Jeremiah

Jeremiah (Hebrew Yirmeyahu, "the LORD exalts" or "appointed by the LORD") was the great prophet of Judah's last decades, often called "the weeping prophet" for the grief with which he bore his message of impending judgment. A priest's son from Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin (Jeremiah 1:1), he was set apart before birth — "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5). His ministry ran from the thirteenth year of Josiah (c. 627 BC) through the fall of Jerusalem in 587/586 BC and into the chaos that followed, spanning the reigns of Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah — over forty years of declining fortunes for the kingdom of Judah.

Jeremiah's call protested his youth and inadequacy, but the LORD touched his mouth and put His words there (Jeremiah 1:9), commissioning him "to pluck up and to break down... to build and to plant" (Jeremiah 1:10). He proclaimed that Judah's idolatry and injustice had broken the covenant, that the temple itself was no guarantee of safety (the great Temple Sermon, Jeremiah 7:1–15), and that submission to Babylon was God's appointed discipline. This message of surrender branded him a traitor: he was beaten and put in the stocks, his scroll was cut and burned by King Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36:23), and he was lowered into a muddy cistern to die before being rescued (Jeremiah 38:6).

No prophet's inner life is so exposed. The "Confessions" (passages through Jeremiah 20:7–18) lay bare his anguish, his complaints against God, and his sense that the word within him was "a burning fire shut up in my bones" that he could not hold back. Yet his message was not only doom. He foresaw a return after seventy years of exile (Jeremiah 29:10) and counseled the exiles to seek the welfare of the city of their captivity (Jeremiah 29:11). Above all he announced the new covenant: "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts... I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (Jeremiah 31:31–34).

This new-covenant promise is the theological summit of Jeremiah's book and one of the most consequential prophecies in Scripture. The New Testament reads it as fulfilled in Christ: Jesus speaks of "the new covenant in my blood" at the Last Supper (Luke 22:20), and Hebrews quotes Jeremiah's words at length to show that the first covenant is now obsolete in Christ (Hebrews 8:8–12). After Jerusalem's fall Jeremiah was carried against his will to Egypt by the fleeing remnant (Jeremiah 43:6–7), where tradition holds he died. His book — the longest in the Old Testament — together with Lamentations, leaves the enduring portrait of a faithful sufferer who proclaimed both the severity and the steadfast mercy of God.