Delay and You’ll Pay
Jeremiah 4:11-28 (RCL 11-12, 22-28)
Tony’s Overview Video
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- Read the Bible Lesson by Tony Cartledge in this month’s issue of the Nurturing Faith Journal
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Key Text: Jeremiah 4:14
O Jerusalem, wash your heart clean of wickedness
so that you may be saved.
How long shall your evil schemes lodge within you?
If you have read the text for today, you may have cringed and wondered why we would choose to study such a heated and unpleasant prophecy. [DD] The Bible contains many positive and encouraging texts, you may think. Why dwell on something so negative?
Why indeed?
Because sometimes the most valuable lessons are the most painful ones.
Corporal punishment for children isn’t as common as it used to be, when some of us learned hard lessons at the business end of a switch. Discipline can also take other forms.
But sometimes lessons come too late. You may have known someone who developed lung cancer, throat cancer, or COPD after years of heavy smoking. The disease would have brought sharp reminders of warnings they had heard but ignored. Sufferers may have wanted to go back and change their behavior, but it was too late.
That’s a gloomy thought, but precisely the kind of point Jeremiah was making in today’s text as he walked the streets of Jerusalem and preached warnings to people who didn’t want to hear what he had to say. [DD]
Imagine the situation. It was a time when empires rose and fell. More powerful kingdoms routinely ravaged neighboring lands to expand their territory with no international organization to censure them.
The country of Judah was a very minor player in world affairs when Jeremiah’s preaching ministry began around 627 BCE (Jer. 1:1-3). The northern kingdom of Israel had been defeated by the Assyrians more than a century earlier (722 BCE). Many Israelites had fled south to Judah, while others were deported to other lands.
Eighth-century prophets like Amos and Micah and Isaiah had insisted that Israel’s fall was due to divine punishment for the people’s persistent idolatry. Jeremiah was convinced that Judah was about to suffer the same fate, and for the same reasons.
The southern kingdom had survived the Assyrian onslaught by agreeing to pay annual tribute, serving as a vassal to the Assyrians for many years.
In Jeremiah’s day, however, a new power was rising in the east. A Neo-Babylonian empire led by Nabopolassar had come to rival the Assyrians, who grew less stable after the powerful king Ashurbanipal died in 627 BCE.
Judah’s young king Josiah – probably encouraged by the prophets Zephaniah and Jeremiah – had instigated a series of religious reforms designed to eliminate pervasive idolatry, but when he tried to prevent an Egyptian force from joining the Assyrians in heading off the Babylonian threat, he was killed in a battle at Megiddo (609 BCE), and Judah fell under Egyptian domination.
Today’s text arises from a period when the Babylonian threat was growing clear and strong. Jeremiah was convinced that Judah’s defeat was not only inevitable, but deserved.
The hot wind of judgment (vv. 11-12)
The first 24 chapters of Jeremiah are largely focused on prophecies against Judah and the city of Jerusalem, with 4:5-6:30 concerned mainly with prophecies predicting an invasion from the north. [DD] [DD]
Babylon was more east than north of Judah, but its armies could not cross the intervening desert: an expeditionary force would have to travel north and west around the desert, then turn south toward Palestine, approaching Judah from the north.
Jeremiah’s prophecies are mainly in the form of poetic oracles. [DD] His friend and supporter, a scribe named Baruch, was responsible for compiling the oracles and writing them down. The first part of the book had to be written twice: when it was read as a warning to King Jehoiakim, the king cut up the scroll and burned it (Jeremiah 36). [DD]
The prophet had observed too many Israelites participating in the cults of other gods while also worshiping at the temple. He had heard priests and prophets associated with the temple insist that Yahweh would always protect Jerusalem because the temple was there. Jeremiah did not see protection for Judah and Jerusalem, but punishment.
Speaking for Yahweh, he declared: “At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward my poor people, not to winnow or cleanse – a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them” (vv. 11-12).
Jeremiah’s hearers would be familiar with the hot desert wind that could bring with it not only heat but blinding sand, making it difficult to see or to breathe. A good breeze could be a useful tool, blowing away the chaff when winnowing grain, or cleaning accumulated dust from outdoor surfaces, but this wind would be too strong for anything good.
