GIRD UP THY LOINS!

The King James Version puts this verse like this: “Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise.” Get dressed and be prepared for action! The work to which Jeremiah was called was difficult work. The message he was assigned would first be a message of doom and judgment before it would be a message of restoration and hope. He was appointed by God, first “to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow,” and only then “to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). It seems that this was not Jeremiah’s natural disposition. “Jeremiah was gentle and compassionate by nature, and the mission he had to carry out was, to him, distasteful in the extreme. It made him contentious, petulant, irascible. People he had prayed for turned out to be his enemies.”* Powerful people would oppose him, and he would suffer for what God told him to say. He would need fortitude, endurance, and courage. As God put it, he would need to become “an iron pillar and a bronze wall to stand against the whole land—against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests and the people of the land” (Jeremiah 1:18). Little wonder that God urged him—and needed to remind him—“Do not be terrified by them.” If Jeremiah allowed himself to become afraid of the people and forces against him, he would be overwhelmed by them.

If Jeremiah did not commit to this task and the messages he would be given, his work would look foolish to those he was so desperately trying to reach and whom God was trying to reach through him. Courage came through recognizing and remembering that God had given him this task. That realization is what drove him during the more than forty years of ministry to which he was called.

* Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 157.