True Leadership - Jeremiah 22:1-23:8

This is what the Lord says: “Go down to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim this message there:  Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place. For if you are careful to carry out these commands, then kings who sit on David’s throne will come through the gates of this palace, riding in chariots and on horses, accompanied by their officials and their people. But if you do not obey these commands, declares the Lord, I swear by myself that this palace will become a ruin.’”... “People from many nations will pass by this city and will ask one another, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this great city?’ And the answer will be: ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God and have worshiped and served other gods.’”

 “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making his own people work for nothing, not paying them for their labor... “Does it make you a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your father have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?” declares the Lord.

 “Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord.  Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to the shepherds who tend my people: “Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,” declares the Lord.  “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number.  I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the Lord.

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Savior.

Jeremiah 22:1 - 23:8

Jeremiah stands before king Zedekiah with a message that the leadership of the nation was terribly wrong. All through the Bible, leaders are to be shepherds of the people, watching over them and taking care of them. This is what this king, and others like him, had failed to do. Leaders are to be an example of righteousness and justice before the people. It is a very serious thing when elected officials do things which are wrong because every leader is, as Paul makes clear to us in Romans 13, a minister of God. He may not be a believer, but he himself is an agent of God, and is to represent God's standard of righteousness. Therefore, when these leaders of the land are guilty of wrongdoing, the effect of their wrongdoing is far greater than if they were just ordinary citizens. Jeremiah was sent to tell this king that this was what was wrong in his life. He had failed to correct the leaders of the land and to be an example of justice and righteousness.

Another thing that government leaders are to do: "Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow." These are the minority groups in any country, the weak, the helpless. The king is told here that it is his task to watch that he does no violence to them. Here is a recognition of the power of government to hurt the weak. Bureaucracy can grow up, making it easy to turn a deaf ear and to be unavailable to those who are really in trouble. Special care must be taken by any government to watch over the weak among them.

Finally, Jeremiah is given a vision of the true shepherd. For the first time in this great prophecy he looks down through the centuries, and sees the coming of One who would fulfill God's ideal, and on beyond that to the time when he will return again actually to carry it out in practice: "The days are coming," declares the Lord, "when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Savior" (Jeremiah 23:5-6). That is the name applied to Jesus by the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 1:30: "...Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption." He himself is our righteousness. So the prophet sees him coming as God's rightful King, and one day to come again so that Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely.

Prayer: Lord God of hosts, may my mind and heart be open to understand what you are doing in the nations of our day. Help me to bow before you and let you search my heart, that I may be a vessel fit for your use. I give You my life. In Your name Jesus I pray, Amen. 

Life Application: To whom are national leaders ultimately responsible? What essential characteristics does God require of these leaders? Who is the ultimate Shepherd and rightful King?

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God's Faithfulness - Jeremiah 20:11-13

But the Lord is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten. Lord Almighty, you who examine the righteous and probe the heart and mind, let me see your vengeance on them, for to you I have committed my cause.

Sing to the Lord! Give praise to the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked.

Jeremiah 20:11-13

Previously in this chapter, Jeremiah poured out his complaint to the Lord while he was in the stocks. But now faith comes to Jeremiah's rescue and begins to strengthen him. Faith counterattacks to uphold the tottering prophet. Jeremiah is now fighting back against the assault he is victim of. He begins now to reckon on reality, to count as truth what God had made known to him. That is the way to handle any frightening situation. You can be almost sure that the way you see it is not really the way it is. This is what you have to remember. It appears to be that way, but it is not that way. Your mind is being assaulted, your thoughts twisted and distorted by a naturalistic view of things. The only answer is to begin with God, the unchangeable One, the One who sees things the way they really are. Start with him and with what he has told you, and work from that back to your situation, and you will see it in an entirely different light.

