Jeremiah 2

Jeremiah 2:1

II. JEREMIAH’S PUBLIC MINISTRY (Chaps. 2-10) A. Sermon against Judah’s Willful Infidelity (2:13:5)2:1-3 Chapters 2 through 19 give a general denunciation of Judah. Judah was once passionately in love with Jehovah. She was holy to Him, and anyone who troubled her experienced disaster. Now, however, as Kyle Yates puts it: The honeymoon is over. God reminds rebellious Israel of the fervor and the warmth and the purity of the love streams in the early days. She was desperately in love with her Lover and the tender love made life full of music and joy and hope. She was pure and clean and holy. No disloyalty or unclean thought marred the beauty of her devotion. But now the picture is heart-rending. God’s heart is crushed with grief and disappointment. Israel now is living in open sin. She is unfaithful to the covenant vows. Other gods have stolen her affection. She has ceased to love Yahweh and her conduct is shameful in the extreme. 2:4-19 Now the LORD asks why she has changed. The people, priests, rulers, and prophets have forgotten all God did for them. Unlike such heathen lands as Cyprus and Kedar, who are loyal to their gods, Judah has forsaken the LORD her God for worthless idols. Why had they forsaken the Lord and thus exchanged their freedom for slavery through alliances with Assyria and Egypt? 2:20-25 Verse 20 reads, “For of old I have broken your yoke and burst your bonds,” meaning that God had delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Or it may read, “For long ago you broke your yoke and burst your bonds; and you said, `I will not serve’” (RSV), in which case the meaning is that Judah threw off the divine restraints imposed by the law. In either case, the passage goes on to describe how degenerate the people became in their idolatry. God had planted them as a noble vine, but they had become degenerate shoots of an alien vine; their iniquity was ineradicable by soap; they were like a swift dromedary or a wild donkey, burning for sexual intercourse, hopelessly enamored with aliens. 2:26-37 When the house of Israel’s sin catches up with her and she cries for deliverance, her numberless gods will be helpless to save. In the meantime, the Lord remonstrates with her for unresponsiveness to chastening, freedom from divine restraint, forgetfulness of God, exceeding a harlot’s skill in sinning, destroying the poor innocents, yet all the while protesting innocence. God will punish them with exile for their trust in nations which He has rejected.