Jeremiah’s First Sermon Series

Jeremiah was called as a prophet. We read this in Chapter one. He is told to fasten his belt around his garment, that is to say, roll up your sleeves and buckle your seatbelt for a turbulent ride. He is to stand up and speak up for God. As we look at Jeremiah’s first sermon there are a couple of other notable aspects of Jeremiah’s call. One is that his father was a priest and the other that he was a youth.

It is assumed that Jeremiah was somewhere in the age of 19-24 when he was called as a prophet. Here he was in line to be a priest, the son of a priest (Jeremiah 1:1) when he is called to bring the message of judgment to Judah.

Jeremiah preached to the southern Kingdom of Judah, but sometimes we will use the term Israel not the northern kingdom but as a whole for the southern and northern kingdom together, because both kingdoms are one people, the Lord’s people.

Can you imagine the crowd that Jeremiah was preaching to as a 19-year-old. He is giving this message of harsh judgement to his dad and his dad’s priestly peers, not to mention the king. He does not even qualify to be a rookie priest until the age of thirty which is probably another ten years away and he has the audacity to bring a message of judgement to those in an honored place of authority over him.

Do you remember the famous rebuke that John Ryland senior gave to William Carey. He said, “sit down young man God can reach India without your help or mine.” Well, William Carey’s best friend was Junior, who was John Ryland’s son. He knew William Carey as a kid so it would be hard for him to receive Carey’s rebuke to the Baptist association for not doing enough for foreign missions.

Being too young to speak a message of judgment was Jeremiah’s reason he gave God why he was not the one who should call out the priests.

Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. (Jeremiah 1:6)

The two most well-known paintings of the prophet Jeremiah are Rembrandt’s work and Michael Angelo’s Sistine Chapel painting. Both of these paintings capture Jeremiah as an old man, either bald or grey headed, and both have him with a long grey beard. He is in prison in both paintings and lamenting that his lifelong messages of doom for Jerusalem have come to pass. To my knowledge no one has ever painted Jeremiah as a teenager preaching his first sermon. My what a different painting that would be.

After his initial resistance to his call Jeremiah starts out great. That is, great in the sense of obeying God.

The word of the LORD came to me: 2 “Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem: “This is what the LORD says: (Jeremiah 2:1-2a)

Do you remember the first sermon you ever preached? I know for me I may have forgotten my second sermon and third sermon and so on, but I distinctly remember preaching my first sermon. I was on an overseas ministry trip and three times as we prepared for the trip I tried to get out of preaching. I finally realized I better go prepared. They expect me to preach.

The sermon was from John 3, You must be born again. After later taking hermeneutics class in seminary and doing a study on exegetical fallacies I am not able to detect even one fallacy in my first sermon. That is still to this day how I understand John Chapter 3, You must be born again. I don’t have any regrets surrounding my first sermon.

Jeremiah was so faithful in how he honored God and preached the difficult message to a hostile crowd. Jeremiah was to go and proclaim the Word of the Lord in the hearing of Jerusalem and proclaim the Word of the Lord he did.

He contrasts the past faithfulness of the Lord’s people to their present-day infidelity. The message begins by reminding them of Israel’s past. Jeremiah is bringing the message of God, but it is in one sense Jeremiah to Judah. He reminds them of the Exodus. He brings up God’s provision in the wilderness.

“‘I remember the devotion of your youth,

how as a bride you loved me

and followed me through the wilderness,

through a land not sown. (Jeremiah 2:2b)

Jeremiah uses the illustration of a bride’s love. It was like there was the honeymoon period of Israel and the Lord and now they are apart. The illustration is of a formally loving relationship that has gone cold.

Israel was holy to the LORD,

the firstfruits of his harvest;

all who devoured her were held guilty,