Jeremiah 3
God offers Israel a second chance
Israel, the spiritual prostitute
1The LORD said this to Israel:If a man divorces his wife
And she marries another,
Can her first husband remarry her?
Of course not.
That toxic behavior would spread over the land.
You, on the other hand, didn’t remarry at all.
You became a busy prostitute. [1]
And now you want to come to me?
Can you find one where you haven’t done it? [2]
You wait by the road to ambush people
And pitch your sexual services.
You polluted the land with your toxin.
This was a terrible thing for you to do.
3So, I stopped the autumn rain.
And now the spring rains haven’t sprung.
You should be red-faced ashamed of yourself.
But the only face you show
Is the stone-cold face of a prostitute.
4Yet you call me your old friend,
A buddy from your childhood.
5And you ask,
‘How long will you hold this grudge?
Forever?’
Sure, you talk the talk,
But you walk like a hooker,
Evil to your bones.”
Judah follows dead Israel’s example
6Afterward, the LORD said this to me during King Josiah’s reign. [3] “Have you seen what this unfaithful nation of Israel [4] has done?” She had sex for the gods. She did it on every hilltop shrine and in the cool air beneath every shade tree she could find.7After getting all of this out of her system, you’d think she would come back to me. She didn’t. And Judah in the southland witnessed it. 8Judah saw how I punished her sister nation of Israel for adultery. I wrote her off. I put our divorce in writing and sent her away empty-handed. That didn’t scare Judah. She did the same. 9She cared so little about spiritual prostitution that she prostituted herself, too. She did it in front of stone idols and at shrines under shade trees. She polluted the land with her toxic sins.
10For all I did to punish Israel, Judah didn’t get it. They refused to come back to me. They only pretended to. That’s what the LORD told me. 11The LORD said, “Even though Israel committed spiritual adultery, at least they were honest about it. Judah lied.
When scatterings of Israel come home
12Go outside and look north. Then say these words for me:Come back, Israel. This is the LORD.
I know you’ve been unfaithful.
I’m not angry at you anymore.
I want to show you mercy.
I can’t stay mad at you forever.
Admit you left the LORD your God
And worshiped with strangers
Under every green tree you could find
And that you disobeyed me.
This is the LORD talking.
14Come home my lost and wandering children.
I am the LORD. You are mine.
I’ll bring some of you back,
One from this city, two from that family. [5]
I will bring you back from the scattered lands to Israel. [6]
15I’ll give you my kind of leaders,
Intelligent and wise.
16There’s coming a time
When you’ll repopulate the land.
In those days, people won’t say,
“Where’s the Ark of the Covenant?” [7]
They won’t even think about it anymore.
17Jerusalem will be known as my town.
People from around the world will come to me there.
And they’ll finally break their bad habit
Of doing what they know is wrong.
18Judah and Israel will reunite.
They’ll come home from exile, [8]
To the land I gave your ancestors.
19I wanted to give you the best
And treat you like my children.
I wanted to give you an inheritance
Of the most wonderful land in the world. But to inherit this,
You have to call me “Father.”
And you have to obey me,
As you would obey a father.
20Instead, you acted like a cheating wife
Who left her husband.
Israel, you’ve cheated on me.
You’ve been unfaithful to me, the LORD.
Lost and weeping, Israel calls on God
21I hear children crying on the hilltops.
It’s Israel weeping
Because they stopped following the LORD their God,
And they lost their way.
I will forgive you for leaving me.
Then you will say,
‘Here we come.
You are the LORD our God.’”
Footnotes
This scene calls to mind something from the life of Hosea, a prophet in the former northern Jewish nation of Israel a century before Jeremiah. In either fact or a metaphor, Hosea married a loose lady, if not a prostitute. She later ran away. But Hosea took her back and may have had to pay her pimp for the right to do so. God stops short of calling his people of Israel a runaway bride who married someone else. That would have been frowned on as disgusting. But comparing Israel to a prostitute that God takes back under his wing is different. It would have reminded the people of Hosea’s century-old story about his wife, Gomer.
Jeremiah says God is either literally or figuratively saying the Israelite ancestors of today’s Jewish people were having sex by worshiping other gods. Some religions seemed to include sex as one of the rituals, to implore the gods to answer their prayers. It might have been a bit like fasting, and yet the opposite of it, too. Both could have been an extra effort to plead with God or the gods—one by abstaining and the other by indulging.
Josiah ruled about 641-609 BC, give or take a couple of decades. If that date is accurate, God delivered his first messages to Jeremiah in about 628 BC. Josiah famously led a religious reform, pointing the nation back to God. It’s unknown if Jeremiah influenced the king and helped talk him into it. But as Jeremiah would learn, the reform was too little, too late. God would punish Judah for centuries of sin. He would allow invaders to level Jerusalem, exile survivors, and erase the Jewish nation from the world map.
This reference to “Israel” is the former northern Jewish nation—the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Assyrian invaders wiped them off the map in 722 BC and deported the survivors of the war. They never returned to reinstate the Israelite nation.
This doesn’t sound like God is promising to bring back a large group of people, as he would later for Judah. He’s bringing back a fragment of scattered Jews from the northland Jewish nation of Israel. They never seemed to return from Assyrian exile in great numbers—certainly not enough to revive a government.
More literally “Zion,” a a term of endearment for Jerusalem or Israel. Here, it’s the nation of Israel, which had separated from Judah, but which would become a united Israel.
The Ark of the Covenant was Israel’s most sacred object. It was a wooden chest plated with gold all over. Inside that chest was a golden jar with some manna, Aaron’s almond wood staff that budded, and stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments. Covering the chest was a lid with figures representing glorious celestial beings called cherubim. This was the place where God’s people found forgiveness (Exodus 25:10-22; Hebrews 9:4-5). It was lost to history, perhaps stolen by invaders such as the Assyrians from what is now northern Iraq or the Babylonians of southern Iraq who leveled Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC. Jeremiah is talking about true faith, which doesn’t need sacred objects or symbols. What he said was perhaps as jarring as saying today that there is coming a time when we won’t even think about the Bible. For his point seemed to be that our faith is in a Person, not in objects associated with the Person.
More literally, “They will come from the north.” When Assyrians exiled Israelites from the Jewish nation of Israel in 722 BC, they led them north along caravan routes to the Euphrates River and then east to what is now northern Iraq.