This is what the prophet does here. He starts with God. "The Lord is with me [that is the first thing to remember], and he is a mighty warrior [he knows how to fight, how to repel assaults]; therefore my persecutors will stumble [their plans are not going to work out], they will not overcome me. In fact, they will be greatly ashamed, for they will not succeed." Faith reassures him that this is what will happen. And this is the correct view, because this is what happened. And so he cries out, Verse 13: "Sing to the Lord; give praise the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked" (Jeremiah 20:13)

That sounds like the account of the incident in Acts 16 when Paul and Silas, thrown into the dungeon and thrust into stocks at Philippi, began at midnight to sing praises to God, because their faith was fastened onto God and his greatness, and not upon their circumstances. This is what Jeremiah learned to do — to sing praises to the Lord.

What allowed him to do this? Perhaps Jeremiah remembered what God had said to Jeremiah in Chapter 1: "I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled," (Jeremiah 1:12). So even though it may take a while, even though things do not go right at first, do not be shortsighted and blame God, for he will "watch over his word to perform it."

A verse in Paul's letter to Timothy gathers this up for us beautifully. Paul wrote to Timothy, in an hour of great turbulence, and said, "If we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot disown himself" (2 Timothy 2:13).

Prayer: Thank you, heavenly Father, for this reminder of your faithfulness to the prophet Jeremiah, and your faithfulness to your promises today. Help me to take all my difficult situations and start with You, allowing You to defend me and work through them for Your glory and my best purposes. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen. 

Life Application: What is our point of reference when evaluating life's perplexing circumstances? Are we training our minds to begin with God's Truth and his faithfulness?

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Jeremiah's Complaint - Jeremiah 20:1-10

When the priest Pashhur son of Immer, the official in charge of the temple of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things, he had Jeremiah the prophet beaten and put in the stocks at the Upper Gate of Benjamin at the Lord’s temple. The next day, when Pashhur released him from the stocks, Jeremiah said to him, “The Lord’s name for you is not Pashhur, but Terror on Every Side. For this is what the Lord says: ‘I will make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends; with your own eyes you will see them fall by the sword of their enemies. I will give all Judah into the hands of the king of Babylon, who will carry them away to Babylon or put them to the sword. I will deliver all the wealth of this city into the hands of their enemies—all its products, all its valuables and all the treasures of the kings of Judah. They will take it away as plunder and carry it off to Babylon. And you, Pashhur, and all who live in your house will go into exile to Babylon. There you will die and be buried, you and all your friends to whom you have prophesied lies.’”

Jeremiah’s Complaint (to the Lord while in the stocks) 

You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived; you overpowered me and prevailed. I am ridiculed all day long; everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I cry out proclaiming violence and destruction. So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. I hear many whispering, “Terror on every side! Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!” All my friends are waiting for me to slip, saying, “Perhaps he will be deceived; then we will prevail over him and take our revenge on him.”

Jeremiah 20:1-10

Here we have the thoughts of Jeremiah while he is in the stocks, waiting for what would happen on the morrow. This is a remarkable account of what the prophet thought while he was imprisoned. He was, to say the least, a profoundly perturbed prophet! Here we get another look at the honest humanity of this man, at the way he faced circumstances just as we do, with fear and despair, alternating at times between faith and confidence.

The first thing he feels is that God himself has deceived him. Here is a bitter cry in which Jeremiah charges God with having lied to him, and with having taken advantage of him. Have you ever felt like that toward God? Jeremiah is probably thinking back to the promise with which he began his ministry. God had called Jeremiah as a young man, and Jeremiah had objected. Remembering those words, he is saying, "What happened, Lord? What happened to your promise? You said you'd be with me to deliver me, but here I am in these miserable stocks." That is the way the heart can easily feel toward God. Like so many of us, Jeremiah took these promises rather superficially. He read into them assumptions God never intended, and so he charges God with lying. That, of course, is the one thing God cannot do. God cannot lie. Yet Jeremiah feels, as many of us have felt, that God has failed his promise. I do not know how many times people have said to me, referring to the word of God, "Well, I know what it says, but it doesn't work!" That is just another way of saying, "God has deceived me; God's a liar!" That was the prophet's predicament.

