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    Ancient Truth: Jeremiah: Ancient Truth, #9
    Ancient Truth: Jeremiah: Ancient Truth, #9
    Ancient Truth: Jeremiah: Ancient Truth, #9
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Ancient Truth: Jeremiah: Ancient Truth, #9

    By Ed Hurst

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    About this ebook

    The Bible is Ancient Truth, but must be read in its own ancient context to be fully understood. Even the people among whom Jesus lived no longer understood their own Hebrew heritage because the leadership had embraced Western intellectual assumptions which were then foreign to Scripture. Where we stand today is even more foreign. The burden of responsibility is upon us to travel back into that world, to the context in which God chose to reveal Himself. This volume examines Jeremiah and Lamentations in light of those Hebrew mental assumptions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEd Hurst
    Release dateMar 13, 2013
    ISBN9781301733262
    Ancient Truth: Jeremiah: Ancient Truth, #9
    Author

    Ed Hurst

    Born 18 September 1956 in Seminole, OK. Traveled a great deal in Europe with the US Army, worked a series of odd jobs, and finally in public education. Ordained to the ministry as a Baptist, then with a non-denominational endorsement. Currently semi-retired.

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      Book preview

      Ancient Truth - Ed Hurst

      Introduction to the Ancient Truth Series

      Mankind is fallen, in need of redemption. The one single source is the God who created us. He has revealed Himself and His will for us, the path to redemption. The pinnacle of His efforts to reveal Himself came in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ.

      Most of us understand easily enough that Divine Son was born into a particular historical and cultural setting, one that is frankly foreign to us, and we to it. The distance is more than mere years of time, or language and culture, but a wealth of things that fall between Him and us. At a minimum, we could point out the Post-Modern culture, Victorian feminism, Enlightenment secularism, European feudalism, and Germanic tribal mythology – so much we can point out without much difficulty. What no one in our Western world today seems to realize is the single greatest barrier to understanding Christ is the thing that lies under all of those obscuring layers of influence: Western Civilization itself.

      That is, the ancient Classical Greco-Roman world was built essentially on Aristotle and Plato. Those two are not simply alien to the people of the Bible, but their basic view of reality is frankly hostile to that of the Bible. Aristotle rejected Hebrew Scripture because he rejected the underlying worldview of the people God used to write that Scripture.

      This book is not a long academic dissertation on the differences; that has been very well covered by far better qualified writers. But this should serve as notice to the reader how our Western intellectual heritage, including our basic assumptions of how a human can know, understand, and deal with reality, is not what’s in the Bible. If you bring that Western intellectual heritage to Scripture, you will not come away with a proper understanding of God’s revelation. If the rules, the essential assumptions, by which you discern and organize truth about your world remain rooted in the West, you will not fully understand the precious treasure of truth God left for us in the Bible.

      We do not need yet one more commentary on the Bible from a foreign Western intellectual background; we need something that speaks to us from the background of the Hebrew people. God spoke first to them. He did not simply find the Hebrew people useful for His revelation; He made the Hebrew people precisely so He would have a fit vehicle for His revelation. Bridging the divide between them and us is no small task, but to get readers started down that path, I offer this series of commentaries that attempt to present a Hebrew understanding for the Western mind. Not as some authoritative expert, but I write as another explorer who reports what he has found so far. I encourage you to consider what I share and heed the call to make your own exploration of these things.

      A note about Scripture translations: There are dozens of English translations of the Bible. None of them is perfect, if for no other reason translation itself is shooting at a moving target. More importantly, it is virtually impossible to translate across the vast cultural and intellectual gulf between that of current English-speakers and those who wrote the Bible. This author recommends the New English Translation, AKA the NET Bible – http://netbible.org/

      Introduction to Jeremiah

      We can only guess that Jeremiah was born between 650 and 640 BC, in the village of Anathoth, a few kilometers north and somewhat east of Jerusalem. This barren hilltop village was one of the original Cities of Refuge granted to the priests and Levites. We believe he was a descendant of the Zadok who replaced the disgraced Abiathar after Solomon caught the latter taking part in the attempted coup of Adonijah. Thus, Jeremiah was surely eligible for active priesthood, but we can’t be sure the politics of the time allowed him to actually serve in the Temple. We know his ministry began during the reign of Josiah and they were roughly age mates.

