Jeremiah 23

The chapter opens with a word as old as the prophets and as sharp as any in the book: Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD (v. 1). The word translated pastors is simply shepherds - and in the prophets a shepherd is a ruler: a king, a prince, a priest, anyone charged with the care of God's people. A shepherd has one calling, to feed and to guard, to keep the flock together and lead it to safety. Judah's shepherds have done the reverse. The LORD names the failure plainly: Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them (v. 2). They have not merely neglected the sheep; their misrule has driven them into exile and danger. Notice whose flock it is. Three times in two verses the LORD calls them my - the sheep of my pasture, my people, my flock. The shepherds were stewards, never owners; the sheep belonged to God all along. And that is exactly why the woe is so heavy. To scatter the flock is not a private failure of leadership; it is a wrong done to the One whose sheep they are. So the verdict comes back on the shepherds' own heads: I will visit upon you the evil of your doings.³

Judgment on the false shepherds is not the last word; it clears the ground for a promise. And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them; and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them (vv. 3-4). Where the shepherds scattered, the LORD will gather; where they drove the sheep away, He will bring them again. And the work is His own: I will gather… I will set up. The flock that human leaders ruined, God Himself takes in hand. Two things stand out. First, He saves a remnant - not the whole proud nation as it was, but the ones brought low and scattered, the survivors He gathers back. Out of loss He grows something fruitful again. Second, He promises new shepherds which shall feed them, so that the flock shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking. The fear, the dismay, the lack - everything the bad shepherds caused - is undone, not by better luck, but by the LORD setting true shepherds over His people. The verses lean forward, and the next two will tell us toward whom: one Shepherd-King above all the rest.¹

Now the promise rises to its summit, and the language turns royal and exact: 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 (v. 5). The word Branch is a single Hebrew term for a fresh shoot springing from a stump or a root - a living, growing thing. It is the LORD's answer to a dynasty that looked cut down: from the felled tree of David's house a new shoot will spring, and it will be righteous. This King will not merely hold office; He will reign and prosper and will execute judgment and justice in the earth - the very thing the failed shepherds never did. Then comes the name, and it is staggering: this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (v. 6). The name set on this King is the divine name itself, joined to our righteousness. He does not simply rule justly; He is named after the righteousness of God, and that righteousness is ours - held out to the people He saves. In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: the safety the shepherds could not give, this King will be. Verses 7 and 8 then promise a homecoming so great it will eclipse the Exodus itself - no longer the LORD liveth, which brought up… out of… Egypt, but the LORD who gathered His people out of the north country, and from all countries. A new and greater deliverance, under a new and greater King.

The prophet who has just announced a coming King now lets us see what the false prophets have done to him: Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets; all my bones shake; I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath overcome, because of the LORD, and because of the words of his holiness (v. 9). This is not detached commentary. Jeremiah is undone - heart broken, bones shaking, reeling like a man overcome with wine - and the cause is twofold. It is because of the prophets, the liars who claim God's name; and it is because of the LORD, and because of the words of his holiness, the crushing weight of the true word he carries against them. A real prophet does not denounce sin from a safe distance; he feels the holiness of God and the horror of the lie at the same time, and it nearly tears him apart. He looks out and sees the rot everywhere: the land is full of adulterers, the very land mourneth, and at the heart of it stand the men who should have been its light - both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in my house have I found their wickedness (v. 11). The corruption has reached the temple itself. And their end is sure: their way will be as slippery ways in the darkness (v. 12), a path with no footing, leading only down.

The LORD now weighs the prophets of Jerusalem against an older scandal. I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria; they prophesied in Baal, and caused my people Israel to err (v. 13). The northern kingdom's prophets had spoken in the name of a false god outright - bad enough. But what the LORD sees in Jerusalem is worse: an horrible thing. These men speak in the name of the true God, yet commit adultery, and walk in lies (v. 14). And the deadliest charge is this: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness. That is the real damage a false prophet does. By telling sinners they are fine, he confirms them in their sin; he strengthens the very hands that should be falling slack in repentance, so that none doth return. A lying word of comfort is not harmless - it locks people into the ruin they might otherwise have fled. The verdict is severe to match: such prophets are as Sodom in the LORD's sight, and He will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall (v. 15) - bitterness for the false sweetness they have poured out. From the very ones who should have been a fountain of truth, profaneness has flowed into all the land.

Now the LORD gives His people the plainest possible warning about these voices: Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD (v. 16). Here is the root diagnosis of every false prophet, in a single line. The source of their message is their own heart. They are not relaying what God has said; they are voicing what they themselves have imagined and wishing it into His mouth. And the effect on the hearers is exact: they make you vain - they fill people with empty hopes, inflate them with confidence that has no ground under it. The content of the lie is named in verse 17, and it is chillingly tailored to its audience: They say still unto them that despise me, The LORD hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you. Mark who is being comforted - those who despise God and who walk after their own imagination. To these the false prophets promise peace and immunity: No evil shall come upon you. It is the oldest and most welcome lie there is - that a person can keep his sin and his safety both, that the road he has chosen will somehow not lead where roads like it always lead. People love that message; it asks nothing of them. And it is a lie.

