Jeremiah 19:1-15.  This section is connected to the one before it by the use of the potter but the reader is left hanging in the first few verses.  In verse 1 Jeremiah is sent to the potter to buy a piece of pottery.  But then he is told to get some of the religious leaders and take them out to the valley of Ben-hinnom.  In Jeremiah 7:31 this valley is mentioned as a place where earlier kings had performed human sacrifices.  Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah began bringing messages from God to the people, desecrated the alter used for such sacrifices and forbid the practice (2 Kings 23:10).  Later the practice would be started up again by a later king Jehoiakim.  In New Testament times the Greek form (Greek is the language the New Testament was originally written in) of the name Ben-Hinnom, Gehenna, became a synonym for Hell.  We are also told that the valley is by the “potsherd” gate.  The word “potsherd” in Hebrew comes from a word that is used for “sun” and “itching”.  The word “potsherd”  means to scrape and probably refers to a piece of broken pottery or tile used to “scratch where it itches”.  So Jeremiah leads the leaders out the gate past all the broken pottery to the valley.

In verses 3-9 Jeremiah delivers a message from God to the leaders.  IN verse 3 he tells them that the LORD of hosts (the personal name of the one true God, Yahweh, combined with the idea that he controls the armies of angles in heaven, the “hosts”) is going to send calamity on the city.  The word for calamity has a lot of meanings including something displeasing or hurtful.  Basically Jeremiah is telling them that God is sending some pain their way and that they are not going to like it.  All the people who see it will be horrified (the idea behind tingling ears).  In verses 4-5 Jeremiah tells them it is because of what had gone on in the valley; worship of false gods including sacrificing of their children in fires.  God never commanded such practices in fact it was the furthest thing from what he might have commanded them to do.  According to verse 6 the valley will not be called Ben-hinnom any longer nor the place of fireplaces (Topheth) but will become famous as a place of slaughter.  In verse 7 we learn that the death will be the result of war (the sword).  The military plans of the leaders will fail and so many people will die that there will not be enough people to bury them quickly.  As a result the vultures will come eat the bodies, an idea that would have been very troubling to the Jewish people since they felt it was a curse not to be buried right away.  Different translations translate the word for what will happen to the plans of the leaders differently, “ruin” or “make void”.  The word is related to the word for jar and means to be “empty”.  I wonder if they kept looking at the jar in his hands wondering what he was going to do with it.  In verses 8-9 the message gets worse, not only will the valley be a place of military defeat so bad that the vultures will have a great feast, the city will be surrounded and tings will get so bad inside that the people will resort to cannibalism; eating the bodies of their children and each other.  According to verse 9 not only will people around them have tingling ears they will actually begin to make fun of the people of Jerusalem; hissing at the city, a way of showing great disrespect.

In verse 10 Jeremiah finally makes use of the jar he bought earlier.  He destroys it.  After completely smashing the jar Jeremiah informs the people that in the same way God will smash and completely destroy Jerusalem.  We know this happened less than 40 years later (perhaps only a few, depending on just exactly when Jeremiah gave this message) in 586 BC when Jerusalem was besieged the final time by Nebuchadnezzar.  In this example Jeremiah tells them Jerusalem will be like the jar, irreparable.   We know that Jerusalem was rebuilt later and re-inhabited by the Jewish people.  This is not a contradiction though for a couple of reasons.  First if you look in verse 11 you will see that the people are also mentioned.  Although places are certainly a part of God’s plan it is the people who are important to him.  These particular people are the ones who would suffer the immediate consequences of their actions, they would fall and become forever separated from God.  They were unacceptable to God and the reason is clear, they had been continually unfaithful to him.  It has been clear from our study of Jeremiah so far, that God allows people to come back to him, but they must do just that, come back, be faithful, and turn away from the false gods they had been following.  At this point in time and for these people though they were unacceptable to God, they were like Topheth, the place where they had sacrificed their children to false gods.   With respect to the city and the territory it’s uselessness seems to depend on the people living there.  In the law certain objects could become unclean and then be restored through certain rituals of dedication, but only after a time cleansing.  These rituals also often involved a waiting period.  On the other hand sometimes objects would become unclean, unacceptable, and would be destroyed, remaining that way forever.  In certain respects the valley of Ben-Hinnom was like that.

