Christ in Jeremiah

Jeremiah 1 is a call narrative, and the first thing the LORD says about His prophet is that He had him in view before he drew breath: Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations (v. 5). The New Testament tells of One foreknown and sent in the same way - foreordained before the foundation of the world, but… manifest in these last times (1 Pet. 1:20) - and…

Jeremiah 2 sets the deepest sin of any people inside a single, unforgettable picture: My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water (v. 13). The LORD is a spring of living water - abundant, fresh, never failing; the substitutes His people dig for themselves are cracked tanks that lose everything poured into them. The chapter opens in love - I remember thee, the k…

Jeremiah 3 sounds one word until it rings: return. The chapter opens with a closed door - the law that a husband may not take back a wife who has gone to another (v. 1; Deut. 24:1-4) - and then the LORD says the thing the law forbids: thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me, saith the LORD (v. 1). The same Hebrew root strikes again and again: Return, thou backsliding Israel… for I am merciful (v. 12); Turn, O backsliding children……

Jeremiah 4 holds the door of return open - If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the LORD, return unto me (v. 1) - but it refuses to let return stay on the surface. God drives it down into the ground of the self with two images the rest of Scripture takes up and carries to their fulfillment. Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns (v. 3): the hard, weed-choked crust of a heart must be broken open before anything good can grow, the same demand the Sower will pr…

Jeremiah 5 opens with a search that lays bare the deepest need of the human heart. God sends the prophet through Jerusalem with a near-unbelievable offer: seek… if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it (v. 1). One righteous man would have spared the city - and not one is found. The poor plead ignorance, the great men knew the way and altogether broke the yoke, and the verdict settles over the whole p…

Jeremiah 6 sets a city under siege and, in the middle of the alarm, holds out an invitation older than the enemy’s ramps: Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls (v. 16). The promise rings unmistakably in the Gospel. The One who calls Himself the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6) offers the very same rest in almost the same words: Take my yoke upon y…

Jeremiah 7 is the Temple Sermon, and its most famous line travels straight into the Gospels. The LORD stands His prophet in the temple gate and exposes a deadly confidence - the people chant The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these (v. 4) while they steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal (v. 9), then come and stand before me in this house… and say, We are delivered to do all these ab…

Jeremiah 8 raises an ache it refuses to resolve, and the New Testament answers it in a Person. The chapter shows a people stricken with a wound that will not heal - healed only slightly by prophets and priests who cry Peace, peace; when there is no peace (v. 11) - and it closes on the most desolate of questions: Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? (v. 22). The cry assumes that a true Ph…

Jeremiah 9 sets two figures side by side, and the New Testament takes up both. First there is the weeping prophet, whose grief over a doomed city is so deep he wishes his whole body could turn to tears - Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people (v. 1). Long after, another Man would stand over the same city and do the very thing Jeremiah longed to do: And when he was come near,…

Jeremiah 10 sets two things side by side and asks the reader to choose between them: a god a man can carry, and the God who carries the man. The idol is wood from the forest, shaped by a craftsman, plated with silver and gold, and nailed down that it move not (v. 4) - upright as the palm tree, but speak not… they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good (v. 5). Over against this dead thing stands the living God: there is none like unto thee, O LORD (v.…

Jeremiah 11 begins with the broken covenant and ends with a plot to kill the prophet, and it is the second half that the New Testament reaches for. When the men of his own town conspire against him, Jeremiah describes himself in words that would later be heard as a portrait of Another: But I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter; and I knew not that they had devised devices against me (v. 19). The same image stands at the heart of the great Servant song…

Jeremiah 12 opens with a question Scripture never punishes a believer for asking. Righteous art thou, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? (v. 1). It is the cry of Psalm 73 - I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked (Ps. 73:3) - and of Habakkuk, who dared to charge God with silence: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongu…

Jeremiah 13 is built around two acted signs and one unforgettable question, and all three open onto the gospel. First the prophet wears a linen girdle bound to his loins, then buries it until it is marred… profitable for nothing (v. 7); the LORD explains that He had caused Israel and Judah to cleave unto me… that they might be unto me for a people, and for a name, and for a praise, and for a glory: but they would not hear (v. 11). A people made to cling close…

At the heart of Jeremiah 14, with the land cracked open by drought and the wells run dry, the people cry out to God with a title that the whole Bible will carry forward: O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble (v. 8). The New Testament names that hope and that Saviour openly - the Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope (1 Tim. 1:1), the One whose very name means he shall save his people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). The prayer’s ache is that God seems as…

