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…King examines Jeremiah’s contributions to religious thought, particularly his New Covenant, his argument against “artificial worship,” and his conception of personal religion. …King concludes by summarising Jeremiah’s message for contemporary Christianity: “the worst disservice that we as individuals or churches can do is to become sponsors and supporters of the status quo.”
The personality of Jeremiah is one of the most fascinating studies in Old Testament history. There is no other sacred author who has taken us with such intimacy into his life, both public and private. We not only get the kernel of his discourses, but we are able to dwell with him in his moments of disillusionment; we are aware of the “inner conflict between his desire for inconspicuous retirement and his devotion to truth and civil duty;”1 we hear him as he secretly talks with God. His life and character are full of surprises which stimulate thought on great moral and religious problems…
Jeremiah came to prophesy at a time which was ripe for a mighty appeal to be made to the masses and to take advantage of the new spirit of the time that had taken hold of Judah. He saw that the wind of pride and evil had become the whirlwind of spiritual desolation. He saw Judah and the moral and spiritual degeneracy into which she had sunk. Isaiah and Micah had raised their voices and gave a tremendous impetus to the revival work of Hezekiah. Zephaniah had done likewise at the beginning of Josiah’s reign, and a little before his time. The time had come for another voice to be raised, to sound the note of warning to Judah. It was this great prophet that appeared at the capital and the Temple, whose message sprang from a heart touched with the deepest tenderness. Such was the prophet Jeremiah—such potency, such persuasion, such pleading in pointing out to Judah the way of escape from impending doom.
The Life and Times of Jeremiah
Jeremiah was born of priestly parentage, toward the middle of the seventh century, in the little town of Anathoth. He prophesied under Josiah and his sons from the year 626 to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC.2 He was contemporary with the prophets, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Ezekiel, Daniel.
As stated above, Jeremiah possessed a dynamic personality. “The Book of Jeremiah,” says A. B. Davidson, “does not so much teach religious truths as present a religious personality. …His inner experiences can be traced throughout the Book. He was in perpetual pain because of the stubbornness of his people,3 and their tragedy caused his tears to flow day and night.4 He loved his people with his whole heart.5 This deep love for his own people expressed itself at times in impatience with them, and a desire to escape from them.6 Amid the bewildering changes of his time, Jeremiah was made to realise that he had been marked from his mother’s womb for a great errand and yet this errand becomes his shame and torture.7 Because Jeremiah possessed this mild and peculiarly sensitive disposition, many came to call him “the weeping prophet.” It would be a great mistake, however, to suppose that he was lacking in courage. A careful study of the facts will show that he was one of the bravest men in Judah.
What were the conditions of the world during the life of Jeremiah? Stated briefly, the most important events which occurred within the life of Jeremiah were these: (1) An invasion by the Scythians (ca. 626 BC). (2) The discovery of the Book of the Law (Deuteronomy) in the Temple and resulting reforms by King Josiah (ca. 621 BC). (3) The overthrow of the Assyrians by the Chaldean (Babylonians), in 612 BC (4) Immediately after the fall of Assyria, the armies of Egypt invaded Judah, defeating King Josiah (ca. 608 BC). (5) The contest for world supremacy between the Babylonians and the Egyptians. In 605 BC. the Egyptians were defeated at the battle of Carchemish. Then comes the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. (6) The first attack on Jerusalem was in 598 BC. The entire city falls in 587 BC.5
Such were the conditions that characterised the times of Jeremiah. Only through gaining a thorough knowledge of these moving events will we be able to understand the prophecies of Jeremiah, for prophecies spring out of immediate occasions. The situations they deal with, the personal moods, attitudes and temptations they are meant to meet, are always contemporary.
In this paper, …I will present three contributions. (1) Prophecies against Unreal Worship. (2) The New Covenant. (3) Personal religion.
The New Covenant
An important element in the teaching of Jeremiah is the establishment of a New Covenant. This prophecy immediately impresses us by the wonderful spirituality of its tone, and by its evangelical character. Dr. Driver laconically states: “By his conception of the New Covenant, Jeremiah surpasses in spirituality and profundity of insight every other prophet of the Old Testament.”8
Jeremiah… brought forth that noblest of all spiritual conceptions… “I will put my law in their inner parts and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, know the Lord; for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin will I remember no more.”9 In every {respect} the New Covenant will differ from the Old. The law written upon stone is to be replaced by the law written in the heart. As stated by Dr. Matthews, “this law written in the heart required no Torah, canonised by an emotionally conditioned populace and then easily subverted by legalism. Nor were manuals of worship, altars, and a Temple, that so often become ends in themselves, required to aid the spirit of man in communing with his Maker. Nor was residence in the Holy Land essential to the highest religious life. True religion was not rooted in the soil of Palestine, but in the hearts of men and women.”10 The law written in the heart will become an inseparable part of man’s moral being. Principles would take the place of external ordinances. Such principles as truth, and justice, and purity, love to God and love to man, would be enshrined in the hearts of men. This, said Jeremiah, would lead to an ideal state, in which the sins of the people would be forgiven. The children of the New Covenant would be the sons of God, no longer subject to external laws of the state, but ruled by impulses to good, acting upon the heart as a principle which grows from within.