The second thing he found was that people were mocking him. Though they could not answer the keenness of his logic, they did the only thing they could do — they began to ridicule his person. That is always the refuge of petty minds. When people cannot handle a logical argument they begin to attack the person, and try to destroy him personally. They laughed at Jeremiah, poked fun at him, ridiculed him. Mockery is hard to bear, hard for the human spirit to take, and this was getting to Jeremiah.

Third, he discovered an unbearable tension within himself. He says, "Lord, your word is a reproach and derision to me. I wish I had never heard it!" He wants to quit preaching, but he cannot. How he is torn with this inner tension — of fear and a dislike of proclaiming the truth, because it only subjects him to ridicule and scorn; and yet when he resolved to quit he found he could not, because the fire of God was burning in his bones and he had to say something. Do you know anything of that? Perhaps not about public preaching — we are not all called to that. But have you ever felt that you just had to speak out? Some injustice, some moral perversity, some scandalous conduct, some loveless hypocrisy was occurring, and you just could not keep quiet about it. Yet you knew that if you spoke out you would only get into trouble, and nobody would thank you for it — you would only upset the status quo and create strife — but you could not contain yourself. Did you ever feel that way? That was what Jeremiah was experiencing here — this tremendous struggle within himself against the proclamation of the Word of God which only created more trouble.

Prayer: Lord, thank you that I can pour my heart out to you. Keep me from charging you with falsehood. Keep me, Lord, from weakness. But even when I am weak, thank you for the forgiveness and the healing that you manifest in my life. In Jesus name I pray, Amen. 

Life Application: Are we willing to stand against overt evil, and trust God's sovereign wisdom for the outcome of our witness? When life tumbles in do we question God's prerogative to determine our circumstances?

This Daily Devotion was Inspired by one of Ray's Messages: A Burning in the Bones

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Break the Jar - Jeremiah 19:1-15

This is what the Lord says: “Go and buy a clay jar from a potter. Take along some of the elders of the people and of the priests and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. There proclaim the words I tell you, and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, you kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Listen! I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned incense in it to gods that neither they nor their ancestors nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.

“‘In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who want to kill them, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds and the wild animals.’...

“Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room... 

Jeremiah 19:1-15

Jeremiah was told, in the striking figure God employed for the benefit of these people, to take the potter's vessel he had bought and dash it to pieces on a rock. As they watched it fly into smithereens, so that it was impossible to bring it back together, these people were taught that they were dealing with a God whose love is so intense that he will never alter his purpose — even if he has to destroy and crush and break them down again.

You see, that is the way the world sees God right now. They see the hell which is coming into our world. And soon it will be worse, according to the prophetic Scriptures. There will be worse signs taking place, worse affairs among men. They will cry out against God as being harsh and ruthless and vindictive, filled with vengeance and anger and hatred. That is all the world sees.

But the people of God are taught further truth. Jeremiah had been to the potter's house. He had seen the potter making a vessel, and he knew that it was love behind this Potter's pressures, and that when the vessel was marred, this Potter was also capable of crushing it down again, bringing it to nothing but a lump, and then molding it, shaping it again, perhaps doing this repeatedly, until at last it fulfilled what God wanted. That is the great lesson Jeremiah learned at the potter's house, and that we can learn at the potter's house, as well.

One of the great lessons we can learn from the New Testament's use of the figure of the potter is in the book of Matthew — the incident when Judas brought back the thirty pieces of silver and flung them down at the feet of the priests, after having betrayed his Lord. The priests gathered the money, took counsel together and bought with the money a potter's field. It was known thereafter as "the field of blood," (Matthew 27:6-10). This again is God's wonderful reminder of the heart of our Potter. For if you watch this Potter very carefully, at work in your life, you will find that his hands and his feet bear nail prints, and that it is through blood, the blood of the Potter himself, that the vessel is being shaped into what he wants it to be.

