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,
and disaster overtook them,’”
declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 2:3)
The Lord cared for Israel. They were holy to the Lord and his special firstfruits people. When they remember this they should come to repentance over forsaking the Lord. We cannot understand how the Lord’s people could be so forgetful and so ungrateful. It is time for us to stop and count the blessings in our life. It is time for us to remember what the Lord has done for us. Have we done the same as Israel. The unimaginable of forgetting the goodness of the Lord and turning away from the Lord? Now is our time to remember and return to the Lord.
Now the message of the Lord through Jeremiah turns from remembering the past to the present. That is what we find in verses 4-13 of chapter 2.
This is what the LORD says:
“What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they strayed so far from me?
They followed worthless idols. (Jeremiah 2:5)
Israel exchanged their relationship with God for other deities. What went wrong? What fault did God’s people find in him? Why did they turn away? God did so much and now he is treated with this disrespect. They committed the ultimate offence to God in turning from him and to worthless idols.
Israel was guilty of apostasy, and it begins with the leaders. The priests didn’t follow the law and the prophets did not remain faithful. (Verse 8) These were the leaders, and they were leading Israel in the wrong direction. They were leading the people away from God when their role was to lead the people to God. For this God brings charges against Israel.
What Israel has done is the ultimate offence. There should be great horror at what Israel has done. To exchange the glory of God for worthless idols is appalling.
But my people have exchanged their glorious God
for worthless idols. (Jeremiah 2:9)
Israel has rejected the living water with flowing living streams for a cistern that cannot even hold water.
“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water. (Jeremiah 2:13)
Israel misrepresents God’s Character (verses 14-37). The priests and the prophets were called out to represent God’s holy character and they failed. The land has been laid to waste and they have done it to themselves (verse 17).
There was corruption in their worship. They forgot to glorify God. A lack of loyalty to God is exposed in Jeremiah 3:1-5. They are like an unfaithful wife.
But God is willing to extend grace. There is a sin stain that cannot be washed.
Although you wash yourself with soap
and use an abundance of cleansing powder,
the stain of your guilt is still before me,”
declares the Sovereign LORD. (Jeremiah 2:22)
We all have the sin stain that can only be washed by God. In grace he extended the new covenant. This stain was washed by the blood of Christ when we put our faith in Christ. That Jesus Christ death on the cross count for us.
Chapter 31 of Jeremiah will tell more of the coming new covenant. There are many prophesies of the coming Messiah, Jesus.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, (Jeremiah 31:31)
Jesus said, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:28)
We are amazed at the sin of Israel. The sin of Judah the southern kingdom. We have sinned and we need God. Jeremiah’s first sermon is for us. We need to listen to this teenager. Examine your life. Repent! Return to God.