Jeremiah 15 is one of the prophet’s rawest chapters, and its center is a confession about the word of God: Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts (v. 16). To eat the word - to take it inside until it becomes one’s own substance and gladness - is the image the Gospel takes up in the One who called Himself the bread of life: I am the bread of life: he that cometh…

Jeremiah 16 sets a sign of unbroken sorrow beside a promise of overwhelming hope. The prophet is forbidden to marry, to mourn, or to feast (vv. 1-9), his barren and silent life a warning that Judah’s ordinary rhythms are about to be cut off in exile. But the chapter does not end in the dark. It rises to a promise so large it remints Israel’s founding oath: It shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The L…

Jeremiah 17 lays bare the human heart and then points past it to the only One who can read it and mend it. Two figures stand opposite each other: the man who trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm is cursed, like the heath in the desert… in a salt land and not inhabited (vv. 5-6); the man who trusteth in the LORD is blessed, as a tree planted by the waters… her leaf shall be green (vv. 7-8) - the very image with which the Psalter opens (Ps. 1:3) and which…

The LORD sends Jeremiah to a potter’s house and turns a craftsman at his wheel into a window onto how God deals with His people: the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel… as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand (vv. 4-6). The picture is of a sovereign hand that has every right over the clay - and Paul reaches for exactly this image: hath not the potter power over the clay, of the sam…

Jeremiah 19 is an enacted sign of judgment: the prophet breaks a fired clay flask in the valley of the son of Hinnom and declares, Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again (v. 11). It is the dark companion to the chapter before it - the marred clay on the wheel could still be reworked (Jer. 18:4), but a hardened, fired vessel, once shattered, cannot. The horror that called it down is named without fl…

Jeremiah 20 is the rawest of the prophet’s laments, and it shows what the New Testament will confirm: that the One who calls a person to speak His word also enters fully into the cost of speaking it. Struck and shut in the stocks by Pashur the priest (vv. 1-2), Jeremiah renames his persecutor Magor-missabib - terror on every side (v. 3) - and then turns to God with words no piety would have dared invent: O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived… I am in der…

Jeremiah 21 lays a single stark choice across the whole chapter, and it is a choice the Gospel takes up word for word. With Babylon at the wall, the LORD tells his besieged people, Behold, I set before you the way of life, and the way of death (v. 8) - the same two ways Moses had set before Israel long before: I have set before you life and death… therefore choose life (Deut. 30:19), the same two ways the Lord himself would set before every hearer: Enter ye in at th…

Jeremiah 22 lays one demand across the whole house of David and tests every king by it: Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong… to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow (v. 3). The throne is held on that condition - obey and kings sitting upon the throne of David keep entering the gates (v. 4); refuse and this house shall become a desolation (v. 5). Then comes the verse that fuses justic…

Jeremiah 23 carries one of the brightest messianic promises in all the prophets, set against the failure of Judah’s shepherds. The kings who should have fed the flock have scattered it (vv. 1-2), so the LORD pledges to gather His remnant Himself and to raise up a ruler of a wholly different kind: Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth&hel…

Jeremiah 24 turns the world’s scorecard upside down. With the young king and the best of Jerusalem already dragged to Babylon, the LORD sets two baskets of figs before the temple - one very good , one so bad they cannot be eaten (vv. 1-3) - and then names them. The good figs are the exiles, the ones who look finished: so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah… for their good. For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring them…

Jeremiah 25 hands the prophet a single terrible object and tells him to carry it to the nations: Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it (v. 15). It is the cup of God’s wrath against sin, and no one is exempt - it begins at the city which is called by my name (v. 29) and reaches all the kingdoms of the world, which are upon the face of the earth (v. 26); those who refuse it are told plainly, Ye shall certainly…

Jeremiah 26 reads, in its bones, like a rehearsal of a later trial. The LORD sends His prophet into the temple court to speak every word he is given and keep none back - diminish not a word (v. 2) - and the instant he finishes, the religious leaders seize him: the priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, Thou shalt surely die (v. 8). A trial convenes, and the verdict is pronounced before any defense is heard: This man is worthy to die; for he hath prop…

Jeremiah 27 turns on a single image - a wooden yoke - and a single demand: Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him and his people, and live (v. 12). The reason reaches all the way back to the foundation of the world: I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground, by my great power and by my outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me (v. 5). Because the LORD made the earth, He may assign its rul…

Jeremiah 28 sets two voices side by side in the house of the LORD and forces a choice between them. Hananiah prophesies comfort - I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon… within two full years the temple vessels and the captive king will be restored (vv. 2-4) - and the crowd would far rather hear him than Jeremiah. Jeremiah answers first with a longing Amen: the LORD do so (v. 6), then names the one test that no flattering tongue can pass: when the word of the…

