JEREMIAH
21
A
Bible Study - Commentary by Jim Melough
Copyright
2003 James Melough
21:1. “The word
which came unto Jeremiah from the Lord, when Zedekiah sent unto him Pashur the
son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, saying,”
For an explanation as to why
Jeremiah’s message to Zedediah, the last king of Judah, is out of
chronological order, see the last section of the introduction; and for the
historical background of the kings of Judah at that time, see 2 Ki
23:28-24:20. This message is generally believed to have been delivered in the
days of the final siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, i.e., in 588-587 BC.
Having apparently learned the folly of listening to the lies of the false
prophets, king Zedekiah sent Pashur (not the Pashur of chapter 20), the son of
Melchiah, meaning my king is Jehovah, and Zephaniah meaning
treasured of Jehovah, the son of Maaseiah meaning work of Jehovah,
to inquire of Jeremiah. Zephaniah was put to death by Nebuchadnezzar after
the capture of Jerusalem, see ch 52:24-27.
21:2. “Inquire,
I pray thee, of the Lord for us, for Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon maketh war
against us; if so be that the Lord will deal with us according to all his
wondrous works, that he may go up from us.”
The spelling Nebuchadrezzar
approximates the Babylonian spelling.
Having seen the first part
of Jeremiah’s warnings fulfilled in Jerusalem’s being besieged, the awakened
and frightened Zedekiah realized that if the city was to be delivered it must
be by God’s intervention. The cavalier attitude that had greeted Jeremiah’s
earlier warnings was gone. Now the former mockers realized that their very
lives were at stake; and they who had turned from Jehovah to worship idols,
now acknowledged “all his wondrous works,” but their recognition of His power
had come too late. They probably hoped for a deliverance similar to that
which had been granted in the days of Hezekiah when God destroyed the host of
Sennacherib as recorded in 2 Ki 19.
Their concern was to save
their lives, but salvation is available only to those who not only acknowledge
God’s authority and power, but who also repent of their sins in God’s time,
and foolish Judah had let that time pass unheeded. Conspicuously absent is
any hint of repentance on
Judah’s
part. What most people fail to understand is that the repentance which saves
must be exercised in God’s time, He Himself hardening the heart and making
repentance impossible once that time is past, and for Judah it was past. They
were doomed.
21:3. “Then said
Jeremiah unto them, Thus shall ye say to Zedekiah:”
21:4. “Thus
saith the Lord God of Israel; Behold, I will turn back the weapons of war that
are in your hands, wherewith ye fight against the king of Babylon, and against
the Chaldeans, which besiege you without (outside) the walls, and I will
assemble them into the midst of this city.”
The Chaldeans were a people
so closely associated with the Babylonians that the name Chaldea was
frequently used as a synonym for Babylon.
Judah’s
case was hopeless. Not only would God refuse to help her: He would aid her
enemies, and help them to capture the city, in spite of the assurances that
had been given by the lying prophets that He would never abandon the city
where He had placed His name.
21:5. “And I
myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and with a strong arm,
even in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath.”
“... anger” is associated
with rapid breathing in passionate rage; “fury” with fervent heat, and with
poison; and “wrath” with rage or strife. These nouns combine to present a
picture of indescribable fury, that should make men tremble even at the
thought of provoking God’s anger.
It is a dreadful thing when
a nation or a man makes God his enemy, as had Judah.
21:6. “And I
will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast: they shall die of
a great (frightful) pestilence.”
More to be feared than all
the fury of the ruthless Babylonians was the wrath of the God they had
despised, and from Whom they had turned to give to idols the worship due to
Him alone, in spite of His having showered countless blessings upon the
ungrateful nation.
Nor were His weapons those
against which they had any hope of defending themselves. He would destroy
them with sickness: the plague. The fact that the animals within the city
would also die of the plague reminds us that man’s rebellion against the
Creator affects the whole earthly creation over which man in Adam has been
appointed as federal head, as it is written in Ro 8:22, “For we know that the
whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”
The dreadful condition of
the city during the siege, is but a foreshadowing of that which befell it in
the later siege of AD 70, both of those sieges being the precursors of the yet
more terrible judgments that will devastate the Tribulation age earth, see
e.g., Rev 6.