      Jeremiah eagerly supported the reforms of Josiah. However, the long legacy of Manasseh that had buried the Law in the first place had taken root in the souls of the leadership, making them rebellious to the bitter end. Thus, God had to cut short the life of that righteous king to make way for the final act of wrath that took them from the Promised Land. We sense Jeremiah had precious little joy in his service as prophet, so we call him the Weeping Prophet. His was a painful life with some four decades of service against all odds, knowing his message would find little traction with much of anyone. The book evinces a deep sensitivity over what must have been a monumental frustration with something so painfully obvious: Unless Jehovah ruled the nation there could be no nation. False patriotism and man-made solutions were a complete waste. It was his painful duty to declare it was too late, and the doom was certain, that the nation should surrender and take her lumps.

      There was at least one very strong political party in the royal court: the Pro-Egypt Party. It was the strongest and the primary source of Jeremiah’s grief. While there may also have been a Pro-Babylon Party, Jeremiah was not a member of any party. His call for surrender to the rising Babylonian Empire was no reflection of political activism, but a deep concern for repentance. Without covenant faithfulness, Israel had no claim to her name, much less the protecting hand of her God. The Lord had specifically revealed to Jeremiah His demand Judah submit peacefully to His use of Babylon as punishment for violating the Covenant. Jeremiah had precious little support for this call in the leadership of Judah, so obsessed were they with the supposed wisdom of human statecraft. There’s no doubt Jeremiah faced accusations of treason. God’s rescue from Assyria during Isaiah’s prophetic service left the leaders thinking Zion was inviolable regardless of actual holiness; no one could prove them wrong. Even when Babylon successfully captured Zion, as Jeremiah warned would happen, the partisans blamed Jeremiah for discouraging the city’s defenders.

      Most scholars warn us that the book is most certainly not in chronological order. Given the text itself tells us the whole thing was rewritten at least once, we should expect Jeremiah and his scribe put things in the order which mattered to them most. The burden is upon us to grasp the message as presented.

      Chapter 1

      Jeremiah begins typically by presenting his credentials. What matters most to us was his membership in the priesthood. We cannot know whether he actually served in the Temple for sure, but he was eligible as a descendant of Zadok. In 627 BC, the Lord called him to service as prophet. He continued in that service until the Exile, some forty years later.

      Then Jeremiah launches into a description of his calling. As with all Hebrew writing, it is at least partly symbolic, meant to convey the impact, not some objective description of the event itself. How would you describe a conversation with God? God is a Spirit and speaks to the human spirit; the intellect struggles merely to discern what is required. The passage includes the notion God foreknew Jeremiah prior to birth and planned to use him this way. Even while still rather young, God commanded him to receive the Word and speak it with boldness. Worthiness was not the issue, since no man was worthy in God’s sight. The issue was the power of God and His sovereign choice. The impact of his service was destroying false structures of the human mind and rebuilding the truth of God.

      Two things were important for Jeremiah’s service. First was to understand the power of God’s Word as something alive, which the Lord stood behind and made it happen. So he gave Jeremiah a vision of an almond sapling (shaqed) to symbolize how God kept track of things. That God stood guard over His word (shoqed) was a play on words, but also we note the almond was the first plant to betray spring, by sprouting before any other.

      Second, the Lord showed him a boiling cauldron, tipping away from the north. Given the impenetrable desert between Mesopotamia and Palestine, anything attacking Judah from anywhere but Egypt or from the sea would have to come from the north. In this case, it was the rising Babylonian Empire. The image is a vast horde of people streaming out of the north, seething and ready to lay siege to Jerusalem. The pagan defiance of many in the Judean leadership had gone too far, too long. Judgment was set, and there was no appeal.

      Thus, the message from God was sure and unalterable. Jeremiah had no excuse for hesitating. He was to be strong; if he faltered at all, God would leave him to stand on his own. He could humble himself before God or be forcibly humbled at the hands of human oppressors. In God’s power, he was stronger than

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