Jeremiah 29 is a letter to people in exile, and from its hard center comes one of the most beloved promises in all of Scripture - though it is most beloved when it is heard, as it was first spoken, to captives in Babylon. The false prophets were saying the exile would be brief; the LORD says otherwise: Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them… And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives…

After chapters of unrelenting judgment, Jeremiah 30 opens the Book of Consolation, and its hope runs straight toward Christ. A great and terrible day is coming - the time of Jacob’s trouble (v. 7) - yet the same sentence that names the affliction names the deliverance: but he shall be saved out of it. The people are rescued not around the trouble but through it, a pattern the Gospel will carry to its depth, where salvation comes by way of a cross and an empty tomb. When th…

Jeremiah 31 holds the most-quoted Old Testament passage in the entire New Testament, and the New Testament reaches for it because it could find the gospel nowhere stated more fully in advance. The chapter opens in the voice of a love that judgment never exhausted - I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee (v. 3) - the very drawing the Son describes when He says No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me dr…

Jeremiah 32 turns on a single staked act and a single staggering question. With Babylon’s army around the walls and the prophet shut up in prison, the LORD tells Jeremiah to buy a field - and he does, sealing the deed and storing it that they may continue many days , because Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land (v. 15). It is faith acting on a promised future against every visible sign - the very thing the New Testament names: faith is the…

Jeremiah 33 is one of the brightest promises in all the prophets, spoken from the darkest place - the prophet shut up in prison, the city under siege. It opens with an open door to prayer: Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not (v. 3) - the very assurance the Gospel renews, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find (Matt. 7:7), spoken by the One who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that…

Jeremiah 34 turns on a single word - liberty - and the irony of a people who refused to give it. Under the weight of the siege, Zedekiah and the people made a covenant to proclaim liberty to their Hebrew slaves, releasing them as the law of the seventh year required (vv. 8-10; Deut. 15:12). The Hebrew is deror , the very word for the great Jubilee release: proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof (Lev. 25:10). But the relief was hollow: aft…

Jeremiah 35 turns on a contrast the Gospel will sharpen to a fine edge: a family of outsiders who keep their father’s word across generations, set against a covenant people who will not keep the word of their God. Jeremiah sets wine before the Rechabites and they refuse it - We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us (v. 6) - and the LORD draws the lesson plain: The words of Jonadab the son of Rechab… are performed… but I hav…

Jeremiah 36 is a story about a written word that a king tried to destroy and could not. After more than twenty years of speaking, the LORD tells Jeremiah to gather it all onto a scroll - Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken unto thee (v. 2) - in the hope that the people would hear… and return every man from his evil way (v. 3). Baruch writes the whole of it at Jeremiah’s mouth and reads it publicly on a fast day (vv. 4-10).…

Jeremiah 37 sets two men against each other in the last days of Jerusalem - a king who wants a word from God in secret but will not obey it in public, and a prophet who keeps telling the truth from a dungeon at the cost of his freedom. The siege lifts for a moment when Pharaoh’s army was come forth out of Egypt (v. 5), and the false hope is immediate; but the LORD’s word does not bend with the headlines: Pharaoh’s army… shall return to Egypt… And the Chaldean…

Jeremiah 38 sets a righteous man down in a pit. His enemies let down Jeremiah with cords into a cistern with no water, but mire , and leave him to die - so Jeremiah sunk in the mire (v. 6). The image runs straight into the Psalms, where the sufferer cries to be brought up from just such a place: He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock (Ps. 40:2); I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing… let me be delive…

Jeremiah 39 is the chapter where the long-delayed word finally lands. For forty years the prophet had said the city would fall, and for forty years he had been called a traitor and a liar for saying it; now the city was broken up (v. 2), and every detail comes to pass as it was spoken - Zedekiah’s flight and capture (vv. 4-5), the slaying of his sons before his eyes and the putting out of those eyes (vv. 6-7), the burning of the king’s house and the breaking of the walls (…

Jeremiah 40 opens in the rubble after Jerusalem’s fall, and its first wonder is who reads God’s hand rightly: not a priest of Judah but a Babylonian officer. The captain of the guard finds Jeremiah bound among the captives, strikes off his chains, and confesses what Judah’s own leaders had refused to hear - The LORD thy God hath pronounced this evil… Now the LORD hath brought it, and done according as he hath said: because ye have sinned against the LORD (vv. 2-3).…

