How God responds to our despair (Jer 15:10-21)

Some years ago, I heard a pastor talk about the cost of ministry and to illustrate this, he read out his journal entries of a typical week. His description was a litany of woes about church meetings that achieved nothing, participants who argued over trivial matters, sermon preparation that went stale, people who cared little for his preaching and whose feedback was meaningless. Although not everyone is in full-time Christian ministry, we all know those moments when life and circumstances overwhelm us to the point of despair and self-pity. Jeremiah had ample reason to feel the way he did suffering persecution, attempts to kill him, humiliation, and mockery. Nevertheless, letting feelings of futility take over made him useless in God’s service. How did God address the prophet’s condition and what can we learn from it for the times when we are dejected?[1]

Lament, encouragement, and validation

In the dialogue between Jeremiah and God, the prophet bitterly laments his birth (Jer 15:10) expressing thereby an oblique desire not to have had his calling (Jer 1:5). Unlike lending or borrowing that could lead to strife, Jeremiah was hated for no good reason. God’s response both encourages him and recognises hardship. The Lord’s purposes were for good (Jer 15:11) to save His people and the prophet’s role was to speak truth into a situation of lies and self-deception. God was even going to turn Jeremiah’s enemies to seek help from the prophet (v.11; e.g. Jer 21:2; 37:3), or, the sentence might acknowledge that having such enemies and distress was an inevitable part of ministry (NRSV, ‘Surely I have imposed enemies on you in a time of trouble and in a time of distress.’).[2] Nevertheless, Judah was not going to overcome the ‘iron from the north’ (Babylon?) or the ‘bronze’ (Jeremiah as a wall of bronze? Jer 15:12, 20). At the same time, Jeremiah was to suffer alongside the people in God’s judgment though he himself was innocent (Jer 15:13-14; 17:3-4).[3]

The dangers of feeding despair

Jeremiah’s continued lament grows darker, however. He cries out for justice (the meaning of vengeance here; Jer 15:15), pleading for deliverance before his persecutors killed him. He recalls the initial joy over ministry, God’s words digested and made his own (Jer 15:16). Yet he is deeply isolated (Jer 15:17), unable to join in happy social occasions when he is preaching God’s judgment and feels in his being God’s indignation over the people’s sin. Jeremiah’s crisis peaks in words that echo Judah’s fate and disposition, so that the prophet puts himself into the enemy camp. He sees his wound as incurable, just as Judah’s wound and pain were (Jer 15:18; 30:12, 15), and considers God unreliable, like a seasonal stream that dries out in the summer heat (v.18). This latter view is reminiscent of Judah who have abandoned God, the source of fresh water (living water) as unsatisfactory (Jer 2:13).

God’s path for recovery

God’s gentle rebuke targets three areas for recovery (Jer 15:19). Jeremiah needs to align himself with God and His purposes (‘return’), sift through his words and stop the kind of talk that is destructive, and not cave in to pressure from the people. The Lord then re-affirms the promises of support from the beginning of Jeremiah’s call (Jer 15:20-21; 1:17-19). The principles gleaned here are relevant to all of us who lose focus and even despair of God’s help. First, we all need encouragement and a validation of our difficulties and seeing the Lord’s initial response to the prophet, we can be heartened that God knows our circumstances, as well as our temperaments and what really gets to us emotionally. Nevertheless, we need to be recalled to His perspective and re-orient our thinking and attitudes towards Him. A part of this is letting go of negative self-talk and feeding our despair and self-pity, which are destructive. Neither should we cave in to the pressures that come from circumstances or people if these are opposed to God’s purposes for us. We cannot just snap out of despair, but when we take tentative steps towards the Lord, He meets us more than half-way to help us in our recovery to a healthy outlook.

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[1] It is important to note that I am not addressing here clinical depression, which may involve some other steps like medication to help the process of recovery.

[2] The verb’s meaning is uncertain in the sentence. In other contexts, it can mean either ‘to lay on, impose’ (Isa 53:6) or ‘to entreat, plead with’ (Jer 36:25).

[3] In the Hebrew there is only one ‘not/no’ in the verse, before ‘payment’, but William L. Holladay convincingly argues that the negative applies to the following two statements (about sins and boundaries) as well. He cites Job 28:17, where there is similarly only one ‘not/no’ doing double duty for two clauses, and there are other examples. His translation is below. Jeremiah 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 1-25, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986), 447, 456.

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