…Let us briefly list the positive features of the religious relationship established by the New Covenant. (1) Inwardness: “I will put my law in their inner parts;” (2) Individualism: “all shall know Me;” (3) Forgiveness of sins: “their sins I will remember no more.”11 All of this states one central truth, the inwardness of true religion. It is this inwardness of true religion which causes men to do the will of God spontaneously from inward inclination rather than from commands of an external law. No one can deny the fact that this prophecy… is one of the profoundest anticipations in all the Old Testament. “Liberating religion from all externals, at the same time the New Covenant strengthened and democratised it by placing responsibilities squarely on the shoulder of the individual, and purified and deepened it by making it a matter of conscience. The New Covenant, the law written in the heart, was one of the great visions of religion.”12
Unreal Worship—Temple and Sacrifice
Another line which can be added to the column of Jeremiah’s contributions to religious thought is his stand against artificial worship. This attack {was} started against the Temple. …The Deuteronomic reformation culminated in the centralisation of national worship in the Temple at Jerusalem. This Temple was the pivot of the nation’s religion. It was a national institution, linked intimately with the fortunes of the race. …The Temple was the apple of the people’s eye. To criticize it was to set aflame the fires of both religion and patriotism. And this was the very thing that Jeremiah did. He saw that the Temple had been relegated to a position of empty formalism which substituted a superficial reverence for the doing of Yahweh’s will. He saw that sacrificial offerings were taking the place of sacrificial living. These conditions led Jeremiah to cry out against the evils of the Temple and sacrifice. All of this is found in the sermon which Jeremiah preached in the Temple. “The primary purpose of this address was to utter a strong polemic against the Temple and the worship there. Anything which Jeremiah may have added about the future fate of the people was subsidiary to this leading aim.”13 …Let us investigate the assumptions growing out of this address.
In the first place, Jeremiah declares that public religion is an organised hypocrisy. In it religion was divorced from morality. He saw that the Temple was worse than a false defence, for it was given to aiding the evils of the day. It had become in Yahweh’s eyes, a cave for robbers to shelter themselves in. Men stole, murdered, played the fool, and broke their promises, only to run under the shadow of the Temple for protection.
“Behold, ye trust in lying words that cannot profit. Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; and come and stand before me in my house, which is called by my name, and say, we are delivered to do all these abominations.”14
Here one can see the profound convictions of a striving prophet. He deals with a problem that is a danger of all religions. It states the important truth that ritual is never to be used as an end within itself... It would be unfair to say to say that the functionaries of the Temple deliberately meant to inculcate evil or immorality, but they drifted into the belief that the Temple was more important than the distinction of good and evil, the sacrifices more vital than sin. It therefore took the fortitude and mind of Jeremiah to expose these pressing faults.
All of this would seem to throw the fault on the Deuteronomists, but not rightly so. The Deuteronomists had no intention to bring about this state of things. They set out to organise religion, and we must admit that it brought about considerable external success. The Deuteronomists, however, failed to see that religion is not something which can be organised, rather it is a spontaneous outflow from men’s contact with a divine spirit. As soon as an external compulsion is attempted it leads inevitably to hypocrisy. This is the marked difference between the reformers and Jeremiah. The former were content to see crowds observe the ritual, even if their lives did not make the mark. Jeremiah cared nothing about external ritual if it did not produce internal change.15
In the second place, Jeremiah announces that since the Temple has become the symbol of a false religion God is about to make an end to it. At this point Jeremiah again went contrary to tradition, for those on the traditional side claimed that with the Temple in their midst the Hebrews could stand inviolable against the world. …Against all the spiritual orthodoxy Jeremiah argues to the contrary. The very first point of his speech is: “Trust ye not in lying words, saying, the Temple of the Lord, The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, are these.”16
The Temple might have been the bulwark of the nation in past days, but times are changed, and the only thing that could save it now was to thoroughly improve both methods and practices, to see strict justice present, to prevent the exploitation of strangers, the orphan and the widow, and to avoid the murder of the innocent. Only on these conditions would they survive and retain their land.17 With history on his side the prophet points to the remains of Shiloh and pronounced the doom of the Temple to be as certain as the fate that had overtaken the old sanctuary.
