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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadPaul Kretzmann Commentary - Jeremiah 16:10 - 16:21
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Reasons for the Captivity
v. 10. And it shall come to pass, when thou shall show this people all these words, declaring to them the judgment of the Lord, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? this being asked with a great show of pretended innocence, or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against the Lord, our God? the implied assertion being that they were being threatened without a cause,
v. 11. then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken Me, saith the Lord, and have walked after other gods, thus habitually indulging in idolatry, and have served them, and have worshiped them, and have, on the other hand, forsaken Me, and have not kept My Law.
v. 12. And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil heart, in deliberate stubbornness, that they may not hearken unto Me, or, "that ye hearken not unto Me," obstinately ignoring His Word;
v. 13. therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your fathers, a country altogether strange to them, and there shall ye serve other gods day and night, without intermission; where I will not show you favor. This is a form of holy irony: what they willingly did in their own country, they would be obliged to do in the land of their captivity; because they voluntarily forsook the true God at home, they would be prevented from serving Him elsewhere. At the same time the Lord opens up before the eyes of Judah a way of redemption, the thought of which was intended to keep His people from despair.
v. 14. Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, according to the asseveration which had been common in Judah these many centuries. The Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt, this being a very emphatic statement,
v. 15. but, The Lord liveth that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the North, from Babylon, and from all the lands whither He had driven them, from the lands of their exile; and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers, this promise being like a ray of light in the midst of extreme darkness. This thought is expanded still more in the next paragraph.
v. 16. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the Lord, whose nets would enfold large multitudes to take them captive, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks, this indicating the extent in which the sentence of captivity was carried out.
v. 17. For Mine eyes are upon all their ways, observing their entire conduct; they are not hid from My face, neither is their iniquity hid from Mine eyes, they are unable to conceal it before His omniscient gaze.
v. 18. And first, that is, to begin with, I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double, in twice the measure in which they committed their wicked deeds; because they have defiled My land, desecrating the country which was considered hallowed to Him; they have filled Mine inheritance, what He had given them to possess as their own, with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable things, with their dead and loathsome idols.
v. 19. O Lord, so the prophet now addresses Jehovah, the God of the covenant, in expressing his own hope and that of all true Israelites concerning the return of the people to the true God, my Strength and my fortress, his Protection against the enemies, and my Refuge in the day of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto Thee from the ends of the earth, thus joining the believers in Israel in their recognition of the vanity of their own idols, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit, the trouble in which they found themselves bringing them to this realization. This admission on the part of the Gentiles is now substantiated by the prophet.
v. 20. Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods? The question has the strength of a most emphatic denial, of a stern rebuke to the men of Judah for their idolatrous ways. Moreover, the Lord expresses His emphatic agreement with this statement of Jeremiah.
v. 21. Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know, in the impending catastrophe, I will cause them to know Mine hand and My might, as it descends upon them in anger; and they shall know that My name is "The Lord," that He alone is God in truth. Cf Eze_12:15; Exo_3:14. Many a person has since that time been brought to a realization of the same truth by similar stern measures of the Lord.