Beginning

14 This message came to Jeremiah from the Lord, explaining why he was holding back the rain:

² Judah mourns; business has ground to a halt; all the people prostrate themselves to the earth, and a great cry rises from Jerusalem. ³ The nobles send servants for water from the wells, but the wells are dry. The servants return, baffled and desperate, and cover their heads in grief. ⁴ The ground is parched and cracked for lack of rain; the farmers are afraid. ⁵ The deer deserts her fawn because there is no grass. ⁶ The wild donkeys stand upon the bare hills panting like thirsty jackals. They strain their eyes looking for grass to eat, but there is none to be found.

⁷ O Lord, we have sinned against you grievously, yet help us for the sake of your own reputation! ⁸ O Hope of Israel, our Savior in times of trouble, why are you as a stranger to us, as one passing through the land who is merely stopping for the night? ⁹ Are you also baffled? Are you helpless to save us? O Lord, you are right here among us, and we carry your name; we are known as your people. O Lord, don’t desert us now!

¹⁰ But the Lord replies: You have loved to wander far from me and have not tried to follow in my paths. Now I will no longer accept you as my people; now I will remember all the evil you have done and punish your sins.

¹¹ The Lord told me again: Don’t ask me anymore to bless this people. Don’t pray for them anymore. ¹² When they fast, I will not pay any attention; when they present their offerings and sacrifices to me, I will not accept them. What I will give them in return is war and famine and disease.

¹³ Then I said, O Lord God, their prophets are telling them that all is well—that no war or famine will come. They tell the people you will surely send them peace, that you will bless them.

¹⁴ Then the Lord said: The prophets are telling lies in my name. I didn’t send them or tell them to speak or give them any message. They prophesy of visions and revelations they have never seen nor heard; they speak foolishness concocted out of their own lying hearts. ¹⁵ Therefore, the Lord says, I will punish these lying prophets who have spoken in my name though I did not send them, who say no war shall come nor famine. By war and famine they themselves shall die! ¹⁶ And the people to whom they prophesy—their bodies shall be thrown out into the streets of Jerusalem, victims of famine and war; there shall be no one to bury them. Husbands, wives, sons, and daughters—all will be gone. For I will pour out terrible punishment upon them for their sins.

¹⁷ Therefore, tell them this: Night and day my eyes shall overflow with tears; I cannot stop my crying, for my people have been run through with a sword and lie mortally wounded on the ground. ¹⁸ If I go out in the fields, there lie the bodies of those the sword has killed; and if I walk in the streets, there lie those dead from starvation and disease. And yet the prophets and priests alike have made it their business to travel through the whole country, reassuring everyone that all is well, speaking of things they know nothing about.

¹⁹ “O Lord,” the people will cry, “have you completely rejected Judah? Do you abhor Jerusalem? Even after punishment, will there be no peace? We thought, Now at last he will heal us and bind our wounds. But no peace has come, and there is only trouble and terror everywhere. ²⁰ O Lord, we confess our wickedness, and that of our fathers too. ²¹ Do not hate us, Lord, for the sake of your own name. Do not disgrace yourself and the throne of your glory by forsaking your promise to bless us! ²² What heathen god can give us rain? Who but you alone, O Lord our God, can do such things as this? Therefore we will wait for you to help us.”

15 Then the Lord said to me, Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me pleading for these people, even then I wouldn’t help them—away with them! Get them out of my sight! ² And if they say to you, But where can we go? Tell them the Lord says: Those who are destined for death, to death; those who must die by the sword, to the sword; those doomed to starvation, to famine; and those for captivity, to captivity. ³ I will appoint over them four kinds of destroyers, says the Lord: the sword to kill, the dogs to tear, and the vultures and wild animals to finish up what’s left. ⁴ Because of the wicked things Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, did in Jerusalem, I will punish you so severely that your fate will horrify the peoples of the world.

⁵ Who will feel sorry for you, Jerusalem? Who will weep for you? Who will even bother to ask how you are? ⁶ You have forsaken me and turned your backs upon me. Therefore, I will clench my fists against you to destroy you. I am tired of always giving you another chance. ⁷ I will sift you at the gates of your cities and take from you all that you hold dear, and I will destroy my own people because they refuse to turn back to me from all their evil ways. ⁸ There shall be countless widows; at noontime I will bring death to the young men and sorrow to their mothers. I will cause anguish and terror to fall upon them suddenly. ⁹ The mother of seven sickens and faints, for all her sons are dead. Her sun is gone down while it is yet day. She sits childless now, disgraced, for all her children have been killed.

