“1 When the priest Pashhur son of Immer, the chief officer in the temple of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things, 2 he had Jeremiah the prophet beaten and put in the stocks at the Upper Gate of Benjamin at the Lord’s temple. 3 The next day, when Pashhur released him from the stocks, Jeremiah said to him, “The Lord’s name for you is not Pashhur, but Magor-Missabib. 4 For this is what the Lord says: ‘I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends; with your own eyes you will see them fall by the sword of their enemies. I will hand all Judah over to the king of Babylon, who will carry them away to Babylon or put them to the sword. 5 I will hand over to their enemies all the wealth of this city—all its products, all its valuables and all the treasures of the kings of Judah. They will take it away as plunder and carry it off to Babylon. 6 And you, Pashhur, and all who live in your house will go into exile to Babylon. There you will die and be buried, you and all your friends to whom you have prophesied lies.’ ”
7 O Lord, You deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. 8 Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. 9 But if I say, “I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name,” His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. 10 I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side! Report him! Let’s report him!” All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.”
11 But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten. 12 O Lord Almighty, You who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see Your vengeance upon them, for to You I have committed my cause. 13 Sing to the Lord! Give praise to the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.
14 Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!
15 Cursed be the man who brought my father the news, who made him very glad, saying, “A child is born to you—a son!” 16 May that man be like the towns the Lord overthrew without pity. May he hear wailing in the morning, a battle cry at noon. 17 For He did not kill me in the womb, with my mother as my grave, her womb enlarged forever. 18 Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
I was installed three years ago this week. I’m thankful to be here. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. You see it the forethought put into this facility. You see it in the attentiveness to each other’s needs. I appreciate your kindnesses to my family. I feel as if we are cared for without my children being treated differently because they are preacher’s kids. I appreciate the fact that you are care about this church because you realize that this is you.
What I appreciate the most though is that there is a critical mass of people within this congregation who want to hear and do God’s word. I appreciate that because it isn’t always the case and when it isn’t the case, ministry is miserable.
In other words, I appreciate the fact that my experience here has not been like Jeremiah’s experience in Jerusalem. His preaching brought him great sorrow because the people didn’t want to hear and do God’s word, but whether here in Inwood or there in Jerusalem God’s servants must obey even when obedience brings sorrow. That goes for all of us as God’s servants and that’s the claim of this sermon: God’s servants must obey even when obedience brings sorrow.
We will study this in two points. First: Jeremiah and Pashur. Second: Jeremiah and God. First, in verses 1-6 we see Jeremiah and Pashur. Second, in verses 7-18, we see Jeremiah and God.
First: Jeremiah and Pashur. After Jeremiah smashed the clay pot and spoke about the judgment to come, which we studied last week, he went to the temple and gave a summary of what he had said in the Valley of Ben Hinnom. He set up shop in the midst of the temple traffic and told everyone within earshot that since they would not repent, the Lord would destroy them.
That’s not the sort of message unrepentant people want to hear. They want to hear the sorts of messages Pashur gave. If Jeremiah made it his point to kick every leg of support from under the people to force them to see their need for God, Pashur made it his point to prop the people up. As Eugene Peterson put it, “Living is difficult. There is much that goes wrong. We lay our plans carefully and things go badly… in the midst of this there are some men and women who make it all seem better… they say that everything is going to be all right and we believe them.” That’s his description of Pashur. It’s a winsome description, but the fact was that everything was not going to be all right. Pashur’s message was actually keeping the people from repenting. His sunny message was leading them to their deaths.
Jeremiah and Pashur couldn’t help but disagree because they had fundamentally different beliefs. Jeremiah believed the people were stubbornly refusing to repent and so judgment was about to fall. Pashur believed that God would never do something like that; these “two views of reality clash,” as Bruggemann put it, “and there can be no compromise.”
When Pashur heard what Jeremiah was saying in the temple, he had him arrested; verse 1, “When the priest Pashhur son of Immer, the chief officer in the temple of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things, he had Jeremiah the prophet beaten and put in the stocks at the Upper Gate of Benjamin at the Lord’s temple.”
When you consider Jeremiah’s message, it’s fair to say that there probably people saying to themselves, “it’s about time somebody shut his mouth.” There were any number of people who thought Jesus got what he had coming to him at the cross for behaving in the temple the way he had. They saw what happened to Jesus on the cross as divine judgment. Jeremiah’s punishment certainly looked like divine judgment. Jeremiah was punished by God’s priest in God’s temple after all. The people who passed through that gate of the temple to worship would have read the situation that way.