It would bring destruction to “my poor people” (NRSV). A literal reading is “daughter of my people” (KJV), but some modern translations interpret “daughter” to indicate endearment or sympathy, such as “my dear people” (NET, HCSB). [DD]
God’s affection for the people, weak and vulnerable to temptation as they were, did not make them less responsible for their sins or more likely to escape discipline. As Stephen Breck Reid has noted, “Vulnerability does not go bail for culpability” (Feasting on the Word, Year C, vol. 4 of Accordance electronic ed. [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010], par. 19243).
The reason for judgment (vv. 13-22)
The prose introduction of vv. 11-12 is followed by a poetic description of – and lament over – the coming judgment. Jeremiah described a vision of God coming in the clouds, and cries “Woe to us, for we are ruined!” (v. 13).
He appealed for the residents of Jerusalem to “wash your hearts clean of wickedness so that you may be saved,” suggesting that disaster might be averted, but with little confidence that his words would have any effect: “How long shall your evil schemes lodge within you?” (v. 14).
Jeremiah heard “a voice from Dan,” formerly the northernmost city of Israel. The voice proclaimed “disaster from Mount Ephraim” – further south in the central hill country – an image of besiegers marching toward Judah (vv. 15-16).
The prophet envisioned the besieging army surrounding the city. Why? “Because she has rebelled against me, says the LORD. Your ways and your doings have brought this upon you. This is your doom: how bitter it is! It has reached your very heart” (vv. 16-18).
Jeremiah shared with God a sharp sense of distress over the fate of the people, crying “My anguish! My anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh, the walls of my heart!” (v. 19a). The deep sorrow Jeremiah felt came from the pit of his stomach: a literal translation would be “My bowels! My bowels!”
We have known that gut-wrenching feeling, the rush of adrenaline followed by a racing heartbeat. “Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent; for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war” (v. 19b).
In his vision, Jeremiah saw one disaster after another as the land was laid waste and dwellings destroyed (v. 20) before the enemy’s battle flags and trumpets of war (v. 21).
Again he appealed to the people, using language common to Israel’s wisdom teachers: “For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good” (v. 22).
Jeremiah was not criticizing the people’s intelligence, but their choices. Smart people can do very stupid things: they can also prove willfully ignorant of truths they should know, turning from God and convincing themselves that their evil actions are right.
But that can’t last forever. At some point, bad behavior will catch up with us.
The totality of judgment (vv. 23-28)
Jeremiah’s grief grew from a vision of destruction so complete that it seemed even creation had been reversed: “I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light” (v. 23).
The phrase “waste and void” translates tohu va-bohu, which appears elsewhere only in Gen. 1:2, which says the earth was “without form and void.” Jeremiah foresaw the hills and mountains shifting and quaking in a lifeless world marked only by the ruined remains of empty cities (vv. 24-26).
Most translations find a bit of hope in v. 27, a short oracle that interrupts the flow of vv. 23-28 and is widely regarded as a later insertion. The NRSV renders it “For thus says the LORD: ‘The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.’” The NET has a similar translation: “The whole land will be desolate, however, I will not completely destroy it.” For an alternate translation, see “The Hardest Question” online.
Jeremiah would eventually come to a place of hope. The vision of extreme desolation he saw here is not uncommon in prophetic/apocalyptic imagery that imagines the whole earth being destroyed before the advent of a new era. Jeremiah did not see the new heaven and new earth of his contemporary Ezekiel’s prophesies, but would later predict that God would gather the scattered people and establish a new covenant that would not be written in a book of law, but on the people’s hearts (Jer. 31:31-34).
All was not lost.
Adult Teaching Resources
Download the PDF of teaching resources for this lesson.
This PDF contains the Teaching Guide, Digging Deeper, and Hardest Question pages.
Read Scripture online: Jeremiah 4:11-28
Youth Teaching Resources
Parent Prep
Doom and gloom can pop up quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. But if you pull the curtain back a little bit further, the signs may have been present all along. Today’s students have more stress on them than ever before. There are more opportunities than ever but the pressure the succeed is even greater. Doom and gloom can happen quickly when these opportunities seem to be slipping away. Help your students understand what they can control and what they can’t control. Help them control what they can, but don’t try and fix it for them. Acknowledge the dark but don’t relish in it. Provide hope. Provide comfort. But don’t be the fix.
Additional Links/Resources
Read Scripture online: Jeremiah 4:11-28
Download the PDF for youth teaching resources using the button below. This PDF contains the Teaching Guide for this lesson:
Video
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“The Torture Machine” from The Princess Bride
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