“ 1 In the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 “Take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah, and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now. 3 Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I plan to inflict on them, each of them will turn from his wicked way; then I will forgive their wickedness and their sin.”
4 So Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah, and while Jeremiah dictated all the words the Lord had spoken to him, Baruch wrote them on the scroll. 5 Then Jeremiah told Baruch, “I am restricted; I cannot go to the Lord’s temple. 6 So you go to the house of the Lord on a day of fasting and read to the people from the scroll the words of the Lord that you wrote as I dictated. Read them to all the people of Judah who come in from their towns. 7 Perhaps they will bring their petition before the Lord, and each will turn from his wicked ways, for the anger and wrath pronounced against this people by the Lord are great.” 8 Baruch son of Neriah did everything Jeremiah the prophet told him to do; at the Lord’s temple he read the words of the Lord from the scroll.
9 In the ninth month of the fifth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, a time of fasting before the Lord was proclaimed for all the people in Jerusalem and those who had come from the towns of Judah. 10 From the room of Gemariah son of Shaphan the secretary, which was in the upper courtyard at the entrance of the New Gate of the temple, Baruch read to all the people at the Lord’s temple the words of Jeremiah from the scroll.
11 When Micaiah son of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, heard all the words of the Lord from the scroll, 12 he went down to the secretary’s room in the royal palace, where all the officials were sitting: Elishama the secretary, Delaiah son of Shemaiah, Elnathan son of Acbor, Gemariah son of Shaphan, Zedekiah son of Hananiah, and all the other officials. 13 After Micaiah told them everything he had heard Baruch read to the people from the scroll, 14 all the officials sent Jehudi son of Nethaniah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Cushi, to say to Baruch, “Bring the scroll from which you have read to the people and come.” So Baruch son of Neriah went to them with the scroll in his hand. 15 They said to him, “Sit down, please, and read it to us.”
So Baruch read it to them. 16 When they heard all these words, they looked at each other in fear and said to Baruch, “We must report all these words to the king.” 17 Then they asked Baruch, “Tell us, how did you come to write all this? Did Jeremiah dictate it?” 18 “Yes,” Baruch replied, “he dictated all these words to me, and I wrote them in ink on the scroll.”
19 Then the officials said to Baruch, “You and Jeremiah, go and hide. Don’t let anyone know where you are.” 20 After they put the scroll in the room of Elishama the secretary, they went to the king in the courtyard and reported everything to him. 21 The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll, and Jehudi brought it from the room of Elishama the secretary and read it to the king and all the officials standing beside him. 22 It was the ninth month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him. 23 Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire.
24 The king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes. 25 Even though Elnathan, Delaiah and Gemariah urged the king not to burn the scroll, he would not listen to them. 26 Instead, the king commanded Jerahmeel, a son of the king, Seraiah son of Azriel and Shelemiah son of Abdeel to arrest Baruch the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet. But the Lord had hidden them.
27 After the king burned the scroll containing the words that Baruch had written at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: 28 “Take another scroll and write on it all the words that were on the first scroll, which Jehoiakim king of Judah burned up. 29 Also tell Jehoiakim king of Judah, ‘This is what the Lord says: You burned that scroll and said, “Why did you write on it that the king of Babylon would certainly come and destroy this land and cut off both men and animals from it?” 30 Therefore, this is what the Lord says about Jehoiakim king of Judah: He will have no one to sit on the throne of David; his body will be thrown out and exposed to the heat by day and the frost by night. 31 I will punish him and his children and his attendants for their wickedness; I will bring on them and those living in Jerusalem and the people of Judah every disaster I pronounced against them, because they have not listened.’”
32 So Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to the scribe Baruch son of Neriah, and as Jeremiah dictated, Baruch wrote on it all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them.
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The North Korean government executes individuals who are found with a Bible. It is illegal to distribute Bibles in Iran. Parts of the Bible are on record as hate speech in Canada. That’s three different types of governments and each of them has done thing quite similar to what we see Jehoiakim do in this passage.
They are trying to cancel God’s word. Jehoiakim burned it in hopes of neutralizing its effectiveness. Governments ban it in hopes of neutralizing its effectiveness. It doesn’t work. That fact is that you can’t cancel God’s word. You can only cancel yourself. That’s the claim of this sermon: You can’t cancel God’s word. You can only cancel yourself.
We will study this in three points. First: the scroll. Second: the chain of command. Third: another scroll. We see the scroll in verses 1-7, the chain of command in verses 8-26, and another scroll in verses 27-32.
First: the scroll. The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah “in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah,” as verse 1 tells us. This was an important year in Ancient Near Eastern history. It was the Nebuchadnezzar’s first year on the throne. It was the year that he twice decimated the Egyptian army opening the door for a conquest of Judah. This was the year that the Lord told Jeremiah to, “take a scroll and write on it all the words I have spoken to you concerning Israel, Judah, and all the other nations from the time I began speaking to you in the reign of Josiah till now. Perhaps when the people of Judah hear about every disaster I plan to inflict on them, each of them will turn from his wicked way; then I will forgive their wickedness and their sin.”
