Year 9, Day 78: Jeremiah 25

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Jeremiah gives us another perspective of judgment in this chapter.  While the result is the same – Babylon is coming to decimate the Middle East – the focus is different.  Today the focus isn’t on a particular grievance.  Today God’s complaint is that the people have not listened to the prophets.  They have not repented.

Reading through this passage reveals that at the time of its writing Jeremiah had been a prophet for 23 years.  Imagine telling people for 23 years that they need to change and repent.  Imagine seeing little movement.  Imagine seeing little fruit for the effort.  Imagine seeing a culture that in spite of the greatest prophecies that could be brought, they are still flinging themselves headlong into God’s wrath.  Imagine living among a people who are deaf by choice.  Imagine living among a group of people who will not heed warnings because they refuse to believe it could happen to them.  Imagine this for 23 years.

First of all, this is probably why Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet.  (Actually, it isn’t.  It is because he is likely the author of the book of Lamentations in addition to the number of weeping poems contained within the book of Jeremiah)  It goes to motive, though.  If you spent more than two decades pursuing a goal and showed no positive gain, I imagine it would cause a person to weep.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the definition of insanity as doing something the same way but expecting different results.  At first blush, this sounds like Jeremiah.  He gives prophesy after prophecy and nothing changes.  Should we think of Jeremiah as insane?  Absolutely not!  Jeremiah isn’t insane because he doesn’t expect different results.  Truth be told, God has been very forthright to Jeremiah.  God’s told him to do it and he’s also told him it won’t work.  Therefore, Jeremiah hasn’t been trying all of these things hoping that it would work and the people would repent.  Instead, Jeremiah has been prophesying simply so that at the end God could look at the people and say, “I told you.”

What does all of this mean?  It means that sometimes we will be asked to toil in a field that produces no fruit.  It means we cannot judge success by the amount of fruit born but rather by our willingness to do as God asks.  If God asks us to go out and reap the harvest, then we will get fruit.   But if God asks us to go out and plow a spiritually dead field, success is simply getting the field plowed.

This feels almost like a defeatist mentality.  I want to hope.  I want to believe that fruit is always possible.  But the realist in me understands that sometimes reality doesn’t look like hope.  Sometimes reality looks like people who are running headlong into poor choices and won’t listen to anything.  In those days, we have to just get up and plow the proverbial field.  In the days when we are called to bear God to people who have no inclination to listening, success is simply bearing God to them and watching them not listen.

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