Jeremiah 23 & 24

Chapter 23

Verses 5-6: The days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up to David a righteous branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The LORD of Righteousness.

• Isaiah 4:2--In that day the Branch of the LORD will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel.
• Isaiah 9:7--Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.
• Isaiah 11:1--A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
• Matthew 1:21-23--She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. All this took place to fulfill what the LORD had said through the prophet: "The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel"--which means "God with us."
• Romans 3: 21-22--But now a righteousness from God, apart from the law, has been made known, to which the law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference..."

Verses 16-18: This is what the LORD Almighty says: "Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you; they fill you with false hopes. They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. They keep saying to those who despise me, 'The LORD says: You will have peace.' And to all who follow the stubbornness of their hearts they say, 'No harm will come to you.' But which of them has stood in the council of the LORD to see or to hear his word? Who has listened and heard his word?

• I believe we see a lot of this today. Religious "leaders" who don't want to offend anyone do not report fully the life the God would have His followers lead.
• "Visions from their own minds" give me the impression that these "leaders" twist the Word to fit their own pre-conceived notions. I believe this happens a lot, and not just in malicious ways but in totally innocent ways. Clearly, however, it is not appropriate to add or subtract material details from Scripture.
• "And to all who follow the stubbornness of their hearts..." is quite an appropriate fragment. In an age of following your heart, this snippet says a lot about the hear which the world would have us believe is worthy to be followed. The heart is stubborn, at least mine is, and it's easy for me to "follow it" while thinking I'm following God. The heart has a way of convincing us that we are following God when all we're really doing is pleasing ourselves.
• There's a lot here in these verses, and I've not even begun to scratch the surface of what these passages have to say about "lying prophets".

Verses 26-32:

This passage is more of the LORD's disgust with "lying prophets." These prophets say things that are "the delusions of" the prophets' own minds. But it's even more sinister than that. God knows that these delusions have a foundation in the lying prophets' desire to cause their parishoners to notice the prophets rather than God. They are power-hungry. A big problem is these prophets give God credit for their own delusional words which masks the fact that they are truly speaking on their own and for their own gain.

Verses 35-36--This is what each of you keeps on saying to his friend or relative: 'What is the LORD's answer?' or 'What has the LORD spoken?' But you must not mention 'the oracle of the LORD' again, because every man's own word becomes his oracle and so you distort the words of the living God, the LORD Almighty, our God.

• Again, we see God calling it like it is, showing us how easy it is to distort God's word. In fact, it's so easy that everyone does it.
• This really give pause to me as to how I present God's word to others, and this is a main reason why we should accompany our scritpture reading & teaching with prayer for wisdom & discernment.

Chapter 24:

This chapter deals with God using two baskets of figs to illustrate how He will deal with the people. One basket is full of good figs suitable for eating, the other basket is full of figs that aren't good enough to be eaten. God says he regards as good the exiles from Judah whom He relocated to Babylon. He makes the promis that He will return them to their land and "give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD."

The poor figs God equates with Zedekiah, King of Judah, his officials, and those survivors scattered about. The promise God makes to these people is not a pleasant one. It's one that will keep them dishoveled for a long time, and one in wich famine, oppression, and war will follow as well.

Jeremiah: Powerful Verses

16:17--My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is is their sin concealed from my eyes.

16:19-21--O LORD, my strength and my fortress, my refuge in time of distress, to you the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say, "Our fathers possessed nothing but false gods, worthless idols that did them no good. Do men make their own gods? Yes, but they are not gods!" Therefore I will teach them--this time I will teach them my power and might. Then they will know that my name is the LORD.

17:5--This is what the LORD says: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD."

17:9--The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve.

Jeremiah 6-9

Jeremiah 6:

• God's wrath is upon Jerusalem.

Verse 6: This is what the LORD Almighty says: "Cut down the trees and build siege ramps against Jerusalem. This city must be punished; it is filled with oppression."

Verse 8: Take warning, O Jerusalam, or I will turn away from you and make your land desolate so no one can live in it.

• Both of these verses show God's displeasure with Jerusalem. He is warning them and describing to them how He will allow other nations to surround them.
• He also talks about how the city must be punished due to its oppression.

