Notes

JEREMIAH 15: Doomed since Manasseh

Jeremiah has been proclaiming a consistent message of doom for Judah and Jerusalem. He is even told multiple times to not pray for this people because their destruction is already decreed. Maybe you’ve wondered what moment this occurred. God tells us through Jeremiah in chapter 15:

***The Reign of Manasseh doomed Judah. Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BC durring the reign of Zedekiah***

3 “I will send four kinds of destroyers against them,” declares the Lord, “the sword to kill and the dogs to drag away and the birds and the wild animals to devour and destroy. 4 I will make them abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth because of what Manasseh son of Hezekiah king of Judah did in Jerusalem.

Manasseh was the son of a good/(generally)righteous king, Hezekiah. His Grandson Josiah was faithful and led Israel in a great revival of repentance and obedience to God. So what could Manasseh have done to condemn this people so badly? The summary of Manasseh’s reign is recorded in 2nd Kings 21 and 2nd Chronicles 33. It is worth reading at this juncture to know why Jeremiah must bring a message of judgment and punishment to the nation of Judah. from 2nd Chronicles 33:

1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem fifty-five years. 2 He did evil in the eyes of the Lord, following the detestable practices of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. 3 He rebuilt the high places his father Hezekiah had demolished; he also erected altars to the Baals and made Asherah poles. He bowed down to all the starry hosts and worshiped them. 4 He built altars in the temple of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, “My Name will remain in Jerusalem forever.” 5 In both courts of the temple of the Lord, he built altars to all the starry hosts. 6 He sacrificed his children in the fire in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, practiced divination and witchcraft, sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, arousing his anger.
7 He took the image he had made and put it in God’s temple, of which God had said to David and to his son Solomon, “In this temple and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my Name forever. 8 I will not again make the feet of the Israelites leave the land I assigned to your ancestors, if only they will be careful to do everything I commanded them concerning all the laws, decrees and regulations given through Moses.” 9 But Manasseh led Judah and the people of Jerusalem astray, so that they did more evil than the nations the Lord had destroyed before the Israelites.
10 The Lord spoke to Manasseh and his people, but they paid no attention.

Manasseh himself actually repented of his sins and cleansed the temple of the foreign Gods that he had placed there at the end of his life. But the people of Judah learned idolatry during their reign that they never repented of. Manasseh’s damage had already been done and the unfaithful ways that he walked in before his repentance doomed God’s people to the destruction that Jeremiah announces and eventually witnesses.

Jeremiah 16: A funeral dinner prohibition

In Jeremiah 16:5 God forbids Jeremiah from attending funeral meals a sign of the withdrawal of his blessing/compasion. What do you think of when you imagine a funeral meal? In the broader ancient world, they could get pretty wild and a passage in Amos 6 seems to give the same impression about funeral meals in Israel:

The Hebrew term for funeral meal is used only here and in Amos 6:7, although it is well known in many other Semitic traditions. Extrabiblical information concerning the funeral meal have been found in Ugaritic texts, Aramaic texts from Elephantine (Egypt and inscriptions in Punic, Nabataean and Palmyrene. In these examples the funeral meal was often held in a banquet hall with an excess of drinking and inappropriate behavior. The context in Amos 6:7 suggests the same type of atmosphere (below). Whatever the Israelite custom, Jeremiah was forbidden to participate (as he was forbidden to attend marriage ceremonies).

IVP Bible Backgrounds Commentary. P654

Amos 6:6 You drink wine by the bowlful
    and use the finest lotions,
    but you do not grieve over the ruin of Joseph.
7 Therefore you will be among the first to go into exile;
    your feasting and lounging will end.

JEREMIAH 16:14-15: Finally, a promise of restoration

we recently read through Isaiah where prophecies of destruction and restoration are mixed in together like chocolate chips in cookie dough. You could hardly complete a paragraph - much less a chapter - about divine punishment without the promise of future restoration and blessing. That has decidedly not been the case in Jeremiah. here we are in our 5th week of reading this book and here in chapter 16 we read our first promise of restoration on the other side of the coming judgment for the people of Judah:

14 “However, the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be said, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ 15 but it will be said, ‘As surely as the Lord lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ For I will restore them to the land I gave their ancestors.

There was a promise of restoration in Jeremiah 12:15 but - startlingly - it was for Judah’s neighbors, not God’s people. Jeremiah is prophesying to a people further lost into the sins of idolatry and injustice than Isaiah. You can see this shifting ratio of judgment/hope as a measure of God’s frustration and the nearness of Judah’s punishment.

