Jeremiah 30

Babylon." So he wrote back to Jerusalem to all the people there, especially addressing Zephaniah, the priest, reminding him of his responsibilities and of his duty to suppress such mad fellows as the Lord’s true prophets by imprisonment and the stocks. He especially named Jeremiah of Anathoth, who he said was assuming to be a prophet of the Lord among them. The reader will note the contemptuous tone of his description of the Lord’s true prophets, “For every man that is mad, and that maketh himself a prophet.” On receiving this letter, Zephaniah read it to the prophet Jeremiah. H. C.—God’s faithful prophets are here represented as prophets of their own making, usurpers of the office, and lay intruders, and as men that were mad, actuated by some demon, and not divinely inspired; or as distracted men, and men in a frenzy. Thus the characters of the false prophets are thrown upon the true ones. If this had been indeed their character, they ought to be bound as madmen and punished as pretenders, and therefore he concludes that Jeremiah must be so done to. He does not bid them examine whether Jeremiah could produce any proofs of his mission, and could make it to appear that he was not mad. H.

30-32. Hereupon the Lord gives Jeremiah a special message for this Shemaiah, which is sent to all the captives—a terrible warning to them all to beware how they encouraged the false prophets, how they implicated themselves in their wickedness, or in any wise gave heed to their falsehoods. It also denounced upon him the utter extermination of his family. God will punish him and his posterity. Thus this chapter affords yet other illustrations of the bold and daring impiety of the false prophets; of the pernicious and widespread results of their influence, and of the fearfully stringent measures which became necessary to eradicate this evil. H. C.

30:1, 2 THE word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD, the God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will turn again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. 4 And these are the words that the LORD spake concerning Israel and concerning Judah. 5 For thus saith the LORD: We have heard a voice of trembling, of fear, and not of peace. 6 Ask ye now, and see whether a man doth travail with child: wherefore do I see every man with his hands on his loins, as a woman in travail, and all faces are turned into paleness? 7 Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but 8 he shall be saved out of it. And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts, that I will break his yoke from off thy neck, and will burst thy bands; and strangers shall 9 no more serve themselves of him: but they shall serve the LORD their God, and David their 10 king, whom I will raise up unto them. Therefore fear thou not, O Jacob my servant, saith the LORD; neither be dismayed, O Israel: for, lo, I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from the land of their captivity; and Jacob shall return, and shall be quiet and at ease, and 11 none shall make him afraid. For I am with thee, saith the LORD, to save thee: for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have scattered thee, but I will not make a full end of thee; but I will correct thee with judgement, and will in no wise leave thee unpunished. 12, 13 For thus saith the LORD, Thy hurt is incurable, and thy wound grievous. There is none to plead thy cause, that thou mayest be bound up: thou hast no healing medicines. 14 All thy lovers have forgotten thee; they seek thee not: for I have wounded thee with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one; for the greatness of thine iniquity, 15 because thy sins were increased. Why criest thou for thy hurt? thy pain is incurable: for the greatness of thine iniquity, because thy sins were increased, I have done these things

16 unto thee. Therefore all they that devour thee shall be devoured; and all thine adversaries, every one of them, shall go into captivity; and they that spoil thee shall be a spoil, and all 17 that prey upon thee will I give for a prey. For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD; because they have called thee an outcast, saying, It 18 is Zion, whom no man seeketh after. Thus saith the LORD: Behold, I will turn again the captivity of Jacob’s tents, and have compassion on his dwelling places; and the city shall be 19 builded upon her own heap, and the palace shall remain after the manner thereof. And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of them that make merry: and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few; I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small. 20 Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their congregation shall be established before me, 21 and I will punish all that oppress them. And their prince shall be of themselves, and their ruler shall proceed from the midst of them; and I will cause him to draw near, and he shall approach unto me: for who is he that hath had boldness to approach unto me? saith the LORD. 22 And ye shall be my people, and I will be your God. 23 Behold, the tempest of the LORD, even his fury, is gone forth, a sweeping tempest: it shall 24 burst upon the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of the LORD shall not return, until he have executed, and till he have performed the intents of his heart: in the latter days ye shall understand it.

Chap. 30. This chapter and the next are in the same strain, and must be assumed to bear the same date. They manifestly contemplate the Captivity as fully begun, and were written for the reading and the comfort of the exiles already in their foreign land. For it should be noted that this is not a message to be pronounced orally to the people, but it is to be written in a book, so that it may be sent to the exiles as in the case of the letters contained in chap. 29. Thus written for the people in their captivity, its tone is mainly one of promise and of rich encouragement. H. C.