Verse 10: To whom can I speak and give warning? Who will listen to me? Their ears are closed so they cannot hear. The word of the LORD is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it.

• There are many references to the inability of the Israelites to hear the LORD and to understand how good He is to them.
• He goes a step further saying that His word is offensive to them. It's offensive to many today as well. At certain times, none of us wants to hear it. It confronts us and makes us uncomfortable.

Verses 13 & 14: "From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace."

• Basically, it appears that God cannot find even one who is not greedy. He doesn't discriminate in these verses. He calls out everyone, including the poor, including the righteous, including the clergy.
• He also remarks that the people do not take these matters seriously. They cry out for peace but aren't willing to do the hard work that true peace requires.

Verse 20: "What do I care about incense from Sheba or sweet calamus from a distant land? Your burn offerings are not acceptable; your sacrifices do not please me."

• Even in a culture where the law required very specific sacrifices to be made as penance for sin, God rejects the Israelites' sacrifices.
• He likely does this because their hearts have turned away from Him. They only repent when they are in trouble. They only pay attention to God when they are in trouble.
• Their actions are unaffected by their ceremonial sacrifices. There's no change from within.

Jeremiah 7:

Verses 1-8: Here, Jeremiah is instructed to again warn the Israelites about their actions & their false gods. It's interesting because he mentions that the people do come to the temple to worship, and they obviously feel good & righteous about this worship, however, Jeremiah informs them that LORD does not recognize their worship since their actions are in conflict with their worship.

Verses 9-11: God asks them boldly if they will continue to seek after false gods while at the same time arriving at the temple that bears His name. He refers to their safety in the context that they feel "safe" in their wrongdoing in the temple. He tells them He is paying attention.

Verses 21-24: God tells the Israelites to do what is forbidden: to eat their burnt offerings. He's making the point that His instructions to the Israelites as He led them out of Egypt were not strictly centered around the sacrifices of custom, but that His people are to obey Him so that He can give them life to the full. Instead, He said that the people went backward as opposed to going forward. After such an incrdible deliverance, the Israelites rebelled from their Deliverer. I can relate to this.

Jeremiah 8:

Verse 2: "They will be exposed to the sun and the moon and all the stars, which they have loved & served and which they have followed & consulted and worshipped. They will not be gathered up or buried, but will be like refuse lying on the ground."

• The irony is heavy in this verse. God hints at His power and the lack thereof regarding some of the Israelites' favorite gods.
• He says He will lay them bare before these idols, and obviously, the implication is that these idols won't be able to do anything for them, for God created even these items which the Israelites were worshipping.

Verses 8 & 9: "How can you say, 'We are wise, for we have the law of the LORD,' when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely? The wise will be put to shame; they will be dismayed and trapped. Since they have rejected the word of the LORD, what kind of wisdom do they have?"

• The difference between human wisdom & God's wisdom is huge. Even that which God has entrusted to His people (the Law in this case) has been not only misinterpreted, but purposefully misrepresented.

Jeremiah 9:

Verse 1: "Oh, that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears! I would weep day and night for the slain of my people."

• This verse & the last verses of Chapter 8 are a glimpse of God's anguish over the disobedience of His people. He is saddened by the wickedness they have chosen.

Verse 5: "Friend deceives friend, and no one speaks the truth. They have taught their tongues to lie; they weary themselves with sinning."

• This is a challenging verse to me. It's a criticism of the "I'm OK, you're OK" mentality. We have deceived ourselves into this type of thinking. Instead of speaking the truth to our friends so as not to offend them, we do them a great disservice by not sharing the truth that God has revealed to us.

Verses 13-16: God again describes why He is ready to destroy the Israelites. He laments that they haven't obeyed His law, that they have worshipped idols, and He describes their hearts as "stubborn."

Verses 23 & 24: This is what the LORD says: "Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight," declares the LORD.

Verse 25: "The days are coming," declares the LORD, "when I will punish all who are circumcised only in the flesh..."

• A turly wise man will boast only of his knowledge of God and that he is able to know God.
• Verse 25 is very telling. The exterior is not important to God. Relationship with Him comes from the inside and then spills over into what we do.