This was 23 years worth of messages from God, including much of what we’ve studied put to paper. That same year, Jeremiah had told the people, “For twenty-three years—from the thirteenth 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,” as chapter 35 states. The Lord had spoken to these people for twenty-three years and they had consistently ignored Him. His response was to do it all over again now that their situation seemed sufficiently desperate to them. That’s long-suffering.
Jeremiah dictated these 23 years worth of oracles to Baruch; verse 4, “So Jeremiah called Baruch son of Neriah, and while Jeremiah dictated all the words the Lord had spoken to him, Baruch wrote them on the scroll.” We studied a bit about the nature of dictation and the importance of authorial intent in discerning the mind of God with the opening verses of Colossians so we won’t belabor the point.
Baruch was almost certainly from a scribal family. His name, while uncommon to us, was common for that time and place. While we won’t study him much in this series, he was the one who preserved Jeremiah’s legacy and was likely the final editor of the book of Jeremiah. In case you are interested in such matters, the scroll mentioned here was almost certainly made of papyrus. You couldn’t fold papyrus without cracking it; that’s why it was rolled into scrolls.
It’s worth noting that the Lord wanted these words written down. We take that for granted because we’re so used to it with the Bible. The spoken word matters in Scripture. God spoke from Sinai. The written word matters too. The Lord wrote that word on stone tablets. The written word captures the spoken word; it preserves, as Calvin put it, “what would otherwise vanish away or escape the memory of man [so it might] remain and be handed down from one to another…” This is the only reason we can hear this word of the Lord through Jeremiah as we are doing this evening.
Jeremiah told Baruch to read the 23 years worth of prophecies in the temple. As verse 5 makes clear, Jeremiah was restricted from going into this temple. We studied some of Jeremiah’s troubles with the temple authorities but my biggest regret of this study is that we didn’t look at chapter 26 in which Jeremiah found himself on trial for his life for what he said in the temple. That’s why he couldn’t go back. It seems that by this fourth year of Jehoiakim, Jeremiah was a complete outsider. Consider the fact that the man who spoke for the Lord was a complete outsider in the Lord’s temple, then consider Jesus’ experience with the temple, and then consider with fear and trembling the fact the Bible is a lens by which we are to view our time.
Jeremiah told Baruch to read the scroll in the temple on a day of fasting. There were no regular days of fasting at this point. Jeremiah was thinking about a fast that the king would call because an emergency had arisen. Considering the situation with Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah knew it wasn’t a case of if but when an emergency would arise.
Jeremiah’s hope was, as verse 7 puts it, that, “each will turn from his wicked ways, for the anger and wrath pronounced against this people by the Lord are great.” Now remember that the man had seen no benefit to his work over the course twenty-three years. Imagine planting corn and beans for twenty-three years and never getting a harvest. Imagine trying to sell a product for twenty-three years and never making a sale. Imagine working in a hospital for twenty-three years and losing every single patient you cared for. Now consider that Jeremiah sent Baruch hoping that, “Perhaps… each will turn from his wicked ways, for the anger and wrath pronounced against this people by the Lord are great.” Such work was not for the faint of heart. As Calvin puts it, “Let us then learn simply to obey God though the labor he requires from us may seem to be useless.” That’s true for you as a Christian parent. That’s true for you as an elder or deacon. That’s true for you as salt and light in this decaying and dark world. You obey and leave the results to God. That’s most clear with Jesus on the cross. He obeyed and left the results to God. It always looks a bit like that.
That’s what Jeremiah did by sending Baruch. Baruch took this scroll to the temple and the word did its work. We see that in our second point: the chain of command. This begins with another time stamp; verse 9, “In the ninth month of the fifth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, a time of fasting before the Lord was proclaimed.” The king declared a fast for the same reason that spontaneous prayer meetings sprang up all over the nation after 9/11: danger was at the door.
Baruch read the scroll—which again is much of what we have preserved as the book of Jeremiah to this point—aloud at the temple to these people who were doubtlessly thinking about the Babylonian threat; verse 10 tells us that Baruch did so very publicly from the upper courtyard in a place provided by Gemariah son of Shaphan the secretary. Shaphan had held the position of secretary, which was probably comparable to our secretary of state. Another of Shaphan’s sons had taken a risk earlier by speaking up for Jeremiah. Shaphan’s grandson Micaiah heard Baruch; verse 11 puts it tellingly that he, “heard all the words of the Lord from the scroll.” Micaiah took the words seriously. Gemariah took them seriously. It seems that the fear of the Lord wasn’t completely gone from Judah or from the leadership.
It’s worth noting that because the list of men in verses 12-13 is a mixed bag. Micaiah went to the palace and the office of the secretary and met with the higher ups about what was happening in the temple. Some of these men listed in verses 12-13 had Babylonian sympathies. This didn’t make them traitors. It just meant they thought a pro-Babylon policy was the best way forward. Others of them had Egyptian sympathies. Some of them were sympathetic to what Jeremiah had been saying. Micaiah told them all what Baruch had been saying in the temple and they decided to invite Baruch to read the scroll to them.
