You Have to Surrender

Jeremiah is a weird book.

It’s the longest book of the Bible (by word count - Psalms has more chapters, but they’re shorter - and if you split Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles into two books each, as our English Bibles do). Jeremiah’s ministry was long, hard, and discouraging - he began prophesying while he was perhaps still a teenager, during the reign of King Josiah of Judah, and prophesied through the next four kings. He saw the collapse of the Assyrian empire, the victory of the Babylonian empire over Egypt that cemented its status as the dominant power in the Near East, the fall of Jerusalem, and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. According to my Old Testament professor in college, he preached for forty years and never saw a single convert. This is perhaps hyperbole - the book of Jeremiah talks about a handful of connections in the priesthood and royal court who supported him, plus his scribe Baruch - but his impact on Judah within his day was seemingly negligible. After the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon, he couldn’t even keep his countrymen from taking him against his will to Egypt, in an attempt to avoid Babylonian reprisals. He repeatedly clashed with prophets and priests and suffered repeatedly for it - betrayed by his own family (Jer 12:6), flogged and thrown in the stocks (Jer 20:1-2), put on trial after being nearly killed by a mob (Jer 26:1-24), banned from visiting the temple (Jer 36:5), falsely accused of defecting to Babylon (Jer 37:12-14), flogged and imprisoned (Jer 37:15), thrown in a dry well to die (Jer 38:1-6), rescued, and re-imprisoned, and only freed after the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem.

The book of Jeremiah is also quite intimate in describing Jeremiah’s own relationship with God. Several times throughout the book, he complains to the Lord (Jer 11:18-20; 12:1-4; 15:10-21; 17:12-18; 18:18-23, 20:7-18). The book is complex to read; it’s a mixture of prophecies, prayers, and narratives of Jeremiah’s life, often not in chronological order, forcing the reader to keep the various Judahite kings straight in their head as prophecies and stories jump back and forth.

It contains several striking, even shocking, passages. Jeremiah’s complaints to God. (“Lord, you coerced me into being a prophet, and I allowed you to do it. You overcame my resistance and prevailed over me. Now I have become a constant laughingstock… Sometimes I think, ‘I will make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger anymore.’ But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it… Cursed be the day I was born!… Why did I ever come forth from my mother’s womb? All I experience is trouble and grief, and I spend my days in shame” (Jer 20:7,9,14,18)). God’s denying Jeremiah of the normal (and socially expected) activities of marriage, mourning, and celebrating (Jer 16:1-9), as a lived parable of the desolation that was coming to Judah. God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for his fellow Judahites (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11, 15:1), because of the depths of their sin - when would we expect God to not want us to pray for someone? One of the most shocking, though, is Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to Babylon.

Let’s put this in historical context. Israel and Judah were small countries, positioned between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and desert to the east, and so they formed a major trade route between the north and south. The golden age of David and Solomon, when they were militarily ascendant over their neighbors, enriched by trade, and internationally esteemed, were long past; instead, they were a pawn in struggles between Egypt to the south and Assyria and Babylon to the north. By Jeremiah’s day, the kingdom of Israel had already fallen to the Assyrians, who also very nearly conquered Judah during the reign of Hezekiah, the great-grandfather of Josiah, and now the kingdom of Judah feared imminent destruction from Babylon.

In the midst of this, Jeremiah sent messages to the surrounding countries:

The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says to give your masters this message: “I made the earth and the people and animals on it by my mighty power and great strength, and I give it to whomever I see fit. I have at this time placed all these nations of yours under the power of my servant, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. I have even made all the wild animals subject to him. All nations must serve him and his son and grandson until the time comes for his own nation to fall. Then many nations and great kings will in turn subjugate Babylon… Things will go better for the nation that submits to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon and is subject to him. I will leave that nation in its native land. Its people can continue to farm it and live in it. I, the Lord, affirm it!” (Jer. 27:4-7, 11)

And to the king and people of Judah:

Submit to the yoke of servitude to the king of Babylon. Be subject to him and his people. Then you will continue to live. There is no reason why you and your people should die in war or from starvation or disease. That’s what the Lord says will happen to any nation that will not be subject to the king of Babylon. ‘Do not listen to the prophets who are telling you that you do not need to serve the king of Babylon. For they are prophesying lies to you. For I, the Lord, affirm that I did not send them.’ (Jer. 27:12-15)

From a human perspective - this doesn’t sound good. It’d be like Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor, or George W. Bush after 9/11, saying, “Welp, they got us good; we shouldn’t suffer war or hardship or disease in trying to fight back.” Except that analogy probably still misses the force of Jeremiah’s words, because our independence and existence as a nation hadn’t been meaningfully threatened since 1865. Perhaps it would be more like a preacher in Kyiv standing up and declaring that Vladimir Putin is God’s servant and Ukraine needed to peacefully surrender to him, but that’s okay, because God would later judge Putin, too. Or William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, a fascist, Nazi propagandist, and former British soldier who broadcast to the UK during World War 2 and was executed for treason after its end.

It’s no wonder the authorities in Jeremiah’s day didn’t like him.

While Jeremiah was telling those in Judah and resisted Babylon that God was going to judge them, he wrote to those Jews who had already been carried into exile to tell them that God would take care of them:

’Build houses and settle down. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and allow your daughters to get married so that they too can have sons and daughters. Grow in number; do not dwindle away. Work to see that the city where I sent you as exiles enjoys peace and prosperity. Pray to the Lord for it. For as it prospers you will prosper…

‘Only when the seventy years of Babylonian rule are over will I again take up consideration for you. Then I will fulfill my gracious promise to you and restore you to your homeland. For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.’ (Jer 29:5-7, 10-11)

How do we interpret such passages? Is this just an interesting bit of Old Testament history, yet another instance of God judging a faithless people, or is there more that we can learn? Jeremiah 29:11 is a wonderful promise to those in exile, and God’s faithfulness to those in exile gives us reason to trust that he has a plan to care for us today, but yanking that verse out of context as if it were given verbatim to us fails to do justice to how challenging Jeremiah’s instruction to his contemporaries was and how starkly it went against the religious understanding of his day. As we look at the political, social, and cultural struggles of the 21st century American church, is there anything we can apply from Jeremiah’s instruction to surrender to the pagan forces of his day and seek their prosperity, rather than fight?

Many evangelical churches are currently struggling with questions of whether, and to what extent, we should get involved and fight in the political, social, and cultural issues that are dividing America. Full disclosure: I have definite opinions - and definite concerns - about how we’re engaging here. So there may be a temptation for me to take these passages from Jeremiah and use them as proof texts to support my side of the debate. But I’m no prophet - it would be as big a mistake for me to use Jeremiah’s history as evidence that I’m right as it was for the false prophets of Jeremiah’s day to use the history of God protecting Israel as evidence that Jeremiah was wrong. Instead, I’d like to list some things that we can learn from Jeremiah and encourage us to work through how they can help us in our current challenges.

God is often less concerned with external religion and political power than we are.

Solomon’s temple was a magnificent structure, the culmination of the preparatory work of the exodus and tabernacle, the fulfillment of prophecies and plans of David and Solomon, the manifestation of his presence among his people (1 Ki 8:27-29), and a place to make God’s glory and fame known to the surrounding nations (1 Ki 8:41-43) - yet Nebuchadnezzar, acting as God’s servant, burned it down and looted all of its furnishings. In fact, God was willing to quite literally burn the entire political, national, and religious system of his people to the ground if it allowed him to reform his people into a remnant that was faithful to him.

True religion needs to touch every aspect of our lives.

Josiah, who was king when Jeremiah started his ministry, started numerous reforms to remove idolatry and refocus Judah’s religious practices on the Lord. He removed idols, desecrated and tore down pagan altars, repaired the temple, renewed the covenant, and organized a national Passover celebration. Kings and Chronicles speak very highly of him (2 Ki 22-23, 2 Chron 34-35). However, Jeremiah’s struggles suggest that these reforms were often merely surface-level - the people followed the structures and practices of their religion without it changing their behavior and hearts.