“But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel. And now because you have done all these works, saith the Lord, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not and I called you, but ye answered not; therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh.”18
Personal Religion
Important as are his other contributions to the body of religious truth, Jeremiah’s teaching on Personal Religion is of greatest permanent value. With Jeremiah religion is an immediate, personal relationship between the Lord and the individual soul; it means obedience and devotion of the individual to his God. “I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord: and they shall be my people and I will be their God; and they shall return unto me with the whole heart.”19 Here Jeremiah passes beyond his predecessors in the direction of the teaching of Jesus. Through his inner struggles, Jeremiah was able to experience a more personal and more tempestuous relation with his God.
This idea of personal religion is expressed nowhere greater than in the life of Jeremiah. Despised and rejected by men he clung the more tenaciously to the Lord and His will. He was sustained by that fellowship with Heaven which made his “inner resistance superior to every outward pressure.” On the one hand we hear him cry, “I am become a laughingstock all day, everyone mocks me. The word of Yahweh is made to me a reproach and a derision all day.”20
Again, he cries, “Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and contention to the whole earth.”21
On the other hand, we hear Jeremiah saying that he is sustained by his life with God. “I am with thee saith Yahweh, to deliver thee.” With this promise Jeremiah began his ministry, and he has left us the record of how it became fulfilled. It is probable that Jeremiah himself wrote down from time to time the account of his intercourse with God; or else he dictated it to Baruch.
That Jeremiah stood alone is in a real sense correct. In many instances he could cry with Elijah, “I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away.”22 The prophet had literally nothing left but God. To God therefore he went for companionship, relief, encouragement, assurance and all that was needed to go on. “Out of the Hebrew prophet, there is created in Jeremiah a new spiritual type—the Old Testament saint: the man who, when flesh and heart fail, finds in God the strength of his heart and his portion forever.”23 It remains for us to sketch briefly the outstanding features of this type of personal religion, as exhibited in Jeremiah.
First, his religion is marked by its strong individualism. In the case of Jeremiah this is naturally accounted for by the peculiar circumstances of his life; it was through such experiences that Jeremiah had to move from the realm of national religion to that of personal religion. Throughout the “Confessions”24 we can see that Jeremiah felt himself absolutely cut off from religious fellowship with men. The bond between him and his nation was broken, therefore he threw his all on Yahweh. When he couldn’t understand certain problems facing society he went to Yahweh. Listen as he cries to Yahweh: “Righteous art thou, O Yahweh, when I contend with Thee; yet would I reason the cause with Thee: wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are they at ease that deal very treacherously? Thou art near in their mouth and for from their heart.”25 Over against their treachery Jeremiah sets his own integrity. “But Thou, O Yahweh, knowest me; Thou seest me, and triest my heart towards Thee.”26
In this we can see that tone of sincerity which sounds throughout Jeremiah’s life. We can see the purity of one who always lives intimately with God. Finally, we see Jeremiah as he reaches complete trust and harmony with his God; Yahweh is his “hope”27 and his strong protector against his persecutors.28 Having completely overcome his despair, Jeremiah found his deepest joy in the world of Yahweh 29 and became, as Yahweh had said at the time of his call,30 a wall of brass capable of resisting all attack.31
Second, out of Jeremiah’s piety grows a trust in the unerring righteousness of God. It was this trust in the unerring righteousness of God that was the basis of his personal religion. He saw Yahweh as the Righteous Judge, the all-seeing Searcher of hearts, who gives to every man according to his deeds.32 Jeremiah came to this conception of God because of the divine working within him. It was the eye of Yahweh that was forever searching the thoughts and intents of the heart. Jeremiah’s great moral sincerity grew out of his realisation of the omniscience and righteousness of God.
Third, Jeremiah is original in his exercise of prayer. Jeremiah “is the father of true prayer, in which the wretched soul expresses both its subhuman misery and its superhuman confidence …Some scholars hold that the prophetic revelation always came in answer to prayer. …He prays for healing. “Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved; for Thou art my praise.”33 He prays for help against his adversaries. “Let them be confounded that persecute me but let me not be confounded; let them be dismayed but let not me be dismayed: bring upon them the day of evil and destroy them with double destruction.”34
To Jeremiah prayer was more than petition. It was no escape from the harsh realities of life. It was an “intimate converse with God, in which his inner life is laid bare, with its perplexities and struggles and temptations.”35 It is such a prayer that contains the assurance of an answer. In one of the most touching passages of his “Confessions,” Jeremiah becomes aware of the answer which solves all his internal problems.