This undated prophecy may not be unreasonably presumed to have followed immediately after the preceding one, in which the restoration of the people from the Babylonish captivity is in direct terms foretold. From hence the transition is natural and easy to the more glorious and general restoration that was to take place in a more distant period, and was designed for the ultimate object of the national hopes and expectations. Both events are frequently thus connected together in the prophetic writings, and perhaps with this design, that when that which was nearest at hand should be accomplished it might afford the strongest and most satisfactory kind of evidence that the latter, how remote soever its period, would in like manner be brought about by the interposition of Providence in its due season. Blayney.

1-3. Verse 2 raises the question, How much is comprised in “all the words I have spoken to thee”? Verse 4 seems designed to answer the question and to suggest the limitation—viz., to these words which follow in this immediate connection, including this chapter and probably the next (31). Hence it does not include all that we now have in the Book of Jeremiah. At another time he was directed to write out all his prophecies. (See chap. 36:2.) Verse 3 gives the key note of this chapter and the next—the great elementary promise of restoration from the captivity to their own land. This would be naturally addressed to the exiles. H. C.

3. I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah. Israel and Judah having been carried away by two distinct captivities, into different parts of the world, several prophecies of the Old Testament not only foretell the restoration of each of them, but likewise their reunion after their restoration. (See Ezek. 37: 6-22; Hos. 1:11.) W. Lowth.

The present physical, moral, and social condition of the Jews must be a miracle. We can come to no other conclusion. Had they continued from the commencement of the Christian era down to the present hour in some such national state in which we find the Chinese, walled off from the rest of the human family, and by their selfishness on a national scale, and their repulsions of alien elements, resisting every assault from without in the shape of hostile invasion, and from an overpowering national pride, forbidding the introduction of new and foreign customs, we should not see so much mystery interwoven with their existence. But this is not their state—far from it. They are neither a united and independent nation, nor a parasitic province. They are peeled, and scattered, and crumbled into fragments, but, like the broken globules of quicksilver, instinct with a cohesive power, ever ready to amalgamate. Geography, arms, genius, politics, and foreign help do not explain their existence; time and climate and customs equally fail to unravel it. None of these are or can be the springs of their perpetuity. They have been spread over every part of the habitable globe; they have lived under the régime of every dynasty; they have shared the protection of just laws, the proscriptions of cruel ones, and witnessed the rise and progress of both; they have used every tongue, and have lived in every latitude. The snows of Lapland have chilled, and the suns of Africa scorched them. They have drunk the Tiber, the Thames, the Jordan, the Mississippi. In every century, and every degree of latitude and longitude, we find a Jew. It is not so with any other race. Empires the most illustrious have fallen, and buried the men that constructed them; but the Jew has lived among the ruins, a living monument of indestructibility. Persecution has unsheathed the sword and lighted the fagot. Papal superstition and Moslem barbarism have smote with unsparing ferocity; penal rescripts and deep prejudice have visited on them the most unrighteous chastisement, and notwithstanding all, they survive.

Like their own bush on Mount Horeb, Israel has continued in the flames, but unconsumed. They are the aristocracy of Scripture, bereft of their coronets—princes in degradation. A Babylonian, a Theban, a Spartan, an Athenian, are names known in history only; their shadows alone haunt the world and flicker on its tablets. A Jew walks every street, dwells in every capital, traverses every exchange, and relieves the monotony of the nations of the earth. The race has inherited the heirloom of immortality, incapable of extinction or amalgamation. Like streamlets from a common head, and composed of waters of a peculiar nature, they have flowed along every stream, without blending with it, or receiving its color or its flavor, and traversed the surface of the globe, to the close of the many centuries, peculiar, distinct, alone. The Jewish race at this day is the most striking seal of the truth of the Sacred Oracles. There is no possibility of accounting for their perpetual isolation, their depressed but distinct being on any grounds save those revealed in the records of truth. Their aggregate and individual character is as remarkable as their circumstances. Meanness the most abject and pride the most overbearing—the degradation of helots, and yet a conscious and a manifest sense of the dignity of a royal priesthood; looking back along many thousand years to ancestry beside which that of our peers and princes is but of yesterday; regarding justly Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as their great progenitors, and pressing forward on the wings of faith, and hope, and promise to a long-expected day when they, now kings and princes in disguise, shall become so indeed by a manifestation the most glorious and a dispensation the most sublime. The people are a perpetual miracle—a living echo of heaven’s holy tones, prolonged from generation to generation. Fraser’s Magazine.

I behold the unconverted Gentiles barring the path to the cross for the sons of Israel, and I can understand the strange logic of the Epistle to the Romans, that only when the fulness of the Gentiles shall have come in will the hardness of Israel give way. They have been scattered to the ends of the earth; they have been ground between the millstones of race prejudices; but they have maintained their lineage and blood, and they have never ceased to be proud of their traditions. The future has its mission for them, but our hands must break the bars, and beat down the gates that have hitherto kept them back. Even in their exile, they are “beloved for the fathers’ sakes,” and their conversion can be nothing less than “life from the dead,” the herald of the millennial reign. Behrends.