Jeremiah 41 is one of the darkest pages in the book, and at its center is a betrayal sealed over a shared meal. Gedaliah, the governor set over the surviving remnant, welcomes Ishmael of the royal seed to his table - there they did eat bread together in Mizpah (v. 1) - and from that bread Ishmael rises to murder him: Then arose Ishmael… and smote Gedaliah… and slew him (v. 2). To kill the host whose bread one has just eaten is the deepest treachery the ancien…

Jeremiah 42 turns on the difference between asking God for guidance and having already decided. The terrified remnant comes with words that could not sound more devout - Pray for us unto the LORD thy God… that the LORD thy God may shew us the way wherein we may walk (vv. 2-3) - and they swear an oath of total submission: Whether it be good, or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice of the LORD our God (v. 6). Jeremiah waits ten days, and the word that comes is c…

Jeremiah 43 is the chapter where a settled disobedience dresses itself up as a charge against the truth. The remnant had sworn an oath to obey whatever the LORD answered (42:5-6); the answer was stay ; and the moment it crosses what they had already chosen, the proud men turn on the prophet: Thou speakest falsely: the LORD our God hath not sent thee to say, Go not into Egypt to sojourn there (v. 2). The Hebrew is blunt - sheqer attah medabber , “a lie you are speaking” - a…

Jeremiah 44 is the prophet’s last recorded oracle, and it turns on one of the most revealing arguments a hardened heart ever makes. The Judeans who fled to Egypt resume their worship of the queen of heaven , and when Jeremiah confronts them they answer to his face: we will not hearken unto thee… for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil (vv. 16-17). They credit the idol for the mercies God gave, and they read their later hardship as proof th…

Jeremiah 45 is one of the shortest chapters in the book and one of the most personal - five verses spoken not to a nation but to a single weary man, Baruch the scribe, who had written the prophet’s words and watched the world they described begin to fall. He pours out his exhaustion: Woe is me now! for the LORD hath added grief to my sorrow; I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest (v. 3). God answers first by widening the view - that which I have built will I break dow…

Jeremiah 46 opens the oracles against the nations, and for most of its length it is a war-song - Egypt mustering at the Euphrates in bright confidence and broken at Carchemish, the day of the Lord GOD of hosts, a day of vengeance (v. 10), followed by the announcement that Nebuchadrezzar will come against Egypt itself and her gods (vv. 13-26). The chapter sets the proud nations, swept away like a felled forest, against a single servant who is not. For the last word of the o…

Jeremiah 47 is a brief, grave oracle against the Philistines, and for six of its seven verses it is pure judgment - an army rising out of the north like an overflowing flood (v. 2), fathers too unstrung with fear to turn back for their own children (v. 3), Tyre and Zidon’s helpers cut off, Gaza shaved bald in mourning, Ashkelon silenced (vv. 4-5). Then the chapter ends on a cry that opens straight onto the gospel. The prophet speaks, as if aloud, to the weapon of judgment…

Jeremiah 48 is the longest of the prophet’s oracles against the nations, and what makes it unforgettable is not its severity but its sorrow. Moab is judged for an ease that curdled into pride - Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel… therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed (v. 11). Wine left undisturbed on its sediment turns thick and spoiled; a life never pour…

Jeremiah 49 gathers five short oracles against the nations ringing Israel - Ammon, Edom, Damascus, the desert tribes of Kedar and Hazor, and far-off Elam - and two threads run through them that the Gospel will pick up and carry to the ends of the earth. The first is the undoing of pride. Edom dwelt in the rose-red clefts of the rock, in cliff-fortresses no army could climb, and its impregnable home had bred an impregnable heart: Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the…

Jeremiah 50 announces the fall of the great empire - Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken in pieces (v. 2) - but its deepest note is the gathering of a scattered people, and that note rings with Christ. The exiles are lost sheep whose shepherds led them astray: My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray (v. 6). The image runs straight to the Shepherd who saw the crowds as sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36) and told o…

Jeremiah 51 is the long sentence passed on Babylon, the empire that burned the temple and carried Zion into exile, and it turns again and again on a single command to God’s own people trapped inside her: Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his soul (v. 6); My people, go ye out of the midst of her, and deliver ye every man his soul from the fierce anger of the LORD (v. 45). The Revelation takes that very call and lays it on the last great Babylon: Come o…

Jeremiah 52 is the book’s historical epilogue, retelling the fall of Jerusalem so plainly that there can be no doubt the prophet’s forty-year warning came true to the letter - the siege and the breach (vv. 4-7), Zedekiah overtaken and his sons slain before his eyes and his own eyes put out (vv. 8-11), the house of the LORD burned and the city broken down (vv. 12-14), the people carried away, and even the great bronze pillars and the brasen sea that Solomon had made for the…