“Therefore, thus saith the Lord, if thou return, then will I bring thee again, and then shall stand before Me: and if thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as My mouth; let them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them. And I will make thee unto this people a brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee, for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.”36
Jeremiah, throughout all his doubts and difficulties, was able to be carried forward by the secret assurance that this business was not his business but God’s business, and this alone supported him under the most pressing perplexities and loneliness. …His communion with God, which was for him the biggest single fact in life, led him to inevitably to the undermining of ecclesiastical religion. The Temple he slashes with scone and ridicule.37 In another passage he scones the magical properties of the Ark.38 He stings with sweeping criticism the priests who were supposed to be the mediators between God and man. …But amid all that Jeremiah proved that God can be found.
…Did Jeremiah ever reach the point of believing that all individuals could have personal relations with God as he did? The answer is yes. He concluded this from his own experiences. He perceived that what religion was to him it must be to all men—the response of the heart to the voice of God. It was this thought that was continually touching the balloon of nationality until finally it burst. This was a supreme contribution, for it shifted the center of gravity in Judaism from the nation to the individual.
Conclusion
We must conclude that Jeremiah left certain ineffaceable contributions to religious thought which are still relevant to our contemporary culture. He stepped on the religious stage sounding the trumpet for a new idea of God, and the signal for another forward march of the soul. He had seized on a great and revolutionary truth, and with that truth, like a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, went ahead of his times. In many instances the picture drawn by Jeremiah is an idealistic one, and an ideal which has not yet been realised—the New Covenant for example. But the ideal is there; it at least serves as a standard by which we may measure ourselves, a goal which we may all strive to attain.
Jeremiah is a shining example of the truth that religion should never sanction the status quo. This more than anything else should be inculcated into the minds of modern religionists, for the worst disservice that we as individuals or churches can do to Christianity is to become sponsors and supporters of the status quo. How often has religion gone down, chained to a status quo it allied itself with. Durkheim and other sociologists rejoice to find in each religion simply the reflection of the State’s opinion of itself foisted upon the divine, and along this they agree that no advancement can be looked for in spiritual affairs. Therefore, we must admit that men like Jeremiah are valuable to any religion. Religion, in a sense, through men like Jeremiah, provides for its own advancement, and carries within it the promise of progress and renewed power. But what is societies reaction to such men? It has reacted, and always will re-act, in the only way open to it. It destroys such men. Jeremiah died a martyr.
It is obvious that if we judge Jeremiah by the ordinary standards of the world, his work was a failure. He was lightly esteemed in life. He became the supreme example of what Deutero-Isaiah called the suffering servant. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. But in after years his unheeded prophecies became the favourite book of the scattered Hebrew race. Many of the Psalms, as we saw above, re-echo his words, and depict scenes such as only Jeremiah could have passed through. It is for these reasons that Jeremiah came to be regarded as the greatest of them all.39
References:
1. R. C. Knox. Knowing The Bible. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1936). p. 99
2. Jeremiah 1:2-ff
3. Jeremiah 8:18, 21, 22; 15:18
4. Jeremiah 9:1; 10:19
5. Jeremiah 8:18–22; 14:20, 21
6. Jeremiah 4:31; 8:21, 22; 9:12
7. Jeremiah 1:5 with 15:10; 20:14-ff
8. S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903). p. 275
9. Jeremiah 31:31-ff
10. I. G. Matthews, The Religious Pilgrimage of Israel, (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947). p. 164
11. Skinner, op. cit., p. 329
12. Matthews, op. cit., p. 165
13. Adam C. Welch, Jeremiah His Times and His Work, (London: Oxford University Press, 1928) p. 137
14. Jeremiah 7:8–10
15. Skinner, op. cit., pp. 175–176
16. Jeremiah 7:4
17. Jeremiah 7:5-7
18. Jeremiah 7:12–14
19. Jeremiah 24:7
20. Jeremiah 20:7-f
21. Jeremiah 15:10
22. I Kings 19:10
23. Skinner, op. cit., p. 223
24. The term has been applied to such passages as Jeremiah 11:18–23; 12:1–6; 15:10–21; 17:9–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–12
25. Jeremiah 12:1-f
26. Jeremiah 12:3
27. Jeremiah 17:14
28. Jeremiah 17:11
29. Jeremiah 15:16
30. Jeremiah 1:18
31. Jeremiah 15:20
32. Jeremiah 17:10; 12:1; 12:3; 20:12
33. Jeremiah 17:14
34. Jeremiah 17:18
35. Skinner, op. cit., p. 214
36. Jeremiah 15:19, 20, 21
37. Jeremiah 7:9
38. Jeremiah 3:16
39. Matthew 16:14; John 1:21
Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.