4-7. This passage contemplates the exile, with its antecedents, as “the day of Jacob’s trouble,” and has for its special object to say, “Yet he shall be saved out of it.” H. C.

7. Alas! for that day is great. The word day often comprehends a succession of time, in which a whole series of events is transacted; so it here contains the whole time of the siege and taking of Jerusalem, the destruction of the city and Temple, and the carrying away the people captive. This is described as a time of great tribulation, in which it was an earnest of the day of judgment, called the great and terrible day of the Lord (Joel 2:31). W. Lowth.

8. “In that day” is not precisely the time of Jacob’s trouble, said in verse 7 to be great, but is rather the day in which he shall be saved out of that trouble.

9. The Jews shall serve, not the king of Babylon, but the royal son of David, their own King Messiah. This would be really serving the Lord their God, both because this King Messiah is Himself God, and because He receives His kingdom from the Father. Both modes of expression are used in the Scriptures. According to His oft-repeated promise, the Lord will raise up this glorious king for them in His own due time. (See the same phraseology, Hos. 3:5; Ezek. 34:23, 24; 37:24, and the same essential ideas in 2 Sam. 7:12-16; Ps. 2:6-8; 89:19-37.)

10. That Jacob and Israel are grouped together in this promise looks to the restoration of the true Israel, without respect to the revolt and separation into two kingdoms. We should quite miss the sense of this promise if we were to restrict it to the restoration of the Ten Tribes in the literal sense from their Assyrian exile.

11. Those nations, Assyria and Chaldea, that once scattered and enslaved the Hebrew people have long since become extinct. But God’s ancient people still exist, and, what is more, the true Israel has already grown so as to pervade the great civilized nations of the world with the name of Christ. H. C.

Though I make a full end of all nations, yet will I not make a full end of thee. We have here ocular proof of prophecy accomplished in an instance without a parallel. It was repeatedly foretold, both in the Old and New Testament, that, for the rejection and murder of their Messiah, the Jews should be dispersed into all countries; yet that they should not be swallowed up and lost among their conquerors, but should still subsist to latest times a distinct people. By Jeremiah God declared, “He would make an end of the nations,” their oppressors, “but He would not make an end of them.” It cannot be said this prediction was written since the event; and certainly an occurrence more singular or improbable could not have been predicted. In the course of human affairs, who hath heard such a thing? Yet so it is. The mighty monarchies of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome are vanished like the shadows of the evening or the phantoms of the night. Their places know them no more. Nothing remains of them but their names; while this little despised people, strangely secure, without a friend or protector amid the wreck of empires, oppressed, persecuted, harassed always, by edicts and executioners, by murders and massacres, hath outlived the very ruins of them all. “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” Behold then a sign and a wonder; the accomplishment of prophecy in a standing miracle. Contemplate the sight as it deserves; and be not faithless, but believing. Bp. Horne.

14,15. In even a cursory review of it, one is struck with the boldness with which the Bible claims the infliction of sorrow as the intentional work of God. We find no adroit hiding of the Divine hand, no obtrusion of second causes to relieve its stern, often its appalling procedures. It is the way of science to evade the name of God. The way of revelation is to proclaim and exult in it, even when the deed done makes the ears of men tingle at its tragic story. Phelps.

16. All that prey upon thee will I give for a prey. The Assyrians were destroyed by the Babylonians; the Babylonians by the Medes and Persians; the Egyptians and Persians were destroyed by the Greeks, under Alexander. All these nations are now extinct; but the Jews, as a distinct people, still exist. A. C.

16,17. The logical connection indicated by “therefore” is this: Because thy case is desperate, past all help from thyself, and because thy lovers—the heathen whose friendship thou wert seeking, and whose gods thou wert serving—all fail thee, I will Myself undertake for thee—will devour those that devoured thee, will drive into exile those who have exiled thee, and spoil those that have spoiled thee. But unto thee will I restore health in place of thy sickness, and healing in place of thy wounds, moved to this by jealousy for mine own great name, because the nations have taunted thee as an outcast, and called thee “that Zion for whom no man cares.” H. C.