Jeremiah remained in those stocks for the rest of the day and throughout the night. He didn’t suffer in this way in God’s temple because he had disobeyed God or bungled his obedience so badly that the well-meaning people didn’t like it. He suffered because he had obeyed God properly. God was happy with Jeremiah. God was not happy with the treatment Jeremiah received; verse 3, ‘The next day, when Pashhur released him from the stocks, Jeremiah said to him, “The Lord’s name for you is not Pashhur, but Magor-Missabib.”
Magor-Missabib, as you can see in your footnotes, means “terror on every side.” This was a favorite phrase of Jeremiah’s. Pashur thought he was keeping law and order in the temple. The Lord said that Pashur wasn’t keeping the peace but was rather making terror; “there are some men and women who make it all seem better… they say that everything is going to be all right and we believe them;” that’s Pashur and that leads to terror. Men like Pashur said, “peace, peace,” when there is no peace, to quote Jeremiah. They are quack physicians of the soul who miss the cancer on the scan and send the patient home happy even as cancer spreads.
Pashur was a danger to everyone around him and he would pay the cost; verse 4, “I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends; with your own eyes you will see them fall by the sword of their enemies.” The king of Babylon executed any number of priests at Ribah; where was Pashur’s god who would never do something like to His people then? He was nowhere because that god is imaginary.
The true God would hold Pashur accountable; verse 6, “you, Pashhur, and all who live in your house will go into exile to Babylon. There you will die and be buried, you and all your friends to whom you have prophesied lies.” The problematic part of speaking nonsense about God is that God is real and doesn’t like people lying about Him even the people love what you have to say. “Not many of you should be teachers, my brothers,” as James puts it.
Pleasant, popular religious nonsense of the sort Pashur spoke led him, and countless others, to their deaths in Babylon. This is the first mention of Babylon in this book. That’s fascinating because this whole book is about Babylon. It doesn’t appear until the twentieth chapter because even though it’s all about Babylon, Babylon is just a tool used by God to discipline His unrepentant people. Babylon matters tremendously and yet Babylon is immaterial. That’s life in God’s world. It truly is all about what’s happening now, but it’s actually all about God. That’s not just “Bible times”, whatever that means; that’s life in God’s world.
Pashur didn’t see that. Jeremiah did. Pashur thought Jeremiah was making a mockery of the temple. Pashur thought Jeremiah was making God out to be a monster. Jeremiah just shook his head and in essence said, “you’re dead. All these priests are dead. The temple is dead. Jerusalem is dead. You were all dead the minute you hardened our heart,” to paraphrase an old scene. Jesus saw what Jeremiah saw. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” That’s Jeremiah and Pashur; now we consider Jeremiah and God; that’s our second and final point: Jeremiah and God.
It’s easy to read Jeremiah’s response to Pashur as a sick burn. And it is It’s easy to read, “The Lord’s name for you is not Pashhur, but Magor-Missabib,” as the prophet punching back and it is, but there’s much more. Let’s see what else was going on inside of Jeremiah; verse 7, “O Lord, You deceived me, and I was deceived; You overpowered me and prevailed.”
Jeremiah was thinking back to his call to prophetic ministry. He was thinking about how he tried to get out of it in the first place, but God would not let him. Jeremiah told God why he didn’t want to do it. God told Jeremiah his objections were irrelevant. He touched or struck Jeremiah’s mouth and said, “I have put my words in your mouth.” “Jeremiah finds himself helpless before [the Lord’s] power, which is overwhelming and irresistible,” as Bruggeman put it. That is the reality. Jeremiah is clay. God is the Potter. “You overpowered me and prevailed.”
Jeremiah didn’t want to spend his life giving sick burns to thick headed priests. He was tired of being mocked; “I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long.”
Jeremiah had hoped that his call to repentance would bring repentance. It didn’t. It brought insult. It brought the wrath of the religious establishment. Jack Lundbom gets the experience of the servant of the word right—it “is not all honey in the mouth. It brings shame, enmity, and intense hurt at the center of one’s being. The discerning listener will see that the prophet has no answer to his dilemma. Speaking Yahweh’s word brings him pain, but keeping silent brings even more pain. This is not someone who delights in judging others, much less in judging a nation that is the prophet’s own.”
Jeremiah knew that he was damned by the people if he did speak and damned by God if he didn’t. Jeremiah would have loved to go along and get along, but that option was closed to him. He felt as if he was given a task that was both thankless and fruitless. Now people who love what’s right are willing to do thankless tasks if they bear fruit. People who love being appreciate are willing to do fruitless tasks if they receive thanks. Who is willing to do what’s both thankless and fruitless? The person who can’t do otherwise; verse 9, ‘But if I say, “I will not mention Him or speak any more in His name,” His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”’
Jeremiah had no choice in the matter. The word was in him, and he had to get it out. You can picture the word of God like a foreign object writhing around within Jeremiah. It burned inside him and so it had to get out; “I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”
True obedience isn’t actually all that heroic. The obedient person says, “what else could I do?” Jesus had his Gethsemane. Paul said the same, “necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I don’t preach the gospel!” Why is it this way? It’s this way because this is the only way that will keep us from boasting in our obedience.
