Study Desk

Look! The enemy rises up like a cloud. His chariots look like a windstorm. His horses are faster than eagles. It will be very bad for us! We are ruined!

I looked, and the good land had become a desert. All the cities in that land were destroyed by the Lord and his great anger.

Enemy shepherds will surround you with all their flocks. They will set up their tents all around you, and each one will let his sheep eat the grass.

Who can I speak to? Who can I warn? Who will listen to me? The people of Israel have closed their ears, so they cannot hear my warnings. They don't like the Lord 's teachings. They don't want to hear his message.

But I am full of the Lord 's anger, and I am tired of holding it in! "Pour out my anger on the children playing in the streets and on the young soldiers gathered there as well. A man and his wife will both be captured as well as all the old people.

They are like a worker who tried to make silver pure. The bellows blew strongly, and the fire became hotter, but only lead came from the fire. The worker wasted his time trying to make that silver pure. In the same way the evil was not removed from my people.

"Jeremiah, cut off your hair and throw it away. Go up to the bare hilltop and cry, because the Lord has rejected this generation of people. He has turned his back on these people. And in anger he will punish them.

Is there a man who is wise enough to understand these things? Is there someone who has been taught by the Lord ? Can anyone explain his message? Why was the land ruined? Why was it made like an empty desert where no one goes?

Now, women of Judah, listen to the message from the Lord . Listen to the words from his mouth. Teach your daughters how to cry loudly. Each of them must learn to sing this funeral song:

But the Lord is the only true God. He is the only God who is alive. He is the King who rules forever. The earth shakes when he is angry. The people of the nations cannot stop his anger.

God is the one who used his power and made the earth. He used his wisdom and built the world. With his understanding he stretched the sky over the earth.

God causes the loud thunder, and he causes great floods of water to fall from the sky. He makes clouds rise in the sky every place on earth. He sends lightning with the rain. He brings out the wind from his storehouses.

But Jacob's God is not like the idols. He made everything, and Israel is the family that God chose to be his own people. His name is Lord All-Powerful.

Tell these things to the king and his wife, "Come down from your thrones. Your beautiful crowns have fallen from your heads."

A black man cannot change the color of his skin, and a leopard cannot change its spots. In the same way, Jerusalem, you cannot change and do good. You always do bad things.

"Important people and common people will die in the land of Judah. No one will bury them or cry for them. No one will cut himself or shave his head to show sorrow for them.

He was making a pot from clay. But there was something wrong with the pot. So the potter used that clay to make another pot. With his hands he shaped the pot the way he wanted it to be.

The next day Pashhur took Jeremiah out from between the blocks of wood. Then Jeremiah said to him, "The Lord 's name for you is not Pashhur. Now his name for you is ‘Surrounded by Terror.'

That is your name because of what the Lord says: ‘I will soon make you a terror to yourself and to all your friends. You will watch enemies killing your friends with swords. I will give all the people of Judah to the king of Babylon. He will take them away to the country of Babylon, and his army will kill the people of Judah with their swords.

Sometimes I say to myself, "I will forget about him. I will not speak anymore in his name." But when I say that, his message is like a fire burning inside me! It feels like it is burning deep in my bones! I get tired of trying to hold his message inside. And finally, I am not able to hold it in.