Sunset Repentance

Their prayer, while authentic, also seems disingenuous. They pray and confess their sins in verse 7, and they acknowledge that God is among them, but something odd is sitting in these two bookends. They accuse God of being like a traveler who will only stay for a night, just passing through (v. 8). Further, they accuse him of being like a weak warrior (v. 9). Sure he is a warrior, but they say he is passive; he can’t help.

While this is a confession, it’s certainly a confused one. In fact, God has been present with them for a long time and has pursued them! He is anything but a transient traveler or a weak warrior! This is a twisted take on reality. Imagine Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, is rewriting the story of the prodigal son. In this version the prodigal son wakes up in the pigpen and wonders why the dad won’t come visit him. Why is the dad so passive? Why is the dad so weak? It’s laughable, but Judah has been so sinful for so long, they can’t even think straight. So God responds.

Notice the Hebrew parallelism of verse 10. The line that God speaks is reinforced and strengthened by its parallel. This makes for a provocative condemnation and is a synopsis of the whole chapter in one verse. The force of the poetry is, “It’s not just that they wander, but they never put their feet up to rest from all their wandering.” God’s response is, “It’s not only that I do not accept them, but I am remembering the guilt and punishing the sin.” Judah was not just sinning; they were tirelessly sinning. God is not just ignoring them; he is actively punishing them. Neither party is passive. God will be as active in his punishment as they are in their sin. It’s so bad that God tells Jeremiah not even to pray for them. God is done. Prayer won’t have any effect.

So, after reading this, how do we reconcile this with the earlier idea that when God gives a warning it implies that there is hope? There seems to be absolutely no hope! Let’s address that question at the end of the next plea and response.

There is another plea and response, but interjected between these two pairs is a specific problem God wants to address, namely, the lying prophets. So we will look at the second plea, but first let’s read about this specific prayer request Jeremiah brings to God.

Jeremiah 14:13-18

The problem, Jeremiah asserts, about God’s condemnation of Judah is that the prophets who are supposedly speaking for God are deceptive (v. 13). God is threatening punishment while they are promising peace. Jeremiah sees this as an inconsistent, confusing message.

God responds to Jeremiah (vv. 14-16). The prophets will meet the same end that they are predicting will never happen. They are, unwittingly, prophets of irony. They will die by the judgment they do not believe exists. You get the sense that they treat God as an impersonal force. However, God is real. He can really be offended, and he can enforce judgment on those who disobey him.

God is not just creating an irony; he is responding to one. The real irony here of course is not that God is going to give them what they do not think exists but that they are representatives of God who do not represent God. They were to be ambassadors, yet they went out—unsent, without any authority, without permission or commission—and spoke for God. An ambassador has no authority when he speaks on his own. By definition an ambassador represents another person. So God responds (vv. 17-18).

And here again we see the stupidity of sin. The confusing message comes from prophets who go to a “land they do not know.” This is perhaps a reference to exile, or, perhaps more likely, it is a telling indictment of their stupidity. They are leaders who do not know where they are going. An old T-shirt said, “I’m their leader. Which way did they go?” This might be laughable on a shirt, but it was tragically true in this case. The prophets were really pawns at the hands of sin. The people chose the life they wanted to live and then affirmed and encouraged the prophets that told them what they already wanted to know.

Jeremiah 14:19–15:9

Here is another confusing confession. The confession here seems authentic on the surface. The people cry out to God. They acknowledge their sin and express their concern that the heavens are silent (vv. 19-20). Then they do something good but, in this context, too late. They invoke the name of God (v. 21).

God’s name was sacred. It was only spoken in the most serious ways. So they say that their motivation for confession is the name of God. They then acknowledge that only Yahweh, their covenant God, has the power to allow drought or bring rain (v. 22).

Confession is the right prayer, God’s name is the right motivation, and that only God can do it is the right hope. It’s all correct, accurate. The problem is that it is just too late. God responds in 15:1-9. Judah will experience “four kinds of judgment.”

There is not much else to say. Reading this leaves one breathless. Even if the two leading intercessor-prophets of a bygone era, Moses and Samuel, would plead on their behalf, it would be fruitless. Their end is destruction, and God will not change his course.

This challenges a notion we mentioned back in the first chapter, namely, that each warning was a mercy. A warning, by definition, is a means of hope, of escape from pending judgment, yet here it seems that there is no escape. So, how is this merciful in any way? Well, in its immediate context, it’s not. Perhaps you have heard someone use the patently obvious phrase, It is what it is. Yet in this case, it applies perfectly. The judgment of God is the judgment of God. But here it is important to remember that preexilic Judah is not the only audience.

Judah, like Israel, would go into exile. The Babylonians would take them into captivity. The Babylonians would be taken over by the Assyrians and then eventually by the Persians. Then comes the Persian King Darius who would decide, providentially prompted, that the people should return to their land (2 Chr 36:22-23). When they did return to their land, they were led by Ezra the scribe, who would skillfully study the law (Ezra 7:10) and then faithfully declare it (Neh 8:1-8). It is logical to assume that a newly returning people, reenergized in their love for God, would read Jeremiah’s words. So the words of Jeremiah were written to those coming out of exile as well as those going into exile. For those going in there was no hope. For those coming out this was a great warning. They did not want to face the wrath of God in a similar way.

Jeremiah 14:1–15:9 was written for the moment and for later. Right now is later. Meaning, if you will, there have been at least three intended audiences for this text: the preexilic nation, the postexilic nation, and us. You. Me. So what does this passage teach us? What is the meaning in front of the text?

What we know about the seriousness of sin is explored by what God has revealed about himself since the time of Jeremiah:

Read Ezekiel 34 and you will see how God feels about shepherds who do not act like shepherds. He rejects them because he loves his sheep. Read John 10 to discover how Jesus is the opposite of a lying preacher. He is the good Shepherd.

A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. This is not just a truism; it is a foundational principle for interpreting the Old Testament. We read a history of a people because we want to learn how we ourselves should be warned. The book of Hebrews is written using the nation of Israel as a warning to us individually as believers. As Paul would say explicitly in 1 Corinthians 10:11, “These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the ages have come.”

God hates sin. God punishes every sin that has ever been committed. Either the punishment for our sin is taken upon us, or it is redirected from God toward Christ on the cross, where he absorbed the weight of God’s wrath for the sins of the world. The cross is at once hope and warning. Yes, the cross is Christ reaching up to heaven and down to us. But the stretched arms of Jesus are a warning. Jesus’s arms are held up to warn us to stay back, not to enter into the hell of God’s wrath from which there is no return—from which no one at all, in heaven or on earth, can save us. So read and be warned.