When we are in the Potter's hands, feeling his pressures, feeling the molding of his fingers, we can relax and trust him, for we know that this Potter has suffered with us and knows how we feel, but is determined to make us into a vessel "useful to the Master" (2 Timothy 2:21). What a tremendous lesson Jeremiah learned at the potter's house — one which can guide and guard us under the pressures of life.

Prayer: Lord, you have used the trials and pressures in my life to teach me to surrender to you. I invite you to use the means to continue to mold and shape me into the person you want me to be. Our lives are in Your hands. Our nation is in Your hands. Do with us what You think is best - for Your purposes, for Your glory. I trust You Lord. In Jesus' name, Amen. 

Life Application: Are we learning to recognize that God's disciplines are evidence of his unquenchable love? How do we respond to this love that persists in making us whole?

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The Potter and the Clay - Jeremiah 18:1-12

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me. He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel. If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.

“Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the Lord says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’ But they will reply, ‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; we will all follow the stubbornness of our evil hearts.’”

Jeremiah 18:1-12

We have commented in previous messages about the many things God uses to teach his people, these remarkable visual aids which appear from time to time in this book whereby God imparts lessons to this prophet. Jeremiah was sent down to the potter's house, and there he saw three simple things, conveying to him a fantastic lesson. You may have observed the same things that Jeremiah did, for the art of making a pot has not changed through the centuries. The wheel is now turned by an electric motor, but that is about the only difference. Even this is still controlled by the foot of the potter. The clay is the same as it has always been. The potter is the same, with his capable hands, working to mold and shape the clay into the vessel he has in mind.

What did Jeremiah see in this lesson? First there was the clay. Jeremiah knew, as he watched the potter shaping and molding the clay, that he was looking at a picture of himself, and of every man, and of every nation. We are the clay. Both Isaiah and Zechariah, in the Old Testament, join with Jeremiah in presenting this picture of the potter and the clay. In the New Testament we have the voice of Paul in that great passage in Romans 9, reminding us that God is the Potter and we are the clay. So Jeremiah saw the clay being shaped and molded into a vessel. Then some imperfection in the clay spoiled it in the potter's hand, and the potter crumbled it up, and began anew the process of shaping it into a vessel that pleased him.

Jeremiah saw the wheel turning constantly, bringing the clay against the potter's hand. That wheel stands for the turning circumstances of our life, under the control of the Potter, for it is the potter's foot that guides the wheel. The lesson is clear. As our life is being shaped and molded by the Great Potter, it is the circumstances of our life which bring us again and again under the Potter's hand, under the pressure of the molding fingers of the Potter, so that he shapes the vessel according to his will.

Then, Jeremiah saw the potter. God, he knew, was the Great Potter, with absolute right over the clay to make it what he wanted it to be. Paul argues this with keen and clear logic in Romans 9: "Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, "Why did you make me like this?" Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?" (Romans 9:20b-21) Of course he has. The vessel is shaped according to the image in the potter's mind.

So Jeremiah, by watching, learned that an individual or a nation is clay in the Great Potter's hands. He has a sovereign right to make it what he wants it to be. He has the skill and design to work with the clay and to bring it to pass. If there be some imperfection in the clay, something which mars the design, spoils the work, the potter simply crushes the clay down to a lump and begins again to make it yet a vessel according to his own mind.

Prayer: Thank you, Father, for creating me and shaping me. I trust that you are sovereign in all that you do, and that your purpose for me is good. I also trust in Your plans for my nation. If we do not return to You in repentance and start walking in obedience, I trust Your correction as the Great Potter. I love you! In Jesus' name, Amen. 

Life Application: What are three principles we may learn from the visual aid of potter and vessel? Are we learning to be grateful for the Potter's molding of our earthly vessels?

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