21:7. “And
afterward saith the Lord, I will deliver Zedekiah king of Judah, and his
servants, and the people, and such as are left in this city from the
pestilence, from the sword, and from the famine, into the hand of
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of their enemies, and into
the hand of those that seek their life: and he shall smite them with the edge
of the sword; he shall not spare them, neither have pity, nor have mercy.”
All of this was fulfilled
during the siege of Jerusalem, in the closing days of which famine and plague
raged in the city; and when it fell to the Babylonians, Zedekiah, attempting
to escape, was overtaken, and saw his sons slain, before he himself was
blinded, and carried off to Babylon to die, see 2 Ki 24-25, and 2 Chr 36. His
death, however, was not by the sword, but by natural causes, see ch 34:4-5.
The same conditions
prevailed in the siege of AD 70, and as noted already, both sieges were but
dress rehearsals for the still more terrible catastrophes that will be
experienced world-wide in the Great Tribulation.
The counterpart of the lying
prophets of OT times are today’s false teachers who preach a God too loving to
consign anyone to eternal torment. Hell, however, is filled with countless
multitudes of those teachers and their dupes, who have preferred to ignore
such passages as this because they have chosen to believe in a god who is a
figment of their own deluded minds, rather than the God presented in
Scripture, the God Who will by no means clear the guilty, apart from
repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, Nu 14:18.
21:8. “And unto
this people thou shalt say, Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I set before you the
way of life, and the way of death.”
No verse of Scripture more
clearly refutes the false teaching of Calvanism that some are predestinated to
salvation, and the remainder to eternal perdition. Whether a man will be in
heaven eternally, or in the lake of fire eternally is a choice he himself
makes. He who accepts God’s indictment that, “There is none righteous, no,
not one,” Ro 3:10, “For all have sinned,” Ro 3:23, and who accepts the Lord
Jesus Christ as his Savior, will enter heaven; and all who reject that
indictment will just as surely suffer eternal torment in the lake of fire, Re
20:11-15.
The error of Calvanism lies
in failure to recognize the difference between Divine omniscience and
foreknowledge. God’s foreknowing who will believe and who will not believe is
a very different thing from His predestinating some to believe and others not
to believe. Further refutation of Calvin’s error is furnished by two other
Scriptures, “God is longsuffering ... not willing that any should perish, but
that all should come to repentance,” 2 Pe 3:9, and “Ye will not come to me,
that ye might have life,” Jn 5:40. If these two verses don’t declare man’s
freedom to choose his own eternal destination, heaven or hell, then language
no longer has meaning.
God’s offering the people
the choice of the way of life or death does not contradict the fact that the
doom of that generation of Judah was irrevocable. This offer translates into
the truth that where there was individual repentance and faith, that
individual would save his soul, but not necessarily his life.
21:9. “He that
abideth in this city shall die by the sword, and by the famine, and by the
pestilence: but he that goeth out, and falleth to the Chaldeans that besiege
you, he shall live, and his life shall be unto him for a prey (prize).”
It would be difficult to
find a clearer picture of the Gospel. The doomed city is a typological
picture of this doomed world. All who remain in and of it will perish
eternally; but those who leave it by trusting in Christ, thereby making
themselves citizens of heaven, may lose everything that pertains to this
world, but in addition to saving their lives, will make themselves heirs of
heaven’s imperishable riches and blessing.
The willingness to submit to
the besiegers speaks symbolically of abandonment of every effort to save
oneself by good works.
The promise that he who
surrendered to the Babylonians would save his life, was fulfilled in the days
of Jehoiachin, see 2 Ki 24; and 25:27-30.
21:10. “For I
have set my face against this city for evil, and not for good, saith the Lord:
it shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it
with fire.”
