THE MOCKED PROPHET

I hear many whispering, / “Terror on every side! / Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!” / All my friends / are waiting for me to slip, saying, / “Perhaps he will be deceived; / then we will prevail over him / and take our revenge on him.” —Jeremiah 20:10

The prophetic work given to Jeremiah was always going to be difficult.

Much of his message was destruction and doom, and he was mocked for his apparent pessimism. “He is dubbed ‘Terror is all around,’ a nickname that is whispered as he passes by as if he were some clownish Chicken Little (Jeremiah 20:10). Jeremiah is wounded by the mockery, and he lashes out, not at those who belittle him, but at God.”* Passhur, the priest in charge of the temple, had beaten Jeremiah and put him in stocks.

In response, Jeremiah’s complaint against God was a fierce reaction of defensiveness, pain, and fear. He complained that God gave him only messages of “violence and destruction” that brought him “insult and reproach all day long” (Jeremiah 20:8).

For a moment, it almost seemed he had taken the side of those who had been attacking him, that he saw and sympathized with their point of view.

After all, he was also part of the nation that he was being compelled to prophesy against. These were his people, and this was his home.

We do not know how much time passed between verses 10 and 11.

Perhaps Jeremiah simply paused for breath, regathered his thoughts and courage, and then proceeded with his writing. Or perhaps it took him longer to be able to regain this perspective: “But the LORD is with me like a mighty warrior; so my persecutors will stumble and not prevail. They will fail and be thoroughly disgraced; their dishonor will never be forgotten” (Jeremiah 20:11). Even in this difficult task, amid mockery and insults and the growing threats to his people, Jeremiah insisted that God was still with him.

* Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 113, 114.