Two baskets of figs sit in front of the temple, one good and one so rotten it can’t be eaten. The easy reading is that God keeps the good people and throws out the bad, so be a good fig. That is half right. It misses who lands in which basket, and who does the work. The good figs are the exiles Jerusalem wrote off, and every verb in verses 5 to 7 has God as its subject: “I will give them a heart to know Me.”
This week the chapter Advent made famous. God turns on the shepherds who scattered His sheep and promises to raise up for David a Righteous Branch, a King who will execute judgment and righteousness in the earth (Jer. 23:5), the very thing chapter 22 demanded and no king did. Then God names Him. Judah’s last king was Zedekiah, whose name means “My righteousness is the LORD.” He wore the name and lived nothing like it. God gives the true King that name turned around: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS (Jer. 23:6). The rest of the chapter goes after the prophets who preached peace out of their own dreams, and God answers them with His word: Is not My word like a fire? says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces? (Jer. 23:29). The hammer comes first. Then the name.
This week Jeremiah is sent to the palace. Zedekiah asks him for a miracle while Babylon is at the wall and gets the answer nobody wanted — I Myself will fight against you (Jer. 21:5). Then chapter 22 walks back through the four kings Jeremiah outlived and measures every one of them against a sentence spoken twice to the house of David: execute judgment and righteousness. In the middle of the worst of them God stops and points at the good one: Josiah judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well — and then the line this session hangs on, Was not this knowing Me? (Jer. 22:16). It ends where nobody wants it to. God swears that if Coniah were the signet ring on His own right hand He would tear it off, and tells the scribes to write this man down as childless (Jer. 22:30) — and Matthew’s family tree of Jesus runs straight through that man.
Last week Jeremiah smashed a jar in the garbage valley. This week we find out what it cost him: Pashhur, the chief officer of the temple police, beats him and locks him in the stocks overnight, and Jeremiah opens his mouth and says the worst thing anybody says to God in the Old Testament — O LORD, You induced me, and I was persuaded (Jer. 20:7). Then watch one word walk through the next five verses: God prevailed over him, his friends expect to prevail against him, and they will not — because nineteen chapters back the promise was already standing, they shall not prevail against you (Jer. 1:19). His enemies cannot win against him precisely because God already did.
Last week the Lord sent Jeremiah to the potter’s house to watch wet clay wadded up and made again. This week He sends him to buy a finished flask — fired, narrow-necked, the kind that cannot be mended — and to carry it through the Potsherd Gate to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, where Judah burned its sons to Baal, a thing God says never came into His mind. Before the elders and the priests he smashes it on the ground, and the word with the shards is that it “cannot be made whole again” — the Hebrew is healed (Jer. 19:11).
God sends Jeremiah to a shop near the clay pits — a wheel, a kiln, and a heap out back of the pieces that didn’t come out right. The Hebrew word for that tradesman is yotzer, the one who forms. It is the same word God uses in verse 11 for what He is making now: a disaster. The Potter is still at the wheel, and the vessel is not fired yet — which is why He says, “Return now every one from his evil way” (Jer. 18:11).
Last week Jeremiah called God a stream that runs dry and his own wound incurable. This week God uses that same word of the human heart — “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9) — and then, five verses later, the man with the incurable wound asks to be healed anyway: “Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed” (Jer. 17:14). He even gives God back the name he’d thrown at Him as an accusation, calling Him the fountain of living waters (Jer. 17:13). Chapter 16 is how he got there. God takes away his wife, his funerals, and his feasts, until there’s nothing ordinary left to lean on. He isn’t being punished. He is being made into the message.
God made His people to cling to Him the way a sash clings to a man’s waist (Jer. 13:11). A sash that stops clinging rots in a hole by the river and is good for nothing. Then the prophet who preached that ends up praying his people’s own words back to God — they say they are called by Your name, and so does he; they say there is no healing for us, and he says my wound is incurable (Jer. 14:9, 19; 15:16, 18) — and he accuses God of being a stream that runs dry. God doesn’t defend Himself. He answers with the very thing Jeremiah has been preaching: “If you return, then I will bring you back” (Jer. 15:19). Our Confessions file that line under the Gospel.
This week the preacher becomes the sufferer. Jeremiah announces the covenant curse (Jer. 11:3) and then learns that the men of his own hometown have marked him for death (Jer. 11:21). Three handings-over run through these chapters: Judah handed over to the curse she chose, Jeremiah handed over like a docile lamb brought to the slaughter (Jer. 11:19), and God’s own dearly beloved of My soul handed over into enemy hands (Jer. 12:7). When Jeremiah asks the oldest question, why do the wicked prosper, the answer isn’t information. It’s a warning that the running gets harder, from the God who has run it Himself.
This week’s class takes up Jeremiah 10, the prophet’s longest satire on idols: a god cut from a tree, dressed in silver, nailed down so it will not topple (Jer. 10:4), a scarecrow in a cucumber field, carried because it cannot walk. Over against it stands the true God, the living God and the everlasting King (Jer. 10:10), who needs no carrying but carries His people (Isa. 46:3–7). Which direction the carrying runs is the whole difference between idolatry and the Gospel.