Jeremiah’s obedience brought him great trouble; verse 10, ‘I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side! Report him! Let’s report him!” You might remember, “Terror on every side!” or, “Magor-Missabib,” from our first point. It seems that Jeremiah used this phrase so much that it became his nickname. ‘Hey, there goes, “Terror on every side!” “What’s the weather going to be today, Jeremiah—cloudy with a chance of judgment?” The word hurt Jeremiah when he tried to keep it in. It brought him hurt once it was out.
It brought him hurt on the most intimate of levels; verse 10, ‘All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.”’ Even his so-called friends wanted him to get what was coming to him. As JA Thompson put it, “The total social and psychological support of his fellow villagers and kinsman was denied to him. It was a devastating experience.”
It seems even Jeremiah’s so-called friends wanted vengeance upon him; “perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.” Ask yourself, “revenge for what?” For telling them the truth? Paul’s words to the Galatians are appropriate, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” This hymn about Jesus is appropriate, “Why, what has my Lord done? What makes this rage and spite? He made the lame to run. He gave the blind their sight. What injuries, yet these are why the Lord most high so cruelly dies.”
Would you quit by this point? We transition jobs regularly for far less than this. What does Jeremiah do? He did what Jesus did as he went to the cross. He doubled down on God; verse 11, “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten. O Lord Almighty, You who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see Your vengeance upon them, for to You I have committed my cause.”
Now Jeremiah was saying this to himself. He was reminding himself of these truths because nothing around him was reminding him. Pashur didn’t seem like “terror on every side,” for years to come; that sick burn just got Jeremiah mocked more. Jeremiah probably had to remind himself, “But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail,” a dozen or so times a day. He talked to himself. He did what Lloyd-Jones advised saying, “Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?”
This is a constant battle; in the next moment, we see Jeremiah was listening to himself tell himself bad news yet again; verse 14, “Cursed be the day I was born!” We went from, “the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior,” to, “Cursed be the day I was born!” rather quickly, didn’t we? That’s how it goes. That’s life at times for commandment keepers.
Jeremiah’s obedience was so daunting that he wished he was never born; this final poem starts with, “Cursed be the day I was born!” and it ends with, “why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
There are all sorts of readings of this passage which argue that Jeremiah was somehow psychologically unbalanced. That seems naïve to me, like saying that some breathing exercises would have Jesus see the situation a bit different as he prayed in Gethsemane. It also seems terribly unsympathetic.
There are acts of obedience that will leave commandment keepers wishing we were never born, but what Jesus knew is that he was born to obey. “Yet not my will but Yours be done.” That’s what we are to learn. You lose your life to save it. Your life is just your context for obedience just as Jesus’ life was; almost every story you will hear about life in this nation will make no reference to that and you hear a dozen such stories telling you what life is about every day; that, and not dramatic stories of evil, is how you recognize the evil of our age.
Now this passage ends in darkness. The last words are, “Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?” The Scripture is no stranger to deeply unsettling questions. It’s baffling how many people grow up in the church and walk away from the faith because some painful experience caused them to ask questions that apparently no one has ever asked before. They seem to think that the Bible has nothing to say in the face of genocide when the second book of the Bible starts by talking by an attempt at genocide. They seem to think that no one else has ever felt abandoned by God in the way that they have and yet believed, which is just to say that they have not read the Psalms lately. Others stay in the church but seem to think their particular call to obedience is so painful that no one ever could understand; that’s not the case; here you have Jeremiah asking himself and God, “Why did I ever come out of the womb to see trouble and sorrow and to end my days in shame?”
These questions of Jeremiah’s didn’t an answer in propositional form. God didn’t give Jeremiah three reasons why he was called to this form of obedience. He probably won’t give them to you. He does, however, demonstrate that He wasn’t asking Jeremiah or you to do anything that He wasn’t willing to do himself.
There is significant overlap between Jeremiah and Jesus. “Man of Sorrows,” what a name’ could be said about either, but we sing it about Jesus, ‘“Man of Sorrows,” what a name for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim! Hallelujah! what a Savior! Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place he stood; sealed my pardon with his blood; Hallelujah! what a Savior!”
Jesus became like us. We saw that at Christmas. We also become like him. There is dignity that comes with that. There is an expanding of the affections that goes on with that. What we’ve seen this evening is also part of it. There is no escaping it no matter how much we might want to. “O Cross, that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be.” Don’t throw off the cross, Jeremiah. That’s the way the resurrection. That was true for Jesus. It’s true for you. Amen.