¹⁰ Then Jeremiah said, “What sadness is mine, my mother; oh, that I had died at birth. For I am hated everywhere I go. I am neither a creditor soon to foreclose nor a debtor refusing to pay—yet they all curse me. ¹¹ Well, let them curse! Lord, you know how I have pled with you on their behalf—how I have begged you to spare these enemies of mine.”

^12-13 Can a man break bars of northern iron or bronze? This people’s stubborn will can’t be broken either. So, because of all your sins against me, I will deliver your wealth and treasures as loot to the enemy. ¹⁴ I will have your enemies take you as slaves to a land where you have never been before, for my anger burns like fire, and it shall consume you.

¹⁵ Then Jeremiah replied, “Lord, you know it is for your sake that I am suffering. They are persecuting me because I have proclaimed your word to them. Don’t let them kill me! Rescue me from their clutches, and give them what they deserve! ¹⁶ Your words are what sustain me; they are food to my hungry soul. They bring joy to my sorrowing heart and delight me. How proud I am to bear your name, O Lord. ^17-18 I have not joined the people in their merry feasts. I sit alone beneath the hand of God. I burst with indignation at their sins. Yet you have failed me in my time of need! You have let them keep right on with all their persecutions. Will they never stop hurting me? Your help is as uncertain as a seasonal mountain brook—sometimes a flood, sometimes as dry as a bone.”

¹⁹ The Lord replied: “Stop this foolishness and talk some sense! Only if you return to trusting me will I let you continue as my spokesman. You are to influence them, not let them influence you! ²⁰ They will fight against you like a besieging army against a high city wall. But they will not conquer you, for I am with you to protect and deliver you, says the Lord. ²¹ Yes, I will certainly deliver you from these wicked men and rescue you from their ruthless hands.”

16 On yet another occasion God spoke to me, and said:

² You must not marry and have children here. ³ For the children born in this city and their mothers and fathers ⁴ shall die from terrible diseases. No one shall mourn for them or bury them, but their bodies shall lie on the ground to rot and fertilize the soil. They shall die from war and famine, and their bodies shall be picked apart by vultures and wild animals. ⁵ Do not mourn or weep for them, for I have removed my protection and my peace from them—taken away my loving-kindness and my mercies. ⁶ Both great and small shall die in this land, unburied and unmourned, and their friends shall not cut themselves nor shave their heads as signs of sorrow (as is their heathen custom). ⁷ No one shall comfort the mourners with a meal nor send them a cup of wine expressing grief for their parents’ death.

⁸ As a sign to them of these sad days ahead,^[a] don’t you join them anymore in their feasts and parties—don’t even eat a meal with them. ⁹ For the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: In your own lifetime, before your very eyes, I will end all laughter in this land—the happy songs, the marriage feasts, the songs of bridegrooms and of brides.

¹⁰ And when you tell the people all these things and they ask, “Why has the Lord decreed such terrible things against us? What have we done to merit such treatment? What is our sin against the Lord our God?” ¹¹ tell them the Lord’s reply is this: Because your fathers forsook me. They worshiped other gods and served them; they did not keep my laws, ¹² and you have been worse than your fathers were! You follow evil to your hearts’ content and refuse to listen to me. ¹³ Therefore, I will throw you out of this land and chase you into a foreign land where neither you nor your fathers have been before, and there you can go ahead and worship your idols all you like—and I will grant you no favors!

^14-15 But there will come a glorious day, says the Lord, when the whole topic of conversation will be that God is bringing his people home from a nation in the north, and from many other lands where he had scattered them. You will look back no longer to the time when I rescued you from your slavery in Egypt. That mighty miracle will scarcely be mentioned anymore. Yes, I will bring you back again, says the Lord, to this same land I gave your fathers.

¹⁶ Now I am sending for many fishermen to fish you from the deeps where you are hiding from my wrath. I am sending for hunters to chase you down like deer in the forests or mountain goats on inaccessible crags. Wherever you run to escape my judgment, I will find you and punish you. ¹⁷ For I am closely watching you, and I see every sin. You cannot hope to hide from me.

