Sunset Repentance
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Sunset Repentance
Jeremiah 14:1–15:9
Main Idea:It can be too late to repent.
- A Confusing Confession: God Responds to Pretense in Prayer (14:7-12).
- Plea (14:7-9)
- Refusal (14:10-12)
- A Confusing Message: God Condemns Lying Preachers (14:13-18).
- A Confusing Confession: God Responds to Procrastination in Repentance (14:19–15:9).
- Plea (14:19-22)
- Refusal (15:1-9)
Sitting across from my desk is a guilty student. He has been caught breaking the ethical code of conduct at our college. The offense warrants expulsion. He is facing calling his parents and letting them know he has been kicked out of school. My responsibility, in this moment, is to adjudicate the right way to move forward. We must uphold the integrity of the campus by respecting the code of conduct, yet I want to be redemptive. So I listen closely.
As the conversation continues, something becomes clear to me. This student is indeed sorry, but I’m not sure why. I do not know if this is regret leading to remorse or repentance leading to change. It’s just unclear. My fogginess is a result of the student’s attitude. He seems to think that while his action was wrong, he can bounce back. In fact the real problem, if he could put a fine point on it, is me. He can do this. He just needs a second chance. If I will do what I am supposed to do, he can get on in life. It would be a shame if I held him back from his goals because I would not extend a little grace.
While he may get a second chance, a second chance is almost always lost on those who think they deserve one. Rather, those who anguish over the consequences of their choices actually have the opportunity to change them—to repent. The bite and sting of sin’s consequences are the fuel of genuine repentance and change.
This is the position in which Judah finds itself in Jeremiah 14. They’ve had so many chances to repent, to change. They have neglected so many prophets—so many warnings unheeded, so much sin, so much rebellion, so much rejection of the God who loves them. We often think change takes a long time, and it does. To move our lives from one position to the next tier of virtue, the next level of discipline, or the next goal takes time. We don’t like the inconvenient truth that the opposite is true, yet at a faster rate. When we neglect God, there is a moment-by-moment hardening of our hearts—baked-on sin that is not easily removed. This is the sense of this difficult passage.
It has grown so dark that God finally says he is done. They have squandered their one-hundredth second chance. Finally, it seems, God has had enough. In this passage he makes strong statements such as, “Do not pray for the well-being of these people. . . . I will not accept [their offerings]” (14:11-12).
There is no doubt that this is a strong word in a book of strong words. God could not be more clear. He is done. There will not be another chance.
The structure of the passage—a dialogue between God and his people—is telling. Twice they plead to God for help, and twice God refuses.
- Plea 14:7-9
- Refusal 14:10-12
- Plea 14:19-22
- Refusal 15:1-9
This dialogue, along with the context (14:1-6) and the condemnation of lying prophets (14:13-16), gives a sense of the structure of the passage.
This leads us to a question: If we rebel for so long, does God finally give up? Is there a point of no return?
Context: Drought (14:1-6)
The setting of the conversation is drought. Though the impact of this is lost on many in the West, drought can ravage a country. The description here is awful. The people are crying for help (v. 2) because they come to the wells, but there is no water (v. 3). The farmers cannot produce crops (v. 4), the doe cannot feed her young (v. 5), and the donkey pants in the air with no water to drink and no vegetation to eat (v. 6). This is a horribly desperate situation.
One immediately thinks of the cracked cisterns of 2:13. The drought is in its own way a metaphor for the soul of Judah. They are stricken with the consequences of their choice to quench their thirst with something that can never satisfy. They have been swimming in the muddy, salty water of depravity, lust, and rejection of their God, and they come up thirsty for the fresh living water. This is the story of the woman at the well of John 4. She drank and drank but was still thirsty. Jesus then offers her living water that causes a cessation of thirst. The desperate longing for refreshment ceases because the individual is perfectly satisfied.
However, to be clear, this drought is not just a metaphor. This is real. Crops are wilting, livestock are dying, and the people of Judah fear for their own future and the immediate future of their children. Imagine the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. People were not just thirsty, but they also could not grow crops and the livestock were dying. The dry was killing them.
In Judah’s darkest moment they cry out to God.
A Confusing Confession: God Responds to Pretense in Prayer
Jeremiah 14:7-12
Plea (14:7-9)
The drought seems to have created a thirst for God. They call on God to act on their behalf while they confess their rebellion to God (v. 7). Also at this time Judah begins to confess that God is their hope (v. 8). Now this is interesting.
Physical desperation produces a spiritual desperation. Pressure helps us understand our spiritual state. Perhaps this is why Jesus constantly warned the rich. For example, in Matthew 6:24 he warned,
No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
The problem with money is never money. That is the presenting problem. Yet in counseling, as in all of life, rarely is the presenting problem the real problem. The problem, Jesus said, with a focus on possessions is that as our wealth grows it produces grappling hooks in our heart. And, to the point of this passage, they produce a false sense of security.
