Jeremiah

July 16, 2017 Background Scripture: Jeremiah 1 Lesson Passage: Jeremiah 1:4 – 10 At one point in his life, Jeremiah seems to have been the most unpopular of all of his contemporaries. The reason for this is quite simple: he spoke the truth when the people preferred to hear a lie. Many of his contemporaries told the people what they wanted to hear and Jeremiah refused to go along with it. He even became angry with God because when he told the people what God told him to say, it caused trouble for him. Jeremiah decided to not say anything to the people that God told him and he thought his life would be less complicated as a result of it. However, God’s calling upon Jeremiah’s life was too much and he could not ignore God’s voice or commission to prophesy. Jeremiah was called by God at a very young age. In fact, God told Jeremiah that his calling was established before he was born. Jeremiah was literally born to be God’s prophet to Israel during what would become one of the nation’s darkest times. The Bible does not give us the specific age Jeremiah was when he learned of his calling but the terms used to refer to Jeremiah suggest that he was either a teenager or a very young man. God informed Jeremiah that he had called and commissioned him before He formed him in his mother’s womb. Again, Jeremiah was born to do God’s bidding no matter how difficult the task would become. Whatever Jeremiah would suffer would be for God’s sake. God told Jeremiah to not be afraid to look the people in their faces and declare God’s word to them. God gave Jeremiah a sign of a boiling pot and told him what it meant. God was going to judge His people harshly for their unrepentant sin and Jeremiah was going to be an eyewitness to the judgment. Jeremiah does not appear to be a person who ever wrestled with whether God called him to be a prophet or not but instead he wrestled with whether he would be better off not doing God’s will. As was the case with the other prophets whose calling is detailed in the Bible, Jeremiah clearly heard God’s voice commission him for the work of prophecy and he was given visual signs to accompany the oral calling. Every prophecy God sent to Israel by the mouth of Jeremiah came to pass. The people hated the message but they could not deny that the future unfolded exactly as God declared it would through Jeremiah. This was probably of little consolation to Jeremiah because the fulfillment of the prophecies sometimes happened years later after he had endured much ridicule. And besides that, Jeremiah was an eyewitness of the account so that whatever Israel was suffering because of the oracle of God, Jeremiah had to live through as well. As a result of this, Jeremiah wept over Jerusalem as he witnessed the devastation that occurred. When you live through the pain, there is no room for “I told you so.” Jeremiah was ultimately vindicated by history because it unfolded according to the prophetic word he spoke. As an eyewitness, later he became popularly known as the weeping prophet of Israel. Robert C. Hudson May 26, 2017