Jeremiah 18: The pOTTER’S HANDS

on a few occasions in the Old Testament there is a depiction of God as a potter shaping clay when he is dealing with his people Israel. The whole first half of chapter 18 is about this metaphor, and it will continue into chapter 19 when we start reading next week. Here are similar passages from Isaiah and Lamentations (which is also attributed to Jeremiah):

Isaiah 64:8 Yet you, Lord, are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand

Lamentations 4: 2 How the precious children of Zion,
once worth their weight in gold,
are now considered as pots of clay,
the work of a potter’s hands!

John 20 & 21: Resurrection Appearances Timeline

Keep this timeline in mind when reading the resurrection appearances in John, no one Biblical author provides a complete list of every resurrection appearance by Jesus, and none of their accounts claim to be entirely comprehensive. It is entirely possible that Jesus made resurrection appearances that are not recorded in the Bible. However, because of what we discussed in the note above about the Holy Spirit’s role in the inspiration of scripture, we can trust that we know about all of the resurrection appearances that God wants us to read about from the 27 books of the New Testament :

John 21: Jesus’ Interrogation of Peter

This conversation in John 21:15-17 had always confused me. I had heard many people try to explain how the different verbs being used for love in the dialogue were significant, but their significance would imply (as is normally taught) that Peter couldn’t bring himself to say that the truly loved (agape’d) Jesus. Which would be a really confusing element in John’s Gospel. I considered my confusion cured a few years ago after reading J. Michael Ramsey’s commentary on the passage in the New International Commentary on the New Testament. Maybe you will too: (that whole section of commentary is longer than i can post here, but the part about the first question really establishes what Ramsey will say about the rest)

The question “Do you love me?” revisits the farewell discourse, when Jesus said to all the disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commands” (14:15; see also vv. 21, 23). When Peter says “Yes,” Jesus will give him a command. And yet the question has in it a possible trap, for it is not just “Do you love me?” but “Do you love me more than these?” (italics added). Jesus is quite capable of “testing” his disciples (as he did Philip; see 6:6), and here he seems to be doing just that. Grammatically, “more than these” could mean “more than you love these other disciples,” but this makes no sense because he has repeatedly urged them to “love one another” (13:34–35; 15:12, 17). Or it could mean “more than you love your boat and your nets, the instruments of your livelihood” (see Mk 1:18//Mt 4:20, “and immediately leaving the nets they followed him”), but no such “love” for material things has played any part in the story. The meaning we are left with—the only possible meaning—is “more than these other disciples—who are present right here on the scene—love me.” Here, as elsewhere in the chapter (and occasionally in the Gospel as a whole), Jesus builds on an incident or pronouncement found in other Gospels—in this case Peter’s confident claim, in the face of Jesus’ prediction that the disciples would abandon him, “Even if they all are offended, yet not I” (Mk 14:29; also Mt 26:33). John’s Gospel has nothing quite so explicit, although Peter did say, “I will lay down my life for you!” (13:37), a rash promise that no other disciple was willing to make.
Peter does not fall into the trap. He could have said, “Yes, I do love you more than these”—sticking to all his rash promises. Or he could have said, “No, I do not love you more than these,” which would have been technically true, but would have given the impression that he did not love Jesus at all. Instead, he says simply, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” wisely forswearing any comparison between his love for Jesus and anyone else’s. If it is a test, he has passed, at least to this point. Much has been written as to whether his use of a different word for love in any way limits or qualifies his answer. But the two words, whatever their different nuances, are used interchangeably in this Gospel for the Father’s love for the Son (for example, 3:35; 5:20), the disciples’ love for Jesus (see 14:15; 16:27), Jesus’ love for Lazarus (see 11:3, 5), and Jesus’ love for “the disciple whom he loved” (see 13:23; 20:2). Other synonyms or near synonyms, moreover, are used interchangeably both in the immediate context—“lambs” (v. 15) and “sheep” (vv. 16, 17), “tend” (vv. 15, 17), and “shepherd” (v. 16)—and in the wider context: “drawing” (vv. 6, 11) and “dragging” (v. 8), live “fish” (vv. 6, 8, 11) and “fish” as food (vv. 9, 13; also v. 5), “boat” (vv. 3, 6) and little “boat” (v. 8). The accent in Peter’s reply, therefore, is not on the choice of verbs but on the omission of the phrase “more than these.” Whatever he may have said before, Peter will now make no such claim. And in the same breath he acknowledges that Jesus knows what is in his heart: “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” From the beginning, the Gospel writer has assured us that Jesus “knew them all” (2:24), or “knew what was in the person” (2:25), so for Peter there can be no dissimulation or deception.

J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, The New International Commentary on the Old and New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 1042–1044.

Week 22 - Jeremiah 15-18, John 21 (May 28 - June 3)