Jeremiah’s situation. What matters is the call of God and you and I stand before Him just as Jeremiah did in this moment. I fear that the gravestone of the American church will read, “I’m just not comfortable doing that.” Jeremiah wasn’t comfortable speaking to kings. He wasn’t comfortable being called a traitor by the people of God because He was speaking the words of God. We will see how it rips him apart inside. We will also see how that makes him more like Jesus. Becoming like Jesus isn’t comfortable. It isn’t designed to be. It’s designed to be overwhelming—overwhelming your selfishness, overwhelming your pride, overwhelming your false sense of security.
Jeremiah was no stranger to being uncomfortable, but rather than shrinking back, he stepped into it. He stepped into it because he had a promise; verse 8, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.” Now we will be seeing this promise to rescue in action throughout this book, but that was specific to Jeremiah. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stayed to speak the truth in Germany just as Jeremiah stayed to speak the truth in Judah wasn’t rescued in that same way. If we are to take the promises seriously, we need to see which promises are truly ours; the first part of verse 8 is ours, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you.” That’s for the elder confronting a fellow sinner about sin. He need not be afraid of that fellow sinner because God is with him in that conversation. That’s for the wife urging her friends to become a bit more intentional in raising their children in the faith in specific ways. That’s for anyone carrying out the mission of Christ. He is with us and so we need not be afraid. We know that because just as Jeremiah was promised, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you,” we were promised, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
The Father, Son, and Spirit are with us just as God was with Jeremiah, which means as we carry out His work. He is not with us if we don’t, and we will see that in the book of Jeremiah too. The people thought that God was with them. They cried, “the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,” but they had no interest in or submission to what God was doing in the world, and so when they actually did encounter God they experienced Him as against them rather than for them.
Jeremiah was to speak the word of God in such a situation. We see the power of this word in verse 9, ‘the Lord reached out His hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “Now, I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.”’
The word of God reveals what is going on in the world and the word of God affects what’s going on in the world. As Judah unravels, the reasons are revealed by the word of God and the unravelling is accomplished by the word of God. As Walter Brueggemann put it, “The whole book [of Jeremiah]… is a… disclosure of the unraveling of a royal world, of the disintegration of a stable universe of public order and public confidence. The man Jeremiah is thrust into the middle of that dismantling to bring the deathliness of Jerusalem to speech… it is the speech of [the Lord] that evokes the end.”
Jeremiah will speak of the tearing down of Jerusalem and it will happen. He will also speak words of consolation and hope in the midst of this tearing down, and those will happen too. This is a word of tearing down and building up, of uprooting and planting. Both are part of Jeremiah’s mission.
Judah must come to terms with the tearing down before they can see the beauty of what will be built up. They must acknowledge that they will be uprooted before they can recognize that in the midst of this uprooting, there will be planting.
Jesus said the same was true about him. He was likely thinking about these words in Jeremiah when, speaking about his body, he told the Jews, ‘“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” When we come to terms with what is destroyed at the cross, we can see the beauty of it. When we submit to the will of God in the uprooting, we can find hope in the will of God in the planting. Remember that if there is uprooting in this nation. Remember that if there is chaos. God has His purposes. God His plan. God bless the broken road that leads us straight to Him. Amen.