17. I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord. The words that were spoken by Jeremiah to console the hearts of Israel had a deeper significance for the Israel of all ages. The ministers of Christ stand forth with a heaven sent commission to restore; it is the leading character of all their teaching. It is even felt to be so by those who reject it. And I know no more melancholy contemplation than is afforded by the sight of the numbers who, feeling the necessity, and even believing the reality, of this restoring efficacy, support with all their hearts and souls the existence of the Christian churches, that are formed to minister to its operations; acknowledge in all their words, and in many of their actions, the beauty and perfectness of our doctrine, as distinguished from all other kinds of moral instruction; contend for it earnestly in conversation, public and private; declare unreservedly for church-teaching in preference to all other teaching; and yet—as if no churches existed—as if no real change had come upon the spirit of things by the preaching of Olivet and the death of Calvary—live and move, devoted Christians—without Christianity! W. A. B.

18,19. The promise of restoration is here renewed in slightly differing phrase, but in the same general sense. “Captivity,” as usual, in the sense of captives. The city shall be rebuilt on her original hill, although this word rendered “heap” may mean pile of ruins. “Hill” is its better established and more usual sense. In the remote future, and through the spiritual fulfilment of these precious promises, the city of God shall be immensely enlarged, beautified, and glorified. Externally considered, the restored Temple and city under Zerubbabel, and perhaps even under Herod the Great, never reached its magnificence in the days of Solomon. The joy and peace of the restored people in the days of Zerubbabel, and of the prophet Zechariah, were memorable rather as a token and pledge of Messianic times and blessings, than as being in themselves very great, either absolutely or relatively to the times of David and Solomon. When we cannot find an adequate fulfilment for a prophecy like this in its external and literal application, we are certainly justified in assuming its outlook onward to the better, brighter days of King Messiah, and especially so when, as here, this King Messiah is manifestly present to the prophet’s thought. (See verse 9.) This view of the passage before us is supported by various parallel passages, in which the multiplying and glorifying of the future Israel stands among the prominent features of Messianic prophecy. (Cf. Ezek. 37:26; 36:37, 38, and Zech. 10:8-10.) H. C.

21. The immediate reference is to Zerubbabel and the elders who returned from the Captivity; but there is a larger significance than any merely human personage could exhaust or satisfactorily correspond to. There can be no doubt as to the Messianic character of this promise. But it is precisely the vagueness of the reference, the primary uncertainty as to who it was to be in whom all the hope of Israel was to be realized, that constituted the moral force of the prediction. In Israel was the secular government to be identified with and crowned by the moral and spiritual; but to the very last was it kept in reserve as to whether or not the kingdom thus foretold was to be of this world. Jesus Christ had Himself to declare the real essence and nature of His kingdom. He constituted the ideal Ruler of Israel in His relation to His subjects. He was to be of the same kindred. A stronger guarantee of the Divine favor could not be given. No foreigner was to hold permanent sway over the Israel of God. In one of themselves the holy people would find a legitimate centre for loyal attachment and patriotic devotion. That from their own midst their Prince should spring was proof that their independence libert" and national individuality should be preserved. He would therefore represent its honor, and secure for himself the strongest personal attachment. The hopes of the race would be embodied in such a personage, who would vitally perpetuate its glory. He was to be allied to them in their experience and sympathies. As their fellow-countryman he will understand their aims and aspirations. By the vicissitudes of their fortune his sympathies will be drawn forth, and he will share the enthusiasm of their future. In Jesus Christ these conditions were fulfilled. M.

He shall approach unto Me. The words admit of being applied, with the greatest propriety, to the Lord Jesus Christ. The prophecy contained in the thirtieth and thirty-first chapters looks forward to Gospel times, and has an ultimate respect to the final restoration of the Jews, and their conversion to the Messiah, of whom Zerubbabel was an illustrious type. The prophet, foreseeing the coming of the Messiah, and deserving His character, spake with an air of surprise: “And who is He that hath boldness to approach unto Me?” None ever approached unto God so nearly, or under the same character, as He did. He, considered as man, was taken into an intimate personal union with the Deity, so as to become Immanuel, or “God with us;” and He approached to God, in the office of Mediator, to make peace between the offended Majesty of Heaven and His sinful creatures. R. Hall.

22. “Ye shall be My people, and I will be your God,” is the crowning promise, full of richest significance, most compactly expressed. They shall meet all the relations of a people peculiarly the Lord’s. He will be everything to them that a God can be or need be. What can be better than this?

23,24. With only slight variations these words occurred (chap. 23:19, 20). There they looked to the judgments of God brought on the land and cities of Judah for their sins through the agency of the Chaldeans. Here they must be taken in the same sense and with the same application. In this view they are parallel to verses 5-7, and are introduced here for their moral bearing on the hearts of the exiles, who amid the richest promises of mercy must not forget how terrible God’s judgments have been upon their countrymen for their great sins against Him. The last clause, “In the latter days ye shall consider it,” intimates the reason for introducing these verses here. It is wholesome and well to think of those fearful judgments even in the latter days of promise and hope. H. C.