Read the Bible in 2023 ◊ Week 16: Friday

Friday’s Bible reading is Jeremiah 17–21. In an old post from 2010, Fruit, I contrasted Jeremiah 17:5–8 with Psalm 1. These chapters in today’s reading also contain many other well-known passages, including the verse above as well as what is probably the most well-known object lesson in the book: the potter and clay.

The juxtaposition of these verses is fascinating. Right after God contrasts those who trust in man with those who trust in God, He says, the heart is deceitful above all else and is desperately sick. The ultimate self-deception is to trust in ourselves or others as our strength and turn away from God. Derek Kidner writes,

“Looking more closely at the passage, we are struck by the inwardness of the character studies in verses 5–8. The pivot-word is trust, for everything will turn on where one’s heart is. The worldly man, wasting his hopes on what is secondary and shifting, cannot flourish — for verses 5–6 describe above all the man himself. Outwardly he may be doing very nicely (as Jeremiah complained in 12:1–2), but in himself he is sadly stunted. Elsewhere there may be ‘showers of blessing’, but in his spiritual desert he remains untouched (6a). The truth about that desert, the godless world, is summed up with masterly brevity in the three features of 6b: thirst, loneliness and sterility.

“In God’s book the only alternative to cursed is blessed; there is no middle ground. The key to it here, as in the New Testament, is faith; and the virtual repetition in verse 7 of the first line by the second (preserved in the RSV: … who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord) highlights the living object and content of this faith: the person of the Lord. Given this, the contrast with the desert shrub must follow, starting with the roots, for nourish­ment; up to the leaves, for health; culminating in the fruit that makes the tree itself a blessing. Here again, this may or may not show in outward circumstances: it is the man himself (7–8a) who is described, seen as heaven sees him.

“But only heaven sees us as we really are, and can deal with us as we should be dealt with (9–10). The wisdom writers point out that a man’s thoughts and even words are deep, and may give little of him away, but verse 9 goes further, to see deep trouble here…Jeremiah shows us how to react to this diagnosis: not with self-defense but with the urgent ‘Heal me, O Lord’ of verse 14.”¹

God sends Jeremiah to the potter’s house twice in the next two chapters.

Notice again the word heart. God sends Jeremiah to a potter once more in the next chapter.

God then tells Jeremiah the words of judgment he is to tell the people. He describes the utter calamity and destruction He will bring in judgment on Judah, and God tells Judah why it is coming.

He then instructs Jeremiah to:

In chapter 20, upon hearing Jeremiah’s prophecy of the imminent judgment of God, Pashur, the priest, has Jeremiah beaten and put into stocks. After he is let go the next day, Jeremiah tells Pashur of God’s judgment on Judah and Pashur.

The very next thing we read is Jeremiah’s discouragement and depression and his lament that he was ever born with words reminiscent of Job’s cries and some of David’s psalms. Francis Schaeffer comments:

“In Jeremiah 20:14–18, we read one of the great cries of discouragement in the Bible, parallel to some of the cries of Job. But the intriguing thing is that neither Job, nor Jeremiah, nor David in the Psalms (where David often cried out to God, saying, “Have You turned away Your face forever, O God? Where are You?”)—in none of these cases does God reprove His people as long as they do not turn away from Him, nor blaspheme Him, nor give up their integrity in their attitude toward Him. There is no contradiction here. It is possible to be faithful to God, and yet to be overwhelmed with discouragement as we face the world. In fact, if we are never overwhelmed, I wonder if we are fighting the battle with compassion and reality, or whether we are jousting with paper swords against paper windmills.

“So Jeremiah says in 20:14–18, “Cursed be the day on which I was born; let not the day on which my mother bore me be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. And let that man be like the cities which the Lord overthrew, and repented not; and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide, because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?” Jeremiah was discouraged because he was a man standing against a flood. And I want to say to you that nobody who is fighting the battle in our own generation can float on a Beautyrest mattress. If you love God and love men and have compassion for them, you will pay a real price psychologically.

“So many people seem to think that if the Holy Spirit is working then the work is easy. Don’t believe it! As the Holy Spirit works, a man is consumed. This is the record of revivals; it is the record of those places in which God has really done something. It is not easy!

“As I stand and try to give a message into the world—at the café tables and in the universities, to individuals and large seminars, publicly and privately—a price has to be paid. Often there is discouragement. Many times I say, “I can’t go up the hill once more. I can’t do it again.” And what is God’s answer? Well, first it is important to know that God doesn’t scold a man when his tiredness comes from his battles and his tears from compassion. Second, this involves learning to say, and mean, “Lord, please make your strength perfect in my weakness.”

