Day #226

Sermon - Audio
Jeremiah 23-25 - Audio
Jeremiah 23-25 - Reading

Daily Insights - Please Comment

Jeremiah 23

• 23.1: The shepherds are the leaders--especially kings--who are supposed to have as their primary concern the people. Instead they destroy and scatter the flock. The idea is that the people are dying both literally and spiritually because the shepherds are not doing their job.
• 23.2: Because the shepherds have not attended to the flock, God will attend to them with punishment.
• 23.6: The LORD is our righteousness is a play on the name of Zedekiah (the king) whose name means “Righteous is the LORD”. While Zedekiah failed to live up to his name, God will bring another king who will live up to his name.
• 23.27: The false prophets are using dreams to trump following God’s ways. Dreams are seen as a new revelation which allows the people to ignore Torah.
• 23.28: God compares the dreams of these prophets with straw while his word is wheat. For those of us not familiar with straw it is an agricultural byproduct after the nutrient grain or seed has been removed; it has no nutritional value. The dreams of the prophets are empty, without value. On the other hand, wheat can be made into life-giving bread which seems to be a reflection back on Deuteronomy 8.3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
• 23.29: “Is not my word like fire,” declares the LORD, “and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? Interestingly, the rabbis see this text as proof that the same text can have many meanings. Since God’s word breaks a rock into many pieces, so his word has multiple meanings.

Jeremiah 24

• 24.1: Verse one gives the historical background to Jeremiah’s vision in chapter 24. It takes place shortly after 597 B.C. when Jehoiachin, king of Judah, surrendered Judah to Nebuchadnezzar after a short siege of Jerusalem. Nebechadnezzar takes Jehoiachin and Judah’s skilled labor force into exile. The practice of taking a country’s skilled labor force was common because it stripped a society of the ability to adequately protect and prepare itself for future attacks. He also places Judah under the leadership of a new Judean king, Zedekiah. “He carried away all Jerusalem and all the officials and all the mighty men of valour, 10,000 captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths. None remained, except the poorest people of the land. 15 And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon. The king’s mother, the king’s wives, his officials, and the chief men of the land he took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon. 16And the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon all the men of valour, 7,000, and the craftsmen and the metal workers, 1,000, all of them strong and fit for war. 17 And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah, Jehoiachin’s uncle, king in his place, and changed his name to Zedekiah. ESV (2 Kings 24:14-16)
• Picture this: Two Baskets of Figs in front of the Temple. Figs are prevalent within the land of Israel, and in the Old Testament figs are commonly used as a symbol of blessing and peace.
• 24.5: The identity of the good figs is revealed as the exiles described in 24:1. Identifying the exiles as the good figs is a shocking turn in this verse because the exiles are the ones removed from the land, taken away from the temple (symbolic of God’s presence in the OT), and granted a harsher punishment through exile in Babylon. Why are these people to be considered the “good figs”—those who are blessed, peaceful, and judged as righteous?
• 2.:6: Vs. 6 reveals the answer to the question in vs. 5. God (Yahweh) will bring about restoration through those who were exiled. The people would be restored to the land, and ultimately redeemed through Christ—a descendent of the exiles to Babylon. (Matthew 1:12) Vs. 6 ultimately teaches why God will “regard with favor” (vs. 5) those who were exiled to Babylon.

Jeremiah 25
Jeremiah prophesies that Judah will spend 70 years in Babylonian captivity as a punishment for her sins.

• 25.1: The year is 605/604 B.C. Egypt has just been defeated by Babylon and Babylon is about to make Israel a vassal state.
• 25.3: Jeremiah has been speaking to the people for over 20 years but they have refused to listen. Since some of these years are part of Josiah’s reign, it is evident that even as Josiah sought to reform Judah that the people did not go along with his reforms.
• 25.9: “Completely destroy them” or “devote them to destruction” ESV. This is what happened to Jericho when the people first entered the land of Canaan some 800 years earlier. As God called his people to do, he is now doing to them because they have failed in their calling. It is a terrible and dreadful fall.
• • 25.10: We see marriage celebrated as a blessing of creation in Genesis 2; however, when the people of a nation are cursed they find themselves cut off from this blessing.
• • 25.11: 70 years The 70 years is not a literal 70 years (the people begin their return 67 years after the 605 B.C. fall of Jerusalem), rather it is a symbolic number understood by the people of the Ancient Near East to be the time which a god punished his people for their disobedience. The time of punishment could be shortened or lengthened depending on repentance.

Jeremiah 25.15-38: A Cup of Wrath

• 25.15: A cup of wine is often used as a symbol of wrath, perhaps because it looks like blood.
• 25.15-26: God’s list of nations that will suffering destruction for their sin covers a wide area surrounding the nations of Israel--all the way into Africa.
• 25.28: God is sovereign, he will punish the sin of the nations, they can’t avoid it.
• 25.30-31: The volume of God’s anger is deafening.
• 25.34: Shepherds are the kings and princes. It is not only the kings of Judah who will be smashed like fine pottery, all the kings of the nations will be smashed. What is sad is that Judah has become like the nations of the earth and so is treated like the others.
• 25.35: At times national leaders are able to escape what befalls their people because of resources not available to all, but God assures the leaders that not one will escape.