The Lord said to Jeremiah: “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s temple and proclaim this message: ’Listen to the Lord’s message, all you people of Judah who have passed through these gates to worship the Lord. The Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Change the way you have been living and do what is right. If you do, I will allow you to continue to live in this land. Stop putting your confidence in the false belief that says, “We are safe! The temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here! The temple of the Lord is here!” You must change the way you have been living and do what is right. You must treat one another fairly. Stop oppressing resident foreigners who live in your land, children who have lost their fathers, and women who have lost their husbands. Stop killing innocent people in this land. Stop paying allegiance to other gods. That will only bring about your ruin. If you stop doing these things, I will allow you to continue to live in this land that I gave to your ancestors as a lasting possession.

“’But just look at you! You are putting your confidence in a false belief that will not deliver you. You steal. You murder. You commit adultery. You lie when you swear on oath. You sacrifice to the god Baal. You pay allegiance to other gods whom you have not previously known. Then you come and stand in my presence in this temple I have claimed as my own and say, “We are safe!” You think you are so safe that you go on doing all those hateful sins! 11 Do you think this temple I have claimed as my own is to be a hideout for robbers? You had better take note! I have seen for myself what you have done! says the Lord. (Jer 7:1-11)

(This kind of preaching no doubt explains why Jeremiah was eventually prohibited from going to the temple.)

This passage is well-known to Christians because Jesus quoted it when he cleansed the temple during the week leading up to his arrest. We typically understand “a den of robbers” to mean simply that the people inside the temple were robbing others, but Jeremiah’s charge is more pointed than that: the religious practitioners were treating the temple as a hideout or refuge in between their forays into immorality, a place where they could find security and comfort while they lived their daily lives however they wanted. They tried to follow the Lord and worship him - but they also didn’t want to give up pursuing other gods.

As followers of God, our beliefs and formal religious practices are important - but so are our choices to act with integrity, seek justice, and avoid any idol that’s put alongside God.

Faithfulness - successfully following God - may not look like what we think of as success.

Contrary to the expectations of Jeremiah’s contemporaries, it was the exiles, not those who remained in the Promised Land, whom God was using to reform his people. Jeremiah’s own ministry was long, hard, and disappointing, with little to show for it in his day. In the view of the religious leaders, he was dangerous and opposed to God. And yet, looking back now, “Bible students consider Jeremiah to be one of the foremost OT prophets. With good reason he has been called a sublime figure… Highest praise has been given him; in fact, he has been credited with the survival of his people after the Fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., a veritable savior of the Jews” (Charles L. Feinberg, Expositor’s Bible Commentary). More importantly, God loved him, challenged him, encouraged him, and took care of him, even in the midst of his complaints (Jer 15:19-21).

It’s easy for us to think that church growth, compliments from others, popular support in elections and polls and news media, and the like are evidence that we’re doing good, but Jeremiah’s life shows that following God may bring none of that.

Be careful when saying what God wants.

The book of Jeremiah describes how priests and false prophets repeatedly opposed Jeremiah, and it names several of them: Pashhur son of Immer, Hananiah son of Azzur, Ahab son of Kolaiah, Zedekiah son of Maaseiah. However, it says very little about their motives. Maybe they were con artists, deliberately lying for prestige or financial gain. Maybe they were deceived by spiritual forces, like Ahab’s prophets were (1 Ki 22:20-22). Maybe they started out intending to speak truly but gradually twisted their message into what people wanted to hear - social media clickbait and “doing it for the likes” create powerful incentives today to say whatever will get the desired emotional reactions out of your friends and followers, but the underlying temptations aren’t new.