“Jeremiah, we recall, was the weeping prophet. This has psychological depth as well as historic meaning. He is really the man weeping. But what does God expect of Jeremiah? What does God expect of every man who preaches into a lost age like ours? I’ll tell you what God expects. He simply expects a man to go right on. He doesn’t scold a man for being tired, but neither does He expect him to stop his message because people are against him. Jeremiah proclaimed the message to the very end.”²

Kidner writes that Jeremiah 21,

“transports us suddenly to the final siege of Jerusalem, some twenty years after the events of chapter 20…

“…If the preview of events was merciless (3–7), the call to surrender, addressed to the citizens over the king’s head (8–10) was shat­tering. After that, the demand to the royal house for energetic social justice (11, 12a, cf. Ps. 101:8), and the warning that in default of this God would be a consuming fire (12b–14), confirmed the moral basis for it al — a basis that was even wider and deeper than the particular oath and covenant that the king had broken.”³

Schaeffer incisively draws comparison between Jeremiah’s day and ours and concludes.

“First, we may say that there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can bein. There must first be the message of judgment, the tearing down…People often say to me, What would you do if you met a really modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel? And I’ve said over and over, I would spend forty-five or fifty minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma—to show him he is more dead than even he thinks he is; that he is not just dead in the twentieth century meaning of dead (not having significance in this life) but that he is morally dead because he is separated from the God who exists. Then I’d take ten or fifteen minutes to preach the gospel. And I believe this usually is the right way for the truly modern man, for often it takes a long time to bring a man to the place where he understands the negative. And unless he understands what’s wrong, he will not be ready to listen to and understand the positivie. I believe that much of our evangelistic and personal work today is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realize the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt (and not just psychological guilt feelings) in the presence of God. But the same is true in a culture. If I am going to speak to a culture, such as my culture, the message must be the message of Jeremiah. It must be the same in both private and public discourse.

“Secondly, with love we must face squarely the fact that our culture really is under the judgment of God. We must not heal the sickness lightly. We must emphasize the reality. We must proclaim the message with tears and ive it with love. Through the work of the Holy Spirit there must be a simultaneous exhibition of God’s holiness and His love, as we speak. We cannot shout at them or scream down upon them. They must feel we are with them, that we are saying we are both sinners, and they must know these are not just god-words but that we mean what we say. They must feel in our attitudes that we know we too are sinners…

“There is in all of this a time for tears. It will not do to say these things coldly. Jeremiah cried, and we must cry for the poor lost world, for we are all of one kind.⁴

“Third, we must say that if we believe in truth, we must practice truth. We live in an age of Hegelian synthesis and relativism; men don’t believe truth exists. How do we expect a world to take us seriously when we say truth exists and then live in a relativistic way?

“…Moreover, in an age of synthesis men will not take our protestations of truth seriously unless they see by our actions that we seriously practice truth and antithesis in the unity we try to establish and in our activities.⁵

“Fourth, we must realize that to know the truth and to practice it will be costly. At times the price will be high in your individual family. Often there is a tremendous pressure upon young Christians as they face their non-Christian families. But the price is also high in society…

“Fifth, we must keep on preaching even if the price is high. There is nothing in the Bible that says we are to stop. The Bible rather says, keep on, keep on…

“Christianity is not a modern success story. It is to be preached with love and tears into the teeth of men, preached without compromise, without regard to the world’s concept of success. If there seem to be no results, remember that Jeremiah did not see results in his day. They came later. If there seem to be no results, it does not change God’s imperative. It is simply up to you and to me to go on, go on, go on, go on, whether we see the results or whether we don’t. Go on.⁶

“My last sentence is simply this. The world is lost, the God of the Bible does exist; the world is lost, but truth is truth, keep on! And for how long? I’ll tell you. Keep on, Keep on, Keep on, Keep on, and then KEEP ON!”⁷

In the Last Supper Discourse, the Lord Jesus instructed and encouraged His disciples. He prayed for them that night, and He prayed for you and me that night. He said:

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Silvesterzug Laterne: Bk muc. (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Jeremiah and the Potter: William Brassey Hole. Public Domain.
^1,3Derek Kidner, The Message of Jeremiah: Against wind and tide (Inter-Varsity Press, Downers Grove IL: 1987) 72–73, 84–85.
^2,4,5,6,7Francis Schaeffer,  Death in the City (Inter-Varsity Press, Downers Grove IL: 1969) 68–70; 70–71; 72–73; 74–75; 76.

I’m using Michael Coley’s Bible reading plan (one page PDF to print) to read through the Bible in 2023. Each day my posts are on different books because he divides Bible readings into seven categories, one for each day of the week: Epistles, The Law, History, Psalms, Poetry, Prophecy and Gospels. There’s more information on his plan and other ones at Read the Bible in 2023.

Copyright ©2011–2023 Iwana Carpenter