Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching Jeremiah

Top Highlights

“For Jeremiah, hope and assurance were not to rest on naïve patriotic and unreasoned expectations that God would swiftly put an end to the power of Babylon and so send the exiles back to their homes. Rather they were to be built upon the painful acceptance of the reality of Babylonian rule in the present. Consequently they had to adapt to this situation and learn to endure it.” (Pages 172–173)

“A new law is not properly envisaged at all, but only a new way of Israel’s knowing and keeping the existing law of the covenant made on Sinai (Horeb). What is promised is not so much a radically different covenant but a renewed form of the earlier, broken covenant.” (Page 191)

“The promise of verse 33, ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts,’ closely recalls the words of Deuteronomy 6:6: ‘these words (of the law) which I command you this day shall be upon your heart.’ The concern in the Old Testament passages, in contrast to what emerged later in Christian thinking, was not for a law that could be summarized in certain succinct, fundamental principles. Rather it was for an obedient attitude towards the law. The central attention is upon the willingness to obey the known law, not for the clarification of obscure or conflicting elements within the law. The issue is focused on whether Israel is willing to obey the law that God has so graciously given.” (Page 191)

“‘You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart’ (29:13). The period of waiting and surviving in a grim and threatening world of exile were to be years of spiritual discipline and an opportunity for repentance. When the time of discipline had been accomplished Israel could truly seek God ‘with a whole heart’; only then could a return to the homeland become a genuine possibility, because only then could it become spiritually meaningful.” (Page 173)