Remember that Jeremiah had taken leaders of the people to the valley to give them the message we have just looked at.  And certainly those leaders don’t seem to be interested in changing.  Jeremiah then returned to the city to a courtyard in the Temple and gave a very short message to the people of Jerusalem in general.  He warned them that God was going to destroy the city and surrounding towns.  I like the last part of today’s reading, the trouble was coming because the people would not turn their heads (they stiffened their necks) as God was calling out to them.  I like this because it shows me that there is always a chance with God.  What we need to do is turn to him when he is calling.  The situation is never hopeless as long as we have breath.  Not too many years before one of the kings, Hezekiah, had a death sentence pronounced against him by God.  When Hezekiah turned back to God and begged for mercy God allowed him to live another 15 years (2 Kings 20:1-6).  God is pure and he will deal with the dirt and evil of our disobedience and rebellion (sin).  In the end we will closely live with him in a pure and perfect world.  But God is also merciful and loving and he will forgive if we turn to him and allow him to do what only he can, clean up our lives for now and eternity.

God thank you for your love. Thank you for your patience.  Thank you for your mercy.  Thank you for holding back and allowing us time to turn around.  Thank you that Jesus dealt with my sins, past, present, and future.  Thank you that he made me a “clean” place where your Spirit can live and help me.  Let me listen well and live more for you each day.  Make the unclean “Topheth” that my life is, clean for you each day. 

Jeremiah 18:1-23.  In verses 1-17 God continues to warn the people of Judah about the trouble he is going to send their way.  God uses a familiar example to help the people understand what he is doing, why, and how they might avoid the trouble; it is the example of a potter making an object out of clay on a pottery wheel.

The wheel was a sort of table that the potter could spin around in a circle with a lump of clay on it.  The potter would then use his hands to form cylindrical object like a cup, vase, or bowl.  Sometimes as the potter was forming the spinning object it would get messed up and he would push it down and form something else.  The clay belonged to the potter and it was up to him what he did with it.  God uses this example to inform the people of Judah that he has the same sort of right over them.  The Jewish people had been chosen by God for a special mission; he wanted them to be an example to the nations around them of what He would do for the people.  In order for the world to understand God through the Jewish people they needed to live only for him and honor him with their lives.  If they obeyed God then he would take care of them and the world would learn about God’s care, but if they disobeyed him then he would have to punish them so the world would see that God is pure and has certain standards.  As we saw in an earlier post God made it very clear to the Israelites that there were rewards for obedience and there would be punishment for disobedience.

Notice though in verse 7 that God’s actions sometimes depend on our actions.  He might decide to destroy a nation but then the people turn to him and he holds back the destruction.  This happened to the city/nation of Ninevah in the book of Jonah.  It also happened in the personal life of one of the last kings of Judah, Hezekiah, who God was going to destroy.  Hezekiah had been proud before God but change and cried to God for help and forgiveness, God decided not to kill him at that time but promised and added 15 years to his life (2 Kings 20:1-6; 2 Chronicles 32). The opposite situation is also mentioned in verses 9-10 where God plans to make a nations secure and prosperous but then they do evil and he decides to punish them instead.

In verse 12 Jeremiah then applies the principle to the people of Judah, they are like the second example, people God planned to make secure and cared for but who rebel against God.  While God hopes that the people will “repent” (change the way they are going) the people decide that they are going to follow their “stubborn evil hearts”.  In verses 13-17 we see that this type of treatment of God is unheard of, the nations show much more respect to their lame useless fake gods that Israel is showing to the true God who has done much for them (like saving them from 185,000 invading troops in the days of Hezekiah about 70 years earlier).  Although the people of Judah were going to miss out on the good they could have enjoyed God’s purposes would still be fulfilled; they would be an example to the nations of what happens when you show disrespect to the one true God (Jeremiah 18:16).