¹⁸ And I will punish you doubly for all your sins because you have defiled my land with your detestable idols and filled it up with all your evil deeds.

¹⁹ O Lord, my Strength and Fortress, my Refuge in the day of trouble, nations from around the world will come to you saying, “Our fathers have been foolish, for they have worshiped worthless idols! ²⁰ Can men make God? The gods they made are not real gods at all.”

²¹ And when they come in that spirit, I will show them^[b] my power and might and make them understand at last that I alone am God.

17 My people sin as though commanded to, as though their evil were laws chiseled with an iron pen or diamond point upon their stony hearts or on the corners of their altars. ^2-3 Their youths do not forget to sin, worshiping idols beneath each tree, high in the mountains or in the open country down below. And so I will give all your treasures to your enemies as the price that you must pay for all your sins. ⁴ And the wonderful heritage I reserved for you will slip out of your hand, and I will send you away as slaves to your enemies in distant lands. For you have kindled a fire of my anger that shall burn forever.

⁵ The Lord says: Cursed is the man who puts his trust in mortal man and turns his heart away from God. ⁶ He is like a stunted shrub in the desert, with no hope for the future; he lives on the salt-encrusted plains in the barren wilderness; good times pass him by forever.

⁷ But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and has made the Lord his hope and confidence. ⁸ He is like a tree planted along a riverbank, with its roots reaching deep into the water—a tree not bothered by the heat nor worried by long months of drought. Its leaves stay green, and it goes right on producing all its luscious fruit.

⁹ The heart is the most deceitful thing there is and desperately wicked. No one can really know how bad it is! ¹⁰ Only the Lord knows! He searches all hearts and examines deepest motives so he can give to each person his right reward, according to his deeds—how he has lived.

¹¹ Like a bird that fills her nest with young she has not hatched and which will soon desert her and fly away, so is the man who gets his wealth by unjust means. Sooner or later he will lose his riches and at the end of his life become a poor old fool.

¹² But our refuge is your throne, eternal, high, and glorious. ¹³ O Lord, the Hope of Israel, all who turn away from you shall be disgraced and shamed; they are registered for earth and not for glory, for they have forsaken the Lord, the Fountain of living waters. ¹⁴ Lord, you alone can heal me, you alone can save, and my praises are for you alone.

¹⁵ Men scoff at me and say, “What is this word of the Lord you keep talking about? If these threats of yours are really from God, why don’t they come true?”

¹⁶ Lord, I don’t want the people crushed by terrible calamity. The plan is yours, not mine. It is your message I’ve given them, not my own. I don’t want them doomed! ¹⁷ Lord, don’t desert me now! You alone are my hope. ¹⁸ Bring confusion and trouble on all who persecute me, but give me peace. Yes, bring double destruction upon them!

¹⁹ Then the Lord said to me, Go and stand in the gates of Jerusalem, first at the gate where the king goes out, and then at each of the other gates, ²⁰ and say to all the people: Hear the word of the Lord, kings of Judah and all the people of this nation, and all you citizens of Jerusalem. ^21-22 The Lord says: Take warning and live; do no unnecessary^[c] work on the Sabbath day, but make it a holy day. I gave this commandment to your fathers, ²³ but they didn’t listen or obey. They stubbornly refused to pay attention and be taught.

²⁴ But if you obey me, says the Lord, and refuse to work on the Sabbath day and keep it separate, special and holy, ²⁵ then this nation shall continue forever. There shall always be descendants of David sitting on the throne here in Jerusalem; there shall always be kings and princes riding in pomp and splendor among the people, and this city shall remain forever. ²⁶ And from all around Jerusalem and from the cities of Judah and Benjamin, from the Negeb and from the lowlands west of Judah, the people shall come with their burnt offerings and grain offerings and incense, bringing their sacrifices to praise the Lord in his Temple.

²⁷ But if you will not listen to me, if you refuse to keep the Sabbath holy, if on the Sabbath you bring in loads of merchandise through these gates of Jerusalem, just as on other days, then I will set fire to these gates. The fire shall spread to the palaces and utterly destroy them, and no one shall be able to put out the raging flames.