“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth.

Israel was holy to the Lord, the firstfruits of his harvest; all who devoured her were held guilty, and disaster overtook them,’” declares the Lord.

Lions have roared; they have growled at him. They have laid waste his land; his towns are burned and deserted.

“If a man divorces his wife and she leaves him and marries another man, should he return to her again? Would not the land be completely defiled? But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers— would you now return to me?” declares the Lord.

A lion has come out of his lair; a destroyer of nations has set out. He has left his place to lay waste your land. Your towns will lie in ruins without inhabitant.

Look! He advances like the clouds, his chariots come like a whirlwind, his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe to us! We are ruined!

I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert; all its towns lay in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

They are well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for another man’s wife.

Shepherds with their flocks will come against her; they will pitch their tents around her, each tending his own portion.”

But I am full of the wrath of the Lord, and I cannot hold it in. “Pour it out on the children in the street and on the young men gathered together; both husband and wife will be caught in it, and the old, those weighed down with years.

“‘Cut off your hair and throw it away; take up a lament on the barren heights, for the Lord has rejected and abandoned this generation that is under his wrath.

Now, you women, hear the word of the Lord; open your ears to the words of his mouth. Teach your daughters how to wail; teach one another a lament.

For the practices of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.

But the Lord is the true God; he is the living God, the eternal King. When he is angry, the earth trembles; the nations cannot endure his wrath.

But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.

When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar; he makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth. He sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.

Everyone is senseless and without knowledge; every goldsmith is shamed by his idols. The images he makes are a fraud; they have no breath in them.

He who is the Portion of Jacob is not like these, for he is the Maker of all things, including Israel, the people of his inheritance— the Lord Almighty is his name.

Pour out your wrath on the nations that do not acknowledge you, on the peoples who do not call on your name. For they have devoured Jacob; they have devoured him completely and destroyed his homeland.

Plot Against Jeremiah

Because the Lord revealed their plot to me, I knew it, for at that time he showed me what they were doing.

I had been like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter; I did not realize that they had plotted against me, saying, “Let us destroy the tree and its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name be remembered no more.”

Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.

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.

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.