Against the prophets who speak from their own hearts, the LORD raises the one question that exposes them all: For who hath stood in the counsel of the LORD, and hath perceived and heard his word? who hath marked his word, and heard it? (v. 18). The image is of a royal council - the inner circle where the King reveals His mind and gives His commands. A true messenger is one who has stood there, who has actually heard the word from the LORD's own mouth and then carries it out faithfully. The false prophet has stood in no such council; he has only consulted himself. The LORD presses the point hard in verses 21-22, which follow: I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, and had caused my people to hear my words, then they should have turned them from their evil way. There is the test laid out twice over. First, commission: a true prophet is sent; the false one runs unsent, eager to speak where God has not spoken. Second, fruit: the genuine word, faithfully delivered, turns people from their evil way. That is what the word of God does - it produces repentance. A message that leaves its hearers comfortable in their sin, that never turns anyone from evil, has by that very fact shown its source. It did not come from the council of the LORD.

Before exposing the dreamers, the LORD asserts something about Himself that pulls the ground out from under every lie told in His name: Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? (vv. 23-24). The false prophets had evidently been acting as though God were small and local - a deity at hand who could be managed, kept at arm's length, perhaps even fooled. The LORD answers that He is both at hand and afar off: there is no secret place a man can slip into where God does not see, no corner of creation outside His presence, for He fills heaven and earth. This is the death of the lying prophet's whole enterprise. He invents his dreams imagining that God neither hears nor sees what he is up to - and the LORD says, I have heard what the prophets said… saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed (v. 25). The repetition - I have dreamed, I have dreamed - carries a note of mockery; we can almost hear the breathless, self-important claim. But the God who fills heaven and earth has heard every word. He names them for what they are: prophets of the deceit of their own heart (v. 26), men who think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams (v. 27) - aiming, whether they know it or not, at the same ruin Baal once worked: making Israel forget the LORD.

The LORD now draws the line between a dream and His word with a single, vivid image. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the LORD (v. 28). There is no objection here to a man telling his dream as a dream - only to passing it off as the word of God. The two are as different as chaff and wheat. Chaff is the dry, weightless husk that the wind carries off at threshing; wheat is the grain itself, the thing that feeds. A human dream, however vivid, is chaff - light, empty, blown away. The word of the LORD is wheat - substantial, nourishing, the thing a life can actually live on. To mix them, to serve chaff as if it were grain, is to starve the very people you claim to feed. So the LORD sets Himself flatly against the counterfeiters, three times over: I am against the prophets… that steal my words (v. 30) - who pilfer the language of true revelation and recycle it as their own; I am against the prophets… that use their tongues, and say, He saith (v. 31) - who manufacture an oracle and stamp it with thus saith the LORD; I am against them that prophesy false dreams (v. 32). And the final indictment is quietly devastating: they shall not profit this people at all. For all their running and dreaming and borrowed thunder, they accomplish exactly nothing. Chaff feeds no one.³

The chapter closes on a strange and pointed scene built around a single word. People keep coming to Jeremiah with a sneering question: What is the burden of the LORD? (v. 33). The Hebrew word for burden also means an oracle, a prophetic message; but it carries the plain sense of a heavy load, something hard to carry. So the question had become a mockery. Jeremiah's messages were almost all warnings of judgment, heavy words; and the scoffers turned his vocabulary into a joke - well, what's the LORD's burden today? - as if his solemn oracles were a tiresome weight they had to put up with. The LORD will not let the mockery stand. He tells Jeremiah to throw the word back at them: What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the LORD. The double meaning snaps shut like a trap. They wanted to know the LORD's burden; the LORD answers that they have become His burden, and He will set them down - I will even forsake you. Anyone who keeps flinging the phrase around as a taunt, He says, will be punished, that man and his house (v. 34). The right way to seek God's word is given in its place: ask honestly, What hath the LORD answered? and, What hath the LORD spoken? (v. 35) - not what's the burden this time? The sin underneath the joke is named without flinching: ye have perverted the words of the living God (v. 36).

The closing verses press the wordplay to its sober end. The people had been told plainly to drop the mocking catchphrase - I have sent unto you, saying, Ye shall not say, The burden of the LORD (v. 38) - and their refusal to stop is itself the final act of contempt. So the LORD makes the pun the very shape of the judgment: Behold, I, even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of my presence (v. 39). The Hebrew turns on a hair: the people had made God's word a burden to be cast off, and now God will cast them off - lift them up and set them down out of His presence. What they did to His word, He will do to them. The result is named in the last verse: an everlasting reproach… a perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten (v. 40). It is a heavy door to close a chapter that opened with the promise of THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS - but the two belong together. The same God who raises a righteous Branch to save His remnant will not be mocked by those who twist His word into a joke. To treat the word of the living God lightly, to make a punchline of His warnings, is no small thing. The chapter that holds out the highest hope also draws the hardest line, and both come from the same holy mouth.