Now it’s almost impossible for us to imagine something like this happening in the White House whether under a Democratic or a Republican president but that’s because we tend to consider science to be a matter of facts and religion to be a matter of values. Maybe we haven’t advanced near as much over the past 3,000 years as we would like to think. These officials invited Baruch in and gave him a hearing; “Sit down, please, and read it to us,” as verse 15 puts it. “So Baruch read it to them. When they heard all these words, they looked at each other in fear.” J.A. Thompson gets it right, “the total impact of these oracles which had been delivered over a number of years was terrifying.”
Being terrified was a proper response. The fear of the Lord is a proper response. We are told over and over again in our culture that fear is a wrong response. That’s insane. Fear is often a very good response. You want your child to have a healthy fear of busy roads. You want your children to have a healthy fear of the consequences of sin. People ought to have a healthy fear of the Lord. People who don’t have that are fools. It is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.
Jehoiakim’s father Josiah feared the Lord. This passage has intentional parallels with the finding of the law in Josiah’s day. Josiah and his officials heard the law and they trembled. The king tore his clothes. He instituted reforms. Here we have Jehoiakim’s officials hearing the law. They were trembling. The question is, “would the king?” “We must report all these words to the king,” as verse 16 puts it. The question is would Jehoiakim respond like Josiah?
Now these officials knew the character of Jehoiakim. They worked with the man, which is why they asked their questions about dictation. They wanted all their ducks in a row before taking this to the king. They remembered when Jehoiakim had put the prophet Uriah to death for saying the same message as that prophet. That’s also from the chapter I wish we would have studied. The king found Uriah and had him put to death for saying the sort of message Jeremiah said. That’s what’s behind the words to Baruch in verse 19, “You and Jeremiah, go and hide. Don’t let anyone know where you are.” Jesus knew this as well. He called Jerusalem the city that killed its prophets.
These government officials brought the scroll to the king. Notice that. Jeremiah didn’t enter the king’s chambers. Baruch didn’t enter the king’s chambers. The word stood alone. That’s what Luther said about the Reformation. Looking back he said, “I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing… I did nothing; the Word did everything.”
When we find the king, he is warming himself by a fire in the winter apartment. It was the ninth month, which is part of our month November into December, so it was cold and wet; that’s what’s behind verse 22, “the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him.” You see the importance of the fire I what comes next. “Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire.”
Jehoiakim was no Josiah. Josiah heard the word and was afraid. Jehoiakim heard the word and was angry. Josiah heard the word and tore his robes in repentance. Jehoiakim heard the word and tore not his robes but the scroll—same word for “tear” in the Hebrew. Josiah heard the word and accepted it. Jehoiakim heard the word and burned it to get rid of it. We are supposed to note the irony of this happening during a fast which the king had declared. It’s a reminder that religion without the heart is a sham. What’s the point of calling a fast to seek the Lord if you won’t hear what He has to say?
Rather than embracing the word, Jehoiakim got rid of the word and then tried to get rid of the word bearers. He sent his son and two other men on a mission to find Baruch and Jeremiah and bring them back for almost certain execution. They never found them and it’s likely that Baruch and Jeremiah remained in hiding until the end of Jehoiakim’s reign.
That’s seemingly the end of the matter. Twenty-three years worth of warnings piled on top of each other had no effect on the king. He had—to borrow from Jesus—no ears to hear, and he had no ears to hear even though Babylon was preparing to knock down his door. The scroll had apparently failed. It had worked its way all the way up the chain of command and done nothing. That’s how it seemed. The reality was that Jehoiakim did not sit on top of the chain of command. We see that in our final and shortest point: another scroll.
The king had shredded, burned, and sought to neutralize the word of the Lord. The most powerful man in the land had voided it, but as God says, His word never returns to Him void. Everything Jeremiah had said for over 23 years stood and the king’s attempts to somehow undo that were meaningless; that’s verse 27, “After the king burned the scroll containing the words that Baruch had written at Jeremiah’s dictation, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, take another scroll and write on it all the words that were on the first scroll, which Jehoiakim king of Judah burned up.” At the end of the chapter, we read about Jeremiah dictating the words all over again and then we read, “And many similar words were added to them.”
Shredding God’s word, burning God’s word, outlawing God’s word, labeling it hate speech—none of this alters reality in any way. As Jesus said, “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” To rework what CS Lewis said, “A man can no more negate God’s word by ripping it up than a lunatic can get rid of the sun by drawing a picture of it and then ripping it up.” The message is that you can’t really break God’s word. You can only break yourself on it. You can’t cancel God’s words. You can only cancel yourself. You can’t cut parts of the book. You can only cut yourself the lamb’s book of life.
The word of God is often maligned, often ridiculed, often marginalized as mere sentimentality on one side and outlawed as hate speech on the other. It is superstitiously respected but never read by a great number of people. The devil does all in his power to neutralize it.
What should be obvious is that this word which Jehoiakim shredded and burned was rewritten. It’s what we’ve been studying for twenty weeks. The word made flesh which was crucified was resurrected. The word doesn’t pass away. You can’t get rid of it. You can’t cancel it. You will only wind up cancelling yourself. Amen.