Jeremiah 19
Butler18. Then said they, Come, and let us devise devices. The people to whom Jeremiah had delivered his message from God seem to have been incensed against him on much the same ground as the Jews were in aftertimes against our Saviour and His apostles. They had persuaded themselves that God had intended for them a perpetual establishment; and would accordingly provide them with a constant succession of men in all departments to preserve and maintain the general welfare—viz., priests to direct all matters of law and religion; wise statesmen to manage their civil concerns, and prophets to make known to them the immediate will of God on all important and extraordinary occasions. Upon this presumption they inferred that Jeremiah, who foretold the contrary, was a false prophet, and as such they determined to punish him. Blayney.—The people turn against Jeremiah to counteract his mission, and to accuse him before the civil authorities, “smiting him with the tongue.” They will not believe his affirmation that their priests, wise men and prophets were deceiving them, and really had no word from the Lord.
19,20. The prophet looks to his God for help in this emergency. He implores the Lord to hear what they say against him. He bears his case to God with confidence, because conscious of having sought to do right, faithfully and benevolently as toward both God and the people. He had done them good; shall they be allowed to requite him with evil?
21-23. The spirit of this prayer is due to the prophet’s deep sympathy with truth and righteousness; to his sense of what the cause and honor of God demand, and to his consciousness that he had honestly and with much benevolent self-sacrifice labored to reclaim and save the people, albeit they were proving themselves hopelessly and madly incorrigible. Hence what else could he do? Shall he succumb and make up his mind to let wickedness rule in rampant defiance of God and of all righteousness? Nay, verily, there are sometimes imperative reasons why guilty men should be given up to exterminating judgments. Justice demands it, and even Mercy has no more to say in bar or even delay of retribution. H. C.
It is important to remember that he is distinctly conscious of having had good motives toward these enemies. He knew that God meant their good, and he, in speaking, had meant the same. It must be noticed also that, whatever his feelings, he expresses them as a prayer to God. He does not take retaliation into his own hands. His rights and interests, whatever they are, he leaves in the hands of Jehovah. He has, indeed, his own estimate as to what his enemies deserve; but he seeks that they may get their deserts in the way of manifestly Divine judgments. Y.
Chap. 19. This chapter and the next are closely connected in time and occasion, the former being the prophetic message and the latter a history of some of its results in the persecution of Jeremiah and his consequent mental conflicts. The horrid forms of the existing idolatry, as well as the persecution of the prophet, must locate it in time after Josiah’s death, and indeed down very near to the end of the kingdom. The siege described (verse 9) must have been the final one in the time of Zedekiah. Probably this message did not precede the final siege by any long interval. The occasion is one: its circumstances are solemnly impressive and significant. The prophet is directed to purchase an earthen bottle; to take some of the elders of the people and of the priests with him to Tophet in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and there deliver his message, predicting the utter ruin of the city, fearful slaughter, terrible famine, burying in Tophet till there shall be no more room for graves; and then to break the bottle before their eyes as a symbol of the complete though temporary destruction of the city and nation. He then returns from Tophet to the city; goes into the Temple, and there repeats before all the people the substance of this fearful threatening. H. C.
1-11. Parables need not be in words; they may be acted; and sometimes men inspired of God have, instead of telling, acted them with dramatic power. “Go,” said the Lord to Jeremiah, “and get a potter’s earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests; and go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, and proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee.” To his summons they assemble, and the preacher appears—nor book, nor speech in hand, but an earthen vessel. He addresses them. Pointing across the valley to Jerusalem, with busy thousands in its streets, its massive towers and noble Temple, glorious and beautiful beneath a southern sky, he says, speaking as an ambassador of God: “I will make this city desolate, and a hissing: every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss: I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, in the siege and straitness wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them." He pauses, raises his arm, holds up the potter’s vessel, dashes it on the ground, and, planting his foot on its shivered fragments, he adds: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, Even so will I break this people and this city as one breaketh a potter’s vessel.” The scene, the aspect of the man, the beautiful but fragile vase, the crash, the shivered fragments, these all-important aids to the speaker, were calculated to make an impression through the senses and the fancy, much deeper than the mere message could possibly have done. Guthrie.