And maybe some of the false prophets truly believed they were speaking God’s truth. Maybe they said God would deliver Judah from Babylon because they rightly remembered and retold God’s promises to take care of his people and God’s deliverance of his people in the past - but, if so, they were forgetting that promise and protection was only part of God’s message to his people, that holiness and accountability also must be included, and that God’s sovereign plan means he may have purposes and priorities broader than they could see.

One odd dynamic of the past few years has been the number of self-proclaimed Christian prophets who’ve confidently declared what God was doing and would do in American national politics and the 2020 election. Many of these predictions proved false. Even in less charismatic streams of Christianity, churches and families have been divided by confident proclamations of which candidates and political causes God wants us to support. We should seek to understand what God is doing - but any beliefs about what God intends with current events and predictions about the future should never contradict or distract from the simple, hard work of recognizing the holiness that God wants from us (both individually and as his people), practicing love in unity for each other, and trusting that God will take of us and protect us through (not necessarily from) whatever happens.

Leaders’ character matters. The sins of the past matter.

The book of Jeremiah has only one mention of Manasseh, the grandfather of King Josiah: “I will make all the people in all the kingdoms of the world horrified at what has happened to them because of what Hezekiah’s son Manasseh, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem” (Jer 15:4). However, the books of Kings and Chronicles describe his reign at length:

He did evil in the sight of the Lord and committed the same horrible sins practiced by the nations whom the Lord drove out before the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed; he set up altars for Baal and made an Asherah pole just as King Ahab of Israel had done. He bowed down to all the stars in the sky and worshiped them. He built altars in the Lord’s temple, about which the Lord had said, “Jerusalem will be my home.” In the two courtyards of the Lord’s temple he built altars for all the stars in the sky. He passed his son through the fire and practiced divination and omen reading. He set up a ritual pit to conjure up underworld spirits and appointed magicians to supervise it. He did a great amount of evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger. He put an idol of Asherah he had made in the temple, about which the Lord had said to David and to his son Solomon, “This temple in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will be my permanent home”… Manasseh misled [Israel] so that they sinned more than the nations whom the Lord had destroyed from before the Israelites… Furthermore Manasseh killed so many innocent people, he stained Jerusalem with their blood from end to end, in addition to encouraging Judah to sin by doing evil in the sight of the Lord. (2 Ki 21:2-7, 9, 16)

As narrated by Kings and Chronicles, Manasseh was almost single-handedly responsible for the Babylonian exile; God announced a final judgment on Judah through his prophets during Manasseh’s reign, and he never relented (2 Ki 21:10-15). The reforms of Manasseh’s grandson Josiah, during Jeremiah’s youth, were valuable but brought only a temporary reprieve (2 Ki 22:18-10). Jeremiah’s command to surrender comes because, by then, the fall of Judah was inevitable; all that his contemporaries could do was influence how hard and how fast the fall would come.

As American individualists in one of the most prosperous and powerful countries in history, we like to think ourselves responsible for our own actions and outcomes and the masters of our own fates. There are deep, important questions about the interplay between present responsibility and consequences of the past (compare, for example, Deut 5:9 and Jer 15:4 to Deut 24:16 and Jer 31:29-30). But Jeremiah’s example suggests that there may be times when, instead of fighting, we may need to accept current events, consider the sins of our collective past (for example, American sins of violence, greed, and racism), and repent and grow.

Even when opposing sin and pronouncing judgment, love others and weep.

Jeremiah gave harsh proclamations against the sin and superficial religion of Judah - and yet, in spite of that, and in spite of God’s instruction to Jeremiah to not intercede for Judah in light of the coming judgment (Jer 7:16, 11:14, 14:11-12), he still prayed for them:

Lord, we know that people do not control their own destiny.
It is not in their power to determine what will happen to them.
Correct us, Lord, but only in due measure.
Do not punish us in anger, or you will reduce us to nothing. (Jer 10:23-24)

And this is no rote, checklist-style prayer; Jeremiah identifies with the people he’s proclaiming judgment against and who opposed and persecuted him, and he weeps over them:

