Week 26 Jeremiah
Chapter 26 is a day-in-the-life-of-a-prophet story.
That morning the Lord told Jeremiah to go to the temple and give a public speech: if you will not listen to me…then I will destroy this temple…and I will make Jerusalem an object of cursing.
Not exactly a feel-good speech, and when Jeremiah was finished the audience’s reception was very cool. In fact they wanted to kill him for being unpatriotic. Serious questions about whether the temple would, or could, or might possibly in fact be destroyed weren’t up for discussion. Jeremiah had broken a non-negotiable-topics taboo. Which couldn’t be tolerated.
Fortunately for him the crowd was divided on the death penalty. The temple priests and the prophets lined up in favour of capital punishment. But the crowd and city officials wanted to hear him out. Some of them remembered a story, a precedent from long before. The prophet Micah had spoken a darkly critical omen against Hezekiah but the king didn’t execute him. So in a better-safe-than-sorry decision Jeremiah’s life was spared.
This was probably a tenser day than usual for Jeremiah.
But based on what he’s been saying for the last 25 chapters you wonder how frequently he operated close to the cultural no-fly zone.
Note: quote from Jeremiah 26:4-6 (NLT version). The Micah-Hezekiah story might be from II Chronicles 32:24-26. (Micah comes 147-pages after Jeremiah in my bible, but he prophesied many decades before him.)