The Prophet Jeremiah by Rembrandt
Nobody volunteers to be a prophet. I heard this recently from a Lutheran pastor, and thought about Moses, Isaiah, and of course, Jonah, all of whom went to various lengths to get out of the job.
It’s not hard to see why. Telling people what they don’t want to hear is always difficult, and the prophets got to tell people in some unique ways that often involved their own suffering, and traditionally, martyrdom.
Take Jeremiah for an example. The northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed about 100 years before Jeremiah got the call to announce the impending doom of Judah. He served as a prophet for about 40 years – his entire life, in other words.
And he got some specific instructions concerning how his life would differ from those around him. He would not get married or have children. He would not attend weddings or funerals. (Jeremiah 16 :1-13) The first was essentially a death sentence for an Israelite – at this point most future hope was centered on children. The second meant Jeremiah was absent from the most important social events of his culture. The reason: there was no point in getting married, having kids, celebrating other people’s weddings, or even mourning the dead, because soon Judah would be destroyed. “You won’t get to enjoy your marriage,” Jeremiah’s absence said, “and soon there will be so many dead it will be impossible to mourn them all.”
Yikes. Kind of a downer.
Jeremiah is fairly unique in that we get to see at least some of his reaction to his vocation, in passages like these:
“Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable? Will You indeed be to me like a deceptive stream, with water that is unreliable?” – Jeremiah 15:18
“O Lord, you deceived me and I was deceived; you have overcome me and prevailed!” – Jeremiah 20:7
Are we uncomfortable yet? Does this seem a little too honest? Do we not like the idea of discontented prophets? Do we not like our own feelings of distrusting or disbelieving God when we feel like He’s pulled the rug out from under us? Do we not like the way God doesn’t seem to line up with His reputation for being a God of love and justice?
What do we do then?
Jeremiah 20:9 is instructive – “But if I say, ‘I will not remember Him or speak anymore in His name,’ then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones; and I am weary of holding it in, and I cannot endure it.”
Two things:
1) Jeremiah apparently tried to quit
2) It didn’t take
When you feel like your bone marrow is on fire if you aren’t doing your job, that’s a pretty good indication that you have strong feelings about it. And however much Jeremiah hated his job – he had to do it.
And it’s a good thing he did. In his lifetime Babylon took anybody who was anybody – king, princes, priests, craftsmen – and they went in exile to Babylon. Ten years later the Babylonians came back and burned Jerusalem and Solomon's temple to the ground.
In an ancient worldview, there would normally be only one way to interpret this. If two countries fought, it wasn’t just the armies fighting, it was their gods. If Egypt beat Assyria in battle, it meant Egypt’s gods were stronger. Simple.
So when Babylon conquers Yahweh’s country, and burns down His temple, the most natural interpretation for Babylonians and Jews would have been that Babylon’s gods beat Yahweh, and possibly that Yahweh was dead. The Jews in exile could literally look out their windows in Babylon and see the temples of the gods who beat their God.
Except…there was this prophet named Jeremiah. He had told them over and over that this would happen, and that it was in reality Yahweh’s plan. Jeremiah also said Yahweh would return them from exile (something that never happened to anybody before). And maybe, just maybe, Jeremiah was right. After all, hadn’t Yahweh done it before, thousands of years ago, with another unwilling prophet who came to a foreign country and said “Let my people go?” God seemed to have this pattern of re-creating His people from seemingly impossible circumstances. Slavery. Idolatry. Exile.
So, thanks Jeremiah. You had a rough go of it. But through you God did something that doesn’t happen except when a person gets a message from beyond the confines of this world, when there is a fire in their bones that has no natural explanation – through you God gave His people hope.