Continuing the allegory of
doomed Jerusalem as a type of this world, God’s delivering the city into the
hand of Nebuchadnezzar for destruction points to the fact that in the Great
Tribulation the type will be fulfilled when Satan, cast out of heaven, comes
down to earth “having great wrath, because he knows that he has but a short
time,” Re 12:12. Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem is a figure of the
destruction that will be wrought here on earth by Satan, using the Beast and
the false prophet, and earth’s rebellious masses, as his agents to bring the
world to ruin. As the destruction of Jerusalem was God’s punishment of
Judah’s idolatry, so will His coming destruction of the world be for a similar
reason: men have rejected the knowledge of God, turning to idolatry and the
gratification of every lust, in brazen defiance of the Creator.
21:11. “And
touching the house of the king of Judah, say, Hear ye the word of the Lord;”
21:12. “O house
of David, thus saith the Lord; Execute judgment (justice) in the morning, and
deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor, lest my fury go
out like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your
doings.”
The reference to the “house
of David” indicates that while this was addressed to the king and his
advisers, it may well have had an application also to the believing remnant
within the apostate mass of the nation, the need of the instruction revealing
that they too had failed to live according to God’s standards. Evil is
contagious!
While “... in the morning”
is understood by some to relate to the custom of trying cases in the morning
before the oppressive heat of the afternoon, it may also indicate the urgency
of obeying the command. Little time remained for them to make things right
with those they had wronged, for the fall of the city would preclude the
possibility of making such amends.
We are missing the point,
however, if we fail to read the application to ourselves. We are the
counterparts of those believers, and like them we too are guilty of much
wrongdoing; and like them we have little time left in which to make amends.
Death or the imminent
“rapture” will end for ever our opportunity to “execute judgment in the
morning,” leaving us to stand at the Bema with our eternal reward diminished
in proportion as we failed to right the wrongs we have done to others.
The mention of God’s fury
going out like unquenchable fire should surely remind us of what is written in
1 Cor 3:12-13, “Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver,
precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest:
for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the
fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.”
21:13. “Behold,
I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock of the plain, saith
the Lord; which say, Who shall come down against us? or who shall enter into
our habitations?”
The reference is to
Jerusalem perched on the hill surveying the valley, like a rock in the middle
of a plain, imagining itself doubly impregnable: first, too strong to be
captured; and second, impervious because God had made it His city, and had
caused His
Temple to be built there.
What an awakening awaited them!
Christendom’s confidence
rests on a similar crumbling foundation. An occasional brief visit to
“church,” the parroted phrase, “In God we trust,” an ornamental cross worn
around the neck, a smudge of ashes on the forehead once a year, etc., are
relied on to guarantee God’s favor, and permit the dupes to indulge in every
form of sin with impunity. What an awakening awaits them! God’s “I am
against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock of the plain,” is as
applicable to Christendom as to Judah. The one will be destroyed just as
surely as was the other, and the time for individual repentance in Christendom
is also as brief as it was for Judah. The Rapture and ensuing Tribulation
judgments are imminent. The Rapture could occur today!
21:14. “But I
will punish you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord; and I
will kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things round
about it.”
“... a fire in the forest
thereof” is understood by some to refer to the many houses in Jerusalem that
were constructed of cedarwood from Lebanon; but since trees are used in
Scripture as symbols of men, the reference to God’s kindling a fire in Judah
may be the symbolic announcement of judgment upon them proportionate to the
degree of their sin, that judgment beginning with their slaughter at the hand
of the Babylonians, and continuing in the torment of hell until “the
resurrection of damnation” and their final consignment to the lake of fire.
Believers will worship God
eternally for the love and grace and mercy that impelled Him to mete out to
the Lord Jesus Christ the punishment due to their sins, so that they live, not
in anticipation of condemnation and corresponding eternal punishment, but in
the joyous expectation of eternal blessing in heaven proportionate to the
faithfulness of their service on earth.
It is very different,
however, with unbelievers. Satan has blinded them to spiritual realities so
that they have no realization of what awaits them when they pass from time
into eternity. Instead of eternal reward there will be eternal torment, first
in hell, and then eternally in the lake of fire.
[Jeremiah
22]