Scripture Daily

Context No. 1336 of 4322 · Jeremiah

Context · Reflection

Jeremiah 16:1-7: in context

1Then the LORD’s word came to me, saying, 2“You shall not take a wife, neither shall you have sons or daughters, in this place.” 3For the LORD says concerning the sons and concerning the daughters who are born in this place, and concerning their mothers who bore them, and concerning their fathers who became their father in this land: 4“They will die grievous deaths. They will not be lamented, neither will they be buried. They will be as dung on the surface of the ground. They will be consumed by the sword and by famine. Their dead bodies will be food for the birds of the sky and for the animals of the earth.” 5For the LORD says, “Don’t enter into the house of mourning. Don’t go to lament. Don’t bemoan them, for I have taken away my peace from this people,” says the LORD, “even loving kindness and tender mercies. 6Both great and small will die in this land. They will not be buried. Men won’t lament for them, cut themselves, or make themselves bald for them. 7Men won’t break bread for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead. Men won’t give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother.

God gives Jeremiah a series of hard commands about his own life. You shall not take a wife or have sons or daughters in this place, God tells him, because the children born here will die grievous deaths, unmourned and unburied. And more: do not enter a house of mourning, do not go to lament or grieve, for I have taken my peace, my steadfast love and mercy, from this people. Do not go to the house of feasting either. Jeremiah is to hold himself apart from the ordinary rhythms of human life, marriage, children, mourning the dead, celebrating with the living, because those very rhythms are about to be shattered by the coming judgment.

What God asks of Jeremiah here is that his own life become the message. It is not enough for him to speak the words of coming disaster; he is to live them, to embody in his own solitary, childless, mourning-less existence the desolation that is coming on the whole people. His singleness would provoke the question, and his refusal to attend funerals or feasts would provoke it, and the answer would be the prophecy itself: it is not worth marrying and bearing children into what is coming, not worth the ordinary comforts of grief and celebration, because judgment is near. It was a costly vocation. Jeremiah gave up marriage, family, the normal consolations of shared sorrow and shared joy, so that his very life would preach. There is something sobering here about how God sometimes calls a person to carry a message not only in words but in the shape of a whole life, at real personal cost. Not everyone is called to Jeremiah's particular sacrifice, but the pattern reaches wider: that our lives, and not only our words, are meant to say something true about God and about what matters, and that following him faithfully can cost us things the people around us keep. Jeremiah's lonely obedience is a reminder that sometimes the message is the messenger's own surrendered life.

Am I willing to let my life, and not only my words, carry a message about God, even when following him faithfully costs me comforts and ordinary goods that others around me keep?

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