First, with regard to the length of the book: the reader is
right that it is a long book. By word count in the Hebrew text, it is the
longest book in the Old Testament, longer even than the Psalms. It is somewhat
shorter than the Psalms in English, but that has to do with the matter of
translation requirements. So yes, it is a daunting book from that perspective.
Strike one.
Second, with regard to the organization of the book: the
would-be reader may page through the book, looking at the subheadings in their
Bible. There are about ninety of these in the ESV. Some of the sections are extended,
some are brief. But reading them one after the other doesn't give the reader
any sense of the development, the order, of the book. So once again, the
would-be reader is right. Strike two.
Third, from reading the subheadings, and just from the
general reputation of the book, the would-be reader has the impression that the
book is all about judgment. Note the first few subheadings in the NIV (2011):
The Call of Jeremiah; Israel Forsakes God; Unfaithful Israel; Disaster from the
North; Not One is Upright; Jerusalem Under Siege. And that’s only through
chapter 6. The book is dark. It is grim, The would-be reader is once again
right. Strike three.
So we close up Jeremiah and go read Psalm 23 or some other
comforting passage.
Why should the Christian read Jeremiah? Why is it even in
the Bible? I don’t know the answer to the second question. But the answer to
the first question is, we read it because it is in the Bible. It was not
written just for Israel, but for God’s people through all ages. It has a
message for us today as much as it did for Jeremiah’s contemporaries. It will
take some patience. It will take some work. But persevering through Jeremiah
will produce fruit in the end.
Over the next several posts, I hope to give the reader
rationale for reading Jeremiah, and then some guidance through the book, so
that it might be read with profit. Just as a starter, Jeremiah (in the KJV) has
42,654 words. That’s about half the length of the average romance novel. It
falls into the long novella, or very short novel category. So you see, Jeremiah
is really not as long as you thought it was.
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