Jeremiah 23a. Take Me to Your Leader.
God through Jeremiah has been criticizing the current government of Judah. King Josiah’s sons, and one nephew, one after the other have served themselves, remodeling the capital while misleading the people, enriching themselves through corruption and violence, and playing a losing game of shifting alliances with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon (reread chapters 21 and 22; especially the central theme in 22:13-17).
Now we are ready to read the conclusion of God’s judgment of political leaders. Such criticism is not well-received by the government, and Jeremiah will suffer for it. But God is relentless in his pursuit of faulty leaders.
Goldingay reminds us of something similar in the career of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was concerned with how easy it was for Hitler to take over the government in Germany (John Goldingay, The Book of Jeremiah, 2021, page 501). In his ‘Memoir’ introducing The Cost of Discipleship, G. Leibholz says:
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great realist. He was one of the few who quickly understood, even before Hitler came to power, that National Socialism was a brutal attempt to make history without God and to found it on the strength of man alone. Therefore in 1933, when Hitler came to power, he (Bonhoeffer) abandoned his academic career, which seemed to him to have lost its proper meaning. He was not, however, expelled from the University until 1936 and even lectured there in the summer and winter of 1935-36. As late as February 1933 he denounced on the wireless (radio) a political system which corrupted and grossly misled a nation and made the ‘Fuhrer’ its idol and god.”
(G. Leibholz, “Memoir,” in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937 [published posthumously 1958], page 14).
The radio broadcast was titled, “The Younger Generation’s Altered View of the Concept of Leader.” The power was cut off halfway through his talk. Bonhoeffer went into hiding teaching at an underground seminary. Then on April 5th, 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo. He was executed on April 9th, 1945, at Flossenberg concentration camp, only a couple of days before it was liberated by the United States Army which was fighting against fascism.
Jeremiah 23:1-4. Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!, says the LORD. Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the LORD.
When you are doing a Bible study, as we are, several questions should be asked of a passage. Is this the beginning of a new story or a chapter in the story? The answer here is, ‘No'. The reason is that the prophet has been talking about kings and occasionally has used the metaphor of a shepherd for a leader (6 times up to Chapter 22). Now we see a concentration of the term, 5 times in these first four verses of Chapter 23. This looks more like a summary or conclusion.
We then ask the next question which is about repeated terms, and we already have one answer: ‘shepherd’ as a verb and ‘shepherds’ as a noun. The second oft repeated word is small, it is ‘my’ which is found in ‘my pasture’, ‘my people’, and ‘my flock’. So we have the familiar metaphor of the owner (God) appointing shepherds (the kings, modelled after the ideal shepherd king, David), to watch over his flock. God has conducted an employee review of the recent kings of Judah and has judged that “the wind shall shepherd all your shepherds.”
God uses a word-play to charge the shepherds saying that since you have not ‘attended’ to your business, God will step in as the owner and ‘attend to you for your evil doings.” Speaking as if the exile has already happened, God says that he will bring the people/sheep back to the fold or habitat. Notice that in Hebrew theology, God is sovereign in the sense that he supervises all events, including the punishment of his people (“where I have driven them”).
God then picks up on ancient themes that go back to the beginnings. When God created the animals and humans, he put them in their habitat and blessed them to “be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:22,28). Perhaps even more appropriate is God’s restatement of the same blessing after the cleansing flood (Genesis 8:17, 9:1,7). Finally, these are also God’s words to Abraham (Genesis 17:6,20); and thus God uses a long-standing blessing for Israel and Judah.
God ends this paragraph with a promise that the flock of people will have new shepherds who will properly dispel their fear and keep them from scattering (compare Psalm 23).
Jeremiah 23:5-6. The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “YHWH is our righteousness.”
God then uses a common Hebrew phrase. After all, God knows how to be a good missionary, so he speaks their language and uses their metaphors. The phrase is “The days are surely coming….” Most of the prophets speak like this, but note that God does not name a particular day. Therefore, if you are obsessed with counting years and making predictions about when certain events will happen, just remember that Jesus said, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Matthew 24:36).
God is clear about the connections. This king will be a descendant of David, but David had many sons so he may not be a descendant of current kings. His name or epithet only helps a little. It is true that the last king, placed there by Nebuchadnezzar, was Zedekiah (tsidqiyah) which means “YAH is righteous.” But anyone alive at the time or soon after would have known that this meaning does not apply to him. At any rate, the variation that God uses means that “God is our righteousness” (YHWH tsidqenu; see Wright, page 503-504). So it is the people of Judah who are in view here. The name is descriptive, but no one with that actual name has arrived since.
Jeremiah 23:7-8. Therefore the days are surely coming, says the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, “As the LORD lives who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,” but “As the LORD lives who brought out and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the land of the north and out of all the lands where he had driven them.” Then they shall live in their own land.
The leaders have let the flock scatter to their own ways. After multiple warnings, God is going to see them defeated by Babylon and scattered in Exile. Then, at the appropriate time, God is going to do another great deed similar to the Exodus. God will bring a remnant of the Jews back to the original land and they will prosper as long as they have learned their lesson about following God and behaving with God’s character traits (with love, forgiveness, and justice).
Within a few years; no kings, no nation, no more. But, with God, there is always hope because there is always a plan to do something different to achieve God's objective: Salvation for the Jews and for the Gentiles. God is faithful even when people are not.