I wish that my head were a well full of water
and my eyes were a fountain full of tears!
If they were, I could cry day and night
for those of my dear people who have been killed. (Jer 9:1)

In fact, God himself laments over the people:

I will now purify them in the fires of affliction and test them.
The wickedness of my dear people has left me no choice.
What else can I do? (Jer 9:7)

It’s easy to fall into us-versus-them thinking - any of our opponents, anyone doing wrong, are first and foremost enemies to be defeated, agents of evil, rather than fellow humans with whom we live in community. Jeremiah risked his life opposing evil, but he also recognized his ties to his people, and he never stopped loving. God opposes and judges evil, but he never stops loving.

There is always hope.

Late in Jeremiah’s ministry, God instructed him to buy a field in his hometown of Anathoth. This was just a year or two before Jerusalem fell to Babylon; Jerusalem was already under siege at the time, and Jeremiah was under arrest for his conflicts with Judah’s leadership. Jeremiah explains the reason for buying the field: “For the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says, ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land’” (Jer 32:15).

Investing in real estate at a time like this would seem highly questionable; it would be like our Kyiv preacher saying that Putin is God’s servant and that Ukraine should surrender to him, but then while in prison proceeding to invest in property in the war-ravaged Mariupol in Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. After the land purchase, God speaks to Jeremiah, promising that, in spite of his judgment for centuries of Israelite sin,

I will bring them back to this place and allow them to live here in safety. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them a single-minded purpose to live in a way that always shows respect for me. They will want to do that for their own good and the good of the children who descend from them. I will make a lasting covenant with them that I will never stop doing good to them. I will fill their hearts and minds with respect for me so that they will never again turn away from me. I will take delight in doing good to them. I will faithfully and wholeheartedly plant them firmly in the land. (Jer 32:37-41)

Much of our contemporary rhetoric and dialogue about American politics and the church in America has an almost apocalyptic flavor: if this election doesn’t go the way we think it should, or this cultural trend or that political agenda isn’t reversed, our country and churches are doomed. This rhetoric seems overblown (it’s not the first time we’ve feared an outcome of an election), but it may actually be the case; Judah in Jeremiah’s day was doomed. But God remains faithful to his promises; the gates of hell will not prevail against his church; he is still our God, and we are still his people.

God’s presence and deliverance may not look like we expect.

Everyone in Jerusalem had no doubt grown up hearing of the Lord’s miraculous deliverance from the Assyrian invasion, during the reign of King Hezekiah, when God killed 185,000 of their soldiers overnight (1 Ki 19). This may have contributed to their confidence that they should fight against the Babylonian invasion - but that was not God’s plan.

And yet, God remained faithful to his people, preserving and purifying them and calling them back to him, at a time when many nations and tribes dissolved and were absorbed into conquering empires. And countless believers since then have drawn comfort from God’s promise to the exiles: “I know what I have planned for you… I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope” (Jer 29:11).

Jeremiah himself had no doubt grown up hearing of prophets like Elijah, who opposed idolatry and immorality with fire from heaven and supernatural strength and miraculous victories, untouchable by any human opposition - but that was not God’s plan for Jeremiah.

And yet, in spite of the persecution and hardships, God was with Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I chose you. Before you were born, I set you apart. I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5). “I, the Lord, hereby promise to make you as strong as a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall. You will be able to stand up against all who live in the land, including the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and all the people of the land. They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you, for I will be with you to rescue you” (Jer 1:18-19).

It’s easy, and natural, to look for God in the miraculous, in clear-cut confrontations of good and evil, in displays of power, in victory. But God often chooses to act through human circumstances, through loss, by being with us through defeat rather than guaranteeing temporal victory, by proving his faithfulness and comfort in spite of the bad, rather than simply removing the bad.

At Easter, God himself “surrendered” to evil, taking upon himself the worst evil that humanity could deal out, rather than simply wielding power against it as he did in the days of Hezekiah and Elijah. And, in doing so, he defeated evil and death for all time, showing once again his love and faithfulness.