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Jeremiah 1:1-14 - Exposition

I'm very pleased to be able to bring God's word to Japanese university students from Jeremiah 1, because I really believe that Jeremiah 1 was written directly for Japanese university students. God addresses so many of the issues that you face in these fourteen verses. We're going to look at three main areas of student life that are dealt with through this passage.

1 Parental Pressure

We're going to begin at Jeremiah 1 and verse 1, since that's a sensible place to start:

What's the very first thing that the Bible tells us about Jeremiah? Who his father is and where he comes from. Now this is a pretty standard way to introduce people in that context, but we know a little bit more about Hilkiah and Jeremiah's family: Jeremiah comes from the family of Anathoth, who was King David's high priest. You might have heard of King David, he was the most famous king in the whole of Jewish history, and his priest would have been almost as famous.

Hilkiah, Jeremiah's father, wasn't doing too badly either. He was in charge of restoring the temple at Jerusalem, and so would be pretty famous throughout the country as well.

We're not even told that Jeremiah is a priest himself; it's assumed. His father was a priest, his ancestors were priests, and so he is going to be a priest. This bring us to our first point: parental pressure. There's a huge family pressure for him to live up to. Maybe that's a pressure that you feel as well. Your family know exactly what they want you to do, they pushed you hard to get into university and they expect you to go on to join Toyota or Japan IBM or the civil service.

But God does not judge us or use us based on our families. Jeremiah knew this, because he says later in 10:23 "I know, O LORD, that a man's life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps." Jeremiah knew this because when God called him at the very beginning of his ministry, he made it clear that it was God who marked Jeremiah out, not his family connections:

Sometimes, like Jeremiah, God calls us to do follow our family's ambitions and expectations, but sometimes He doesn't. Our earthly fathers may have good ideas about what we should do with our lives, but the one whose plan really counts is our heavenly Father. God is the one who knows us intimately, who created us, and who began his work in us even before we were born. Before you were born, God was thinking about you; He was making plans for you. God says later to his people, through Jeremiah,

2 Prophetic Power

But even if God has some great things for us and great plans for our lives, that doesn't necessarily mean that we feel we can do them. So when God tells Jeremiah that He is going to make him a prophet to the nations, Jeremiah tells God, "Ah, Sovereign LORD! behold, I do not know how to speak; for I am only a child."

When Jeremiah said this he would have been about university age. He was at the right age to be a student, but God wanted him to be a prophet to the nations. I had a look at what other people were doing when they were my age:

And Jeremiah, when he was even younger, was going to be a prophet to the whole world. Well, quite naturally, he didn't want to do it. It's funny how God often chooses people who really don't think they can do the job - Moses, Jeremiah, Noah, me.... There's a good reason for this: people who know what they're doing can be a real problem. Peter knew what he was doing when he said that Jesus should not be crucified; he was wrong. God wants to use people who are so confident that they cannot do the job themselves that He has to do it for them. So when Paul preaches, he preaches ‘not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.' He doesn't think that he can do this by his own power, and so he hands the work over to God.

And when you do hand over the work to God, He makes sure that you are able do it: it's up to God to supply the prophetic power. God made sure to equip Jeremiah with His words, and with boldness. We're not all called to be prophets to the nations--some of us are called to be missionaries, church leaders, or office workers. These callings are equally important, because they're from God. And God will make sure that we're able to fulfil the calling. This is why Paul says, in Romans 12

God gives us gifts in order to fulfil the role He sets out for us.

Or as Hudson Taylor put it, "God's work done God's way will not lack God's supply". This means we have to find out what God's work for our lives is; that is the relatively easy bit. Then we have to be sure we're doing God's work God's way. That's the hard part.

When God appoints Jeremiah as a prophet, God sets him up with power over the nations. But this is no ordinary power--as Matthew Henry says, "He is not set over the kingdoms as a prince to rule them by the sword, but as a prophet by the power of the word of God." The power has to be exercised God's way, as a prophet. When Jesus came as the Messiah, he had to do things God's way, through gentleness and sacrifice, and that's why he says

Just like Jeremiah, and just like Jesus, God has a purpose for your life; He wants to equip you to fulfil it; and He wants you to rely on Him for every step of the way. How do we do this?

3 Personal Perseverance

Well, the third message to young Japanese from this passage, and from the whole book, is the call to personal perseverence. The whole book of Jeremiah is about perseverence; it's a message to the people of Judah that they need to press on with their repentance. At the time this was written, the people had wandered away from God toward idols, and the king Josiah had called them back to the LORD. The people started saying the right things, and sometimes they did the right things, but their hearts were not turned back to God. They still burned incense to their idols.

So God called Jeremiah to go out and confront the people and tell them to persevere in their repentence and in following God. God wanted the people of Judah to persevere in faithfulness to Him.

And god called Jeremiah too to persevere in telling the people to repent. In Jeremiah's first vision, God begins by telling Jeremiah that what God says is actually going to take place:

but the Hebrew has the sense of ‘staying awake, going without sleep' to wait for the fulfilment of what He is saying. God was persevering, and He wanted Jeremiah to persevere with Him. Jeremiah was rejected and ignored for most of his life, and he didn't see the fulfilment of his prophecies for about forty years, but he pressed on and he faithfully persevered in telling the people things they didn't want to hear.

For forty years he told the people that they would be sent into exile because of their sin, and when he was nearly sixty years old, they were sent into exile in Babylon. God's word to Jeremiah did come true. He did live to see his prophecies come true. God was faithful because Jeremiah was faithful and persevered.

And this is what God wants for us today; He wants us to persevere. He wants us to persevere in turning to Him, and He wants us to persevere in speaking His words. He wants us to persevere, to keep on proclaiming Him, even if we are ignored and rejected. He wants us to persevere, and He promises to give us everything we need in order to persevere. He wants us to persevere because He has a plan for us that is far above any plan from our earthly family or our own expectations. He wants us to persevere because He knows us, because before we were born he knew us, he set us apart, and he appointed us.

He wants us to persevere.