This chapter is filled with these awful warnings of the prophet. And they are made the more awful by the reflection that, fitted as they were to rouse the most careless and hardened, yet they failed with those to whom they were addressed. And so this sad chapter teaches us such lessons as these: The earnest purpose of God to save man from his sin. Hence these warnings. The awfully hardening power of the sin which could despise them. What wise methods are to be employed in the endeavor to arouse and alarm the ungodly. C.
4, 5. “They have filled the place with the blood of innocent ones.” This can mean nothing less than burning to death great multitudes of young children. Is it strange that God should doom the nation to a most fearful ruin as the least He could do to express His detestation of these murders, and as His only hope for redeeming a remnant from idolatry, since the nation as such were demoralized by this sin past hope?
7,8. So usually in God’s order the cup of madness comes before the cup of doom. First wisdom and then might would fail them. That the city should not only be desolate, but be an object of scorn to all passers-by, indicates that the Gentile nations had some general knowledge of the guilt and crimes which had provoked God to these fearful visitations of His wrath. A great city and a strong nation blotted out from among the nations, and lying desolate for seventy years, must be in any age of the world a fearfully solemn and impressive moral lesson, testifying before even heathen minds to the wrath of their gods. Must we not suppose that to some extent they knew the ingratitude, the rebellion against their own God, the horrible immoralities and the murders of innocent children which had called forth His vengeance?
9. This very doom—parents eating the flesh of their offspring—had been predicted long before as Jehovah’s curse upon them for these sins. (See Lev. 26: 29 and De. 28: 53.) This siege continued one year and a half (Jer. 52: 4-7), “Until the famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people of the land.” In his Lamentations (4: 10) the prophet has recorded the fulfilment of this dreadful doom: “The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.” Verily the hand of retributive justice was in this, that parents who had thrust their own sons and daughters into the fire to burn them to death for Baal and Moloch should be straitened by war, siege and famine, to boil and eat their own children! H. C.
11. As the bottle was easily, irresistibly and irrecoverably broken, so shall Judah and Jerusalem be broken by the Chaldean army (verse 11). They depended much upon the firmness of their constitution and the fixedness of their courage, which they thought hardened them like a vessel of brass; but the prophet shows that all that did but harden them like a vessel of earth, which, though hard, is brittle, and sooner broken than that which is not so hard. Though they were made vessels of honor, still they were vessels of earth, and so they shall be made to know, if they dishonor God and themselves, and serve not the purposes for which they were made. It is God Himself who made them, that resolves to unmake them: I will break this people, and this city—dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel—the doom of the heathen (Ps. 2: 9; Rev. 2: 27); but now Jerusalem’s doom (Isa. 30: 14). A potter’s vessel, when once broken, cannot be made whole again—cannot be cured, so the word is. The ruin of Jerusalem shall be an utter ruin; no hand can repair it but His that broke it; and if they return to Him, though He has torn, He will heal.
12. “I will make this city as Tophet.” As they had filled the valley of Tophet with the slain which they sacrificed to their idols, so God will fill the whole city with the slain, that shall fall as sacrifices to the justice of God.
15. Whatever men may think to the contrary, the executions of Providence will fully answer the predictions of the word; and God will appear as terrible against sin and sinners as the Scripture makes Him; nor shall the unbelief of men make either His promise or His threatenings of no effect. H.
The people are repeatedly apprised that these judgments are coming, and must come because they are hardening their heart and refusing to hear the words of the Lord. Everything here indicates that the great crisis is at hand. The
threatened judgments have nearly reached the climax of horrors. Their very recital makes one’s ears tingle! What must the dread reality have been? Verily, the Lord is a God of judgment; and hardened sinners have cause to tremble before Him! H. C.