This is why the poor are blessed and the rich are warned (Luke 6:20, 24; 16:14-31). The poor get it. Their physical desperation mirrors their spiritual desperation. The wealthy have the same spiritual desperation, but they don’t know it. The wealth has provided a cover of comfort that masks real need. So in this way the wealthy are dumber than the poor, or at least less insightful. The mental liquid of wealth seeps into the part of the brain that assesses spiritual need, and they assume, quite understandably, that their spiritual needs are met by material wealth. Everything seems all right—like Novocain for the soul.
In the kingdom, therefore, poverty is a blessing because it actually corresponds with poverty of spirit. And here in Jeremiah an entire nation is broken by desperation. The drought is a metaphor for spiritual drought, but again, this is not just a metaphor. Their crops and livestock are dying. Life is changing. Aspirations for a clear and comfortable future are evaporating like the morning fog.
Their prayer, while authentic, also seems disingenuous. They pray and confess their sins in verse 7, and they acknowledge that God is among them, but something odd is sitting in these two bookends. They accuse God of being like a traveler who will only stay for a night, just passing through (v. 8). Further, they accuse him of being like a weak warrior (v. 9). Sure he is a warrior, but they say he is passive; he can’t help.
While this is a confession, it’s certainly a confused one. In fact, God has been present with them for a long time and has pursued them! He is anything but a transient traveler or a weak warrior! This is a twisted take on reality. Imagine Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, is rewriting the story of the prodigal son. In this version the prodigal son wakes up in the pigpen and wonders why the dad won’t come visit him. Why is the dad so passive? Why is the dad so weak? It’s laughable, but Judah has been so sinful for so long, they can’t even think straight. So God responds.
Refusal (14:10-12)
Notice the Hebrew parallelism of verse 10. The line that God speaks is reinforced and strengthened by its parallel. This makes for a provocative condemnation and is a synopsis of the whole chapter in one verse. The force of the poetry is, “It’s not just that they wander, but they never put their feet up to rest from all their wandering.” God’s response is, “It’s not only that I do not accept them, but I am remembering the guilt and punishing the sin.” Judah was not just sinning; they were tirelessly sinning. God is not just ignoring them; he is actively punishing them. Neither party is passive. God will be as active in his punishment as they are in their sin. It’s so bad that God tells Jeremiah not even to pray for them. God is done. Prayer won’t have any effect.
So, after reading this, how do we reconcile this with the earlier idea that when God gives a warning it implies that there is hope? There seems to be absolutely no hope! Let’s address that question at the end of the next plea and response.
There is another plea and response, but interjected between these two pairs is a specific problem God wants to address, namely, the lying prophets. So we will look at the second plea, but first let’s read about this specific prayer request Jeremiah brings to God.
A Confusing Message: God Condemns Lying Preachers
Jeremiah 14:13-18
The problem, Jeremiah asserts, about God’s condemnation of Judah is that the prophets who are supposedly speaking for God are deceptive (v. 13). God is threatening punishment while they are promising peace. Jeremiah sees this as an inconsistent, confusing message.
God responds to Jeremiah (vv. 14-16). The prophets will meet the same end that they are predicting will never happen. They are, unwittingly, prophets of irony. They will die by the judgment they do not believe exists. You get the sense that they treat God as an impersonal force. However, God is real. He can really be offended, and he can enforce judgment on those who disobey him.
God is not just creating an irony; he is responding to one. The real irony here of course is not that God is going to give them what they do not think exists but that they are representatives of God who do not represent God. They were to be ambassadors, yet they went out—unsent, without any authority, without permission or commission—and spoke for God. An ambassador has no authority when he speaks on his own. By definition an ambassador represents another person. So God responds (vv. 17-18).
And here again we see the stupidity of sin. The confusing message comes from prophets who go to a “land they do not know.” This is perhaps a reference to exile, or, perhaps more likely, it is a telling indictment of their stupidity. They are leaders who do not know where they are going. An old T-shirt said, “I’m their leader. Which way did they go?” This might be laughable on a shirt, but it was tragically true in this case. The prophets were really pawns at the hands of sin. The people chose the life they wanted to live and then affirmed and encouraged the prophets that told them what they already wanted to know.
A Confusing Confession: God Responds to Procrastination in Repentance
Jeremiah 14:19–15:9
Plea (14:19-22)
Here is another confusing confession. The confession here seems authentic on the surface. The people cry out to God. They acknowledge their sin and express their concern that the heavens are silent (vv. 19-20). Then they do something good but, in this context, too late. They invoke the name of God (v. 21).
God’s name was sacred. It was only spoken in the most serious ways. So they say that their motivation for confession is the name of God. They then acknowledge that only Yahweh, their covenant God, has the power to allow drought or bring rain (v. 22).
