Verse of the day · September 30
What were the great and mighty things God promised to show Jeremiah?
Jerusalem was falling, and Jeremiah, locked up inside it, was told to ask God to rebuild the city.
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Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.
Jeremiah 33:3
It was the eleventh year of Zedekiah, king in Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was locked up. Not in a dungeon: in the court of the prison, which stood inside the king's own house in the city. The word he had been delivering in God's name, over and over, was that God would give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon. And Zedekiah had shut him up for saying it, perhaps only to stop him saying it again. Being where he was made him easy to reach, and the elders and the king's officers kept coming to consult him. What they wanted out of him was a different message. Either they thought that if he would only prophesy something good, the good thing would then have to happen; or they thought he had enough weight with God to make God change his mind, destroy the army outside and deliver the city.
The city had not fallen yet. It was coming down. The king of Babylon's army had thrown up siege mounds against the city and set engines on the mounds to throw stones into the houses. Houses were already down, the strongest and stateliest levelled with the ground. Men went out at the besiegers to beat them off the siege, and did more harm than good: it only made the assaults fiercer, and they came back wounded and died of it, until the houses of Jerusalem were full of their bodies. God's own word for those dead men was whom I have slain in mine anger and in my fury: the enemy's sword was his sword, and their anger his anger. And the men who died that way were, for the most part, the ones who had marked themselves out by their wickedness — the very men for whose wickedness he had hidden his face from the city, so that he was just in everything he brought on it.
The people had stopped expecting anything else, and twice God names what they were saying. The land would be desolate, they said, without man and without beast — nobody left in it, and not so much as cattle. And this: the two families which the LORD hath chosen, he hath even cast them off. That is the people talking about themselves — Israel and Judah, both picked out, both dropped, and no longer a nation at all. Not all of them said it; but in those who did it was unbelief, and despair of ever seeing better times. The restoration of that people was an event despaired of.
Into that, the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah a second time. Not the second time God had ever spoken to him, but the second on this one subject, and it came with things growing worse and worse. It found him where the first word had, in prison. No locks and no bars shut a visit like that out. Jeremiah was shut in; the word was not: it got in to him there, and it got back out.
Before the invitation comes, the speaker names himself by what he makes: Thus saith the LORD the maker thereof, the LORD that formed it, to establish it; the LORD is his name. Maker of what? Of the city: he built Jerusalem in the first place, so he can build it again; he built it for his own praise, so he will. And maker of the promise itself: he made it, and he is the one who will make it good.
Then: Call unto me, and I will answer thee. It is not addressed to Jerusalem and the people in it. It is spoken to the prophet, encouraging him to seek the Lord in prayer, with a promise of an answer to him. And the way that comfort was to be obtained and brought in was prayer. He had prayed once already, before this word came: he could not see how the pulling down and the building up could both be true, and putting that to God had eased him. He must pray again, and keep humbly at it for a further sight of what God intended. Only God can say what is coming. Idolaters were going to their gods for news about how the present trouble would end and getting no light out of them; Jeremiah was told to ask the one who knew.
Great and mighty things: things past belief, more than reason can take in. Whatever they were, they were not the things Jeremiah already knew. Not the destruction of Jerusalem, not the seventy years of captivity in Babylon that would follow it, not the return from that captivity — he had been told all of it time after time and had prophesied it himself. Then God tells him what they are. They are spiritual blessings, and the coming back from that captivity was only a picture of some of them.
Their condition was a disease thought mortal and incurable, and what is promised is health and cure: the death prevented, the sickness taken away, and an abundance of peace and truth revealed to them. They were scattered and enslaved and their nation was in ruins: God would bring back the captives of Judah and of Israel, and build them again as he had built them at first. Sin was the cause of all their troubles; sin would be pardoned and subdued, and so the root of the judgments would be killed. In the streets the people had just called empty of man and beast there would be the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, and the voice of them that say, Praise the LORD of hosts: for the LORD is good; for his mercy endureth for ever — which is what they did sing, when they came back from that captivity. The emptied countryside would be stocked again, with shepherds counting their flocks. And last, a king: a descendant of David's own line, with a rightful title and not a usurper's — a Branch of righteousness grown up to David, who would execute judgment and righteousness in the land.
What crowns it is the king — the Messiah, still five or six hundred years off — and the righteousness he would bring in.
The promise may reach two things, not one. There is the seeing of them, which the prophet would be given if he asked for it. And there is the happening of them, which God's own people would have to pray for, encouraged by having been told they were coming. The word went to one man, but he was to pray for all of them, as their representative. Promises are not given to replace prayer but to quicken it and encourage it. So the invitation was not what the elders and the officers at the prison had wanted from him — a way of getting God to change his mind. He was being urged by God to pray for what God had already determined to grant.
Those men wanted the army destroyed and the city delivered. The army was not destroyed. Jerusalem was going to fall, and Jeremiah was going to watch it fall with his own eyes — and that was the pledge he was given. He had said in God's name that the city would come down. He would see that word come true in front of him, and so the rest of what he had been handed would come true too. And what he was invited to ask for lay on the far side of the ruin: that same city built again, as it had been built at first. And a people cleansed of the sin that had brought the army to the wall. Calling was how he was to take hold of it.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, the Geneva Bible notes and Adam Clarke. How these teachings are made