Jeremiah's Call and His Foretelling of Jerusalem's Fall

The event

The Lord called Jeremiah while he was still young, telling him plainly, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you... I have appointed you a prophet to the nations." His ministry began in the thirteenth year of Josiah, around 627 BC, and would stretch across the reigns of five kings of Judah — Josiah, Jehoahaz, Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and finally Zedekiah — through the nation's final, painful slide toward exile.

Jeremiah's message never wavered: Judah's persistent idolatry and injustice would bring Babylonian conquest unless the nation repented, and he said so at real personal cost — beaten, put in stocks, thrown into a muddy cistern, and constantly opposed by false prophets promising peace that would never come. His tears over his own message earned him the traditional title "the weeping prophet," a man who loved the people he was sent to warn even as he delivered news they refused to hear.

Jeremiah also looked beyond the coming disaster to genuine hope: his promise of a New Covenant, in which God would write His law on His people's hearts rather than on tablets of stone, is quoted at length in Hebrews as the very covenant Christ inaugurated at the Last Supper. Jeremiah lived to see everything he'd warned about come true, watching Jerusalem fall to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in his own lifetime — and wrote Lamentations to mourn it.

Scripture references

• Jeremiah 1:1-10
• Jeremiah 25:1-14
• Jeremiah 31:31-34