If there is one prophet with whom every student of Scripture should be on intimate terms it is Jeremiah. His personal struggle with the call of God, his courage in the face of opposition, his hope of God's redemption through judment and afterward make him an irreplaceable resource for Christian life and thought.
David Allan Hubbarb
Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, "Now, I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant."
Jer 1:9-10
Jeremiah was, as a prophet, appointed to "pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build up and to plant" (1:10). These very words of his appointment speak of crisis and radical transformation. Jeremiah, and his audience, did indeed lived through the most cataclysmic period in the history of the nation. By the end of the period recorded in the book, all the institutional structures that stood when Jeremiah began his ministry had been destroyed, the last kings of Judah had died or taken captive, the majority of Judah's population in exile, mostly in Babylon but also in Egypt. Jeremiah himself was carried against his will into exile in Egypt (43:6). For the next forty years the land was a desolation, of which we know nothing from Scriptures; what little we do know are scrapings the archaeologists are able to piece together from the ruins. So devastated was the land, it came to be called "the Babylonian emptiness."
Jeremiah's message remains a powerful, and often neglected, reminder to us today, who so often live like Jeremiah's audience — blind to the downward spiraling madness they thought was life, indifferent to the destruction they were heading towards, and deaf to the call of faith and reason.
©Alberith, 2016