Refusal (15:1-9)
Confession is the right prayer, God’s name is the right motivation, and that only God can do it is the right hope. It’s all correct, accurate. The problem is that it is just too late. God responds in 15:1-9. Judah will experience “four kinds of judgment.”
There is not much else to say. Reading this leaves one breathless. Even if the two leading intercessor-prophets of a bygone era, Moses and Samuel, would plead on their behalf, it would be fruitless. Their end is destruction, and God will not change his course.
This challenges a notion we mentioned back in the first chapter, namely, that each warning was a mercy. A warning, by definition, is a means of hope, of escape from pending judgment, yet here it seems that there is no escape. So, how is this merciful in any way? Well, in its immediate context, it’s not. Perhaps you have heard someone use the patently obvious phrase, It is what it is. Yet in this case, it applies perfectly. The judgment of God is the judgment of God. But here it is important to remember that preexilic Judah is not the only audience.
Judah, like Israel, would go into exile. The Babylonians would take them into captivity. The Babylonians would be taken over by the Assyrians and then eventually by the Persians. Then comes the Persian King Darius who would decide, providentially prompted, that the people should return to their land (2 Chr 36:22-23). When they did return to their land, they were led by Ezra the scribe, who would skillfully study the law (Ezra 7:10) and then faithfully declare it (Neh 8:1-8). It is logical to assume that a newly returning people, reenergized in their love for God, would read Jeremiah’s words. So the words of Jeremiah were written to those coming out of exile as well as those going into exile. For those going in there was no hope. For those coming out this was a great warning. They did not want to face the wrath of God in a similar way.
Conclusion
Jeremiah 14:1–15:9 was written for the moment and for later. Right now is later. Meaning, if you will, there have been at least three intended audiences for this text: the preexilic nation, the postexilic nation, and us. You. Me. So what does this passage teach us? What is the meaning in front of the text?
God Takes Sin Seriously
What we know about the seriousness of sin is explored by what God has revealed about himself since the time of Jeremiah:
- God will punish sin, and some will be given over to their sin (Rom 1:16-32). So to the question of our introduction, yes, there is a point of no return. There can be a time when God says that he has had enough. When is that time? The answer is simply, do not tempt God. If you do not know him, then repent now. Change. Turn and ask him to save you today (Heb 3:7-19).
- When a believer sins, God, like a loving Father, will discipline the believer (Heb 12:2-17).
- The ultimate expression of God’s hatred toward sin is what Christ experienced on the cross for our sin (John 19).
God Rejects Lying Preachers
Read Ezekiel 34 and you will see how God feels about shepherds who do not act like shepherds. He rejects them because he loves his sheep. Read John 10 to discover how Jesus is the opposite of a lying preacher. He is the good Shepherd.
Judgment on Others Is a Warning for Us
A smart person learns from his mistakes, but a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. This is not just a truism; it is a foundational principle for interpreting the Old Testament. We read a history of a people because we want to learn how we ourselves should be warned. The book of Hebrews is written using the nation of Israel as a warning to us individually as believers. As Paul would say explicitly in 1 Corinthians 10:11, “These things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our instruction, on whom the ends of the ages have come.”
God hates sin. God punishes every sin that has ever been committed. Either the punishment for our sin is taken upon us, or it is redirected from God toward Christ on the cross, where he absorbed the weight of God’s wrath for the sins of the world. The cross is at once hope and warning. Yes, the cross is Christ reaching up to heaven and down to us. But the stretched arms of Jesus are a warning. Jesus’s arms are held up to warn us to stay back, not to enter into the hell of God’s wrath from which there is no return—from which no one at all, in heaven or on earth, can save us. So read and be warned.
Reflect and Discuss
- What do Jeremiah 14 and 15 teach us about the timing and promptness of repentance? Can we, as believers, repent too late? What are the consequences of repenting in a sluggish manner?
- What were the two confusing confessions and the one confusing message of 14:1–15:9?
- Did God refuse the pleas of Israel in this passage? If so, why?
- If we rebel for so long, does God finally give up? Is there a point of no return?
- Is the drought metaphor in 14:2-6 a physical or spiritual drought?
- In what way does physical desperation lead to spiritual desperation? How does God use the physical circumstances in our lives to produce a spiritual thirst for him?
- Who are the three audiences of Jeremiah 14:1–15:9? Was the text written for then, now, or later?
- How do we know from this passage that God takes sin seriously? What do Romans 1:16-32; Hebrews 12:2-17; and John 19 teach us about how God views sin?
- What does Jeremiah teach us about lying preachers? How does God view lying preachers? Panning out in Scripture, what do Ezekiel 34 and John 10 teach us about lying preachers?
- How are we, as Christians, to understand God’s judgment on others? What lessons of warning can we ascertain from God’s judgment on others?