In verse 12 the people rejected God and in verse 18, after telling them that their actions were unbelievable, the people turned their anger and rejection toward Jeremiah.  In very religious sounding language they tell each other that Jeremiah must be a false prophet because there is no way all the other prophets and priests can be wrong.  They aren’t even honest in what they say they are going to do to him, they say they are just going to “tell him off” (“strike him with our tongues”) and ignore him but Jeremiah tells us that they have dug a pit to capture him and imprison him in (vv. 20, 22).  Clearly they intended to do more than just ignore him (later in the book we will see that they actually do throw him in a hole in the ground and keep him there for quite a while).

In verse 20 Jeremiah asks if good (the warnings he had been giving the people) should be repaid with evil.  Jeremiah then asks God to let their children starve to death, kill the people with the sword, and let the women become childless widows.  It sounds like Jeremiah is asking God to get revenge on them for the way they want to treat him.  But notice that Jeremiah asks God to “deal with them in the time of [His] anger” (v. 23) not according to Jeremiah’s hurt and anger.  Also notice that Jeremiah had been talking to the people so that God’s ‘wrath” would be turned away (by them turning back to God see verse 7).  Rather than looking for personal revenge Jeremiah may be saying to God, “I give up, they really are that bad, go ahead and do what you planned to do to them, bring on the famine and the sword.”  Notice in verse 21 that Jeremiah is talking about the men being struck down and dying and that the young men dying “in battle”.  In an earlier post I mentioned that sometimes God holds back punishment because one of his people is looking for revenge.  God is going to follow through on the invasion in Jeremiah’s lifetime and so I think that this is more about Jeremiah asking God to follow through than it is about his own personal feelings.

If I am right then the lesson we can learn is that we need to leave the revenge up to God.  And look at how God responds to evil, he will punish it, but he gives opportunity to come back to him.  God is perfect and pure and he is willing to forgive, we are not so perfect and pure so we should be even more willing to let go when people treat us wrongly.  We see that Jeremiah had feelings though and that he was hurt by others.  We see that he wanted justice, he had done right and didn’t deserve the treatment he was getting.  But he was willing to leave the justice up to God.  More importantly he seems to want the people punished because of how they have treated God.  He wants the punishment by God in God’s timing.

In 2 Thessalonians 1:4-10 Paul lays it out to the believers in Thessalonica (a city in ancient Greece).  He admits that they are suffering for being believers but that it is a sign of their true trust in Jesus.  He then tells them that God will judge the people who have treated them badly and that it will be right for God to punish them because they have treated the believers so badly.  Paul also tells them that those people won’t be punished until Jesus returns to rule on the earth.  It seems unfair but Paul told another group of believers on one occasion that Heaven won’t be available for those who stay locked into their sinful lives; those who have blown God off and lived the way they wanted to live.  He then reminded them they some of them had been like that (1 Corinthians 6:11).  Paul himself had gone around arresting and killing believers before he turned his life over to Jesus.  Peter gives us the answer in 2 Peter 3:9 when he tells some of the early believers that God is holding back, for now, so more people can turn to him.  God’s timing is the best timing and we need to let him deal with the timing for punishing evil.  In the mean time we need to be faithful in helping the world know about God’s love, our evil, and the possibility of either forgiveness or judgment.  We also need to remember that it may cost us here and now but it will be great in eternity for us.

God thank you for waiting long enough for me to turn back to you.  Don’t let me be selfish and want you to deal with sin and trouble right now.  Let me be patient like you, let me have your heart toward a lost and dying world.  Let me endure the small amount of pain living for you brings as I help those around me find eternal peace with you.  Give me strength, give me the words, give me the life to back up the message.  Thank you for loving me and the world.  I know you will do the right things at the right times.  You are the one true God; awesome!