Lives of Scripture

Jeremiah was called as a young man — he protested, "I am only a youth," but God told him, "Before you were born I consecrated you... a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:4-10). From Josiah's thirteenth year until Jerusalem's fall, Jeremiah warned Judah that persistent idolatry and false confidence in the temple itself ("This is the temple of the LORD") would bring Babylonian judgment, a message so unwelcome that he was beaten, put in stocks, and lowered into a muddy cistern to die before a foreign official, Ebed-melech, rescued him (Jeremiah 7:1-15; 20:1-2; 38:1-13). King Jehoiakim cut up and burned the scroll of Jeremiah's prophecies as Baruch read it aloud, and Jeremiah simply dictated it again (Jeremiah 36). Even while announcing seventy years of exile, Jeremiah bought a field in Anathoth as a prophetic sign that God would one day restore the land (Jeremiah 32:6-15). His deepest message looked past judgment to hope: God promised a New Covenant written on human hearts rather than stone, a promise the New Testament identifies as fulfilled in Christ (Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 8:8-12). After Jerusalem fell and the governor Gedaliah was assassinated, Jeremiah was forced against his own counsel to flee to Egypt with the surviving remnant, and Scripture's record of him ends there (Jeremiah 43:1-7).