LESSONS FROM JEREMIAH – PART 16 – DEEPEST ANGUISH PARALLELS THE LORD. LOOKING AT CREATIONISM - YOUNG EARTH/OLD EARTH? DESTRUCTION
PART 16 - Jeremiah 4:19-26
CHAPTER 4
[A]. DEEPEST ANGUISH MATCHING DISASTER AND DEVASTATION
{{Jeremiah 4:19-20 “MY SOUL, MY SOUL, I AM IN ANGUISH! Oh, my heart! My heart is pounding in me. I cannot be silent because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Disaster on disaster is proclaimed, for the whole land is devastated. Suddenly my tents are devastated, my curtains in an instant.”}}
This passage carries some doubt as to whom the speaker is. I normally write what the Lord is giving me but sometimes I check out other writers on a difficult passage. In this case I looked at the Commentaries to see where they fell in this matter, and they are on one side or the other, or say it could be two speakers. The two choices are either the prophet, or the people of the nation. A few suggest it may be a bit of both.
Verse 19 opens with “My soul, my soul” in the NASB, and with “My bowels, my bowels” in the KJV and “My anguish, my anguish” in the NIV and ESV. The word tries to reach the centre of one’s being and is said to fathom the depths and seat of human emotions, sometimes likened to labour pains. This word “anguish” is plummeting to the depths of sorrow and deepest distress. Then it is followed by “Oh, my heart. My heart is pounding in me.” This is a key expression. It literally means “the walls of my heart”, or in the ancient thinking, “the heartstrings that surrounded the heart and which were ready to break.” Modern expression is “My heart is breaking” and means it is being torn apart. Such was the extreme anguish. It also means great shakings of the heart, what we would call great palpitations. That whole experience is grave and full of distress, or as one has said, “my heart makes a noise in me; palpitates, beats and throbs, being filled with fears and dread, with sorrow and concern, at what was coming on; it represents an aching heart, all in disorder and confusion”.
This experience of the prophet or the nation, or both, is not unlike that inner tearing apart the Lord experienced on the cross. He too was facing the ruthless enemy and was abandoned, with none to help. {{Psalm 22:11 “Be not far from me, for trouble is near, for there is none to help.”]]
He faced the onslaught of the foes of hell just as Judah faced the northern foes. The Messianic Psalm 22 contains this verse – {{Psalm 22:14-15 “I AM POURED OUT LIKE WATER, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted within me.” My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws, and You lay me in the dust of death.”}}. In that other Messianic Psalm, 69, we read this – {{Psalm 69:17 “Do not hide Your face from Your servant, for I am in distress. Answer me quickly.”}} And {{Psalm 69:20 “REPROACH HAS BROKEN MY HEART, and I am so sick, and I looked for sympathy, but there was none, and for comforters, but I found none.”}}
In Jeremiah 4 verse 19, we learn that the speaker can not keep silent and it was because of the grief and coming fear. Did something similar apply to the Lord? Yes, it did – {{Psalm 69:3 “I am WEARY WITH MY CRYING. My throat is parched. My eyes fail while I wait for my God.”}} And {{Psalm 22:1-2 “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning.” O my God, I cry by day but You do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest.”}}. Another interesting comparison presents itself here as both the Lord and the nation faced the roaring lion – {{Psalm 22:13 “They open wide their mouth at me, as a ravening and a roaring lion.”}} Of course the whole Gethsemane experience would fit in here as well.
Going back to verse 19, the reason for not being silent is that the soul has heard trumpet and alarms associated with the battle noise and shouts. In reality that had not yet happened but the vision of it, or the realisation of its coming, provoked a verbal response of determination. Verse 20 is the continuation of the fear or vision in verse 19, and looks at total disaster through the whole land. The Targum of Jeremiah believes these exclamations of verse 19 are those of the prophet. If that is the case, then Jeremiah is overcome by the devastation that is coming to his people. His soul sees it all, like a vision from God, and his whole being is deeply affected. I consider it is the correct interpretation of that verse. Compare Jeremiah’s inner soul in Lamentations.
When we come to verse 20, I think it is most likely that it is the people speaking, not the prophet, and one thinks it is the pious section of society who speaks as is seen in this quote – [[“On the other hand, the phrase "my tents" (verse 20) certainly implies that the people, or the pious section of the people, is the speaker. Both views may perhaps be united. The prophet may be the speaker in ver. 19, but simply (as is the case with so many of the psalmists) as the representative of his fellow-believers, whom in verse 20 he brings on the stage more directly.”]]
[B]. THE BABYLONIAN ADVANCE AMONG FOOLISH PEOPLE
{{Jeremiah 4:21-22 How long must I see the standard, and hear the sound of the trumpet? MY PEOPLE ARE FOOLISH. They know Me not. They are stupid children, and they have no understanding. THEY ARE SHREWD TO DO EVIL, but to do good, they do not know.”}}
There is a sense of prolonging here as Babylon advanced bit by bit through the whole land, and all that time the people would be exiting the rural areas to go to the fortified cities mentioned earlier. Standards and flags were set up to mark their way and the trumpet blown as the alarm. The question is asked, How long?” Every day of the “how long” means more trumpets and banners or flags. If these banners were not for the people fleeing to the fortified cities, then they belonged to the advancing Babylonians. Whatever the exact rendering, it meant a horrible time because the land was being engulfed.
In verse 22, God states directly what sums up the people. They are stupid; they don’t know God; they have no understanding; they are so cunning in doing evil things; and they have no idea how to do good. The children of this world are shrewder than the children of light. {{Romans 3:10-12 as it is written, “There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who understands. There is none who seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become useless. There is none who does good. There is not even one.”}} The inhabitants of Judah became that way because they rejected God. When people do that, their decisions are skewed and improper. They don’t operate according to the absolutes of God, and are then prone not to know what is morally and ethically correct. Then you have a nation that promotes those things which will be to its harm, and make irrational decisions like a blind man in a paper bag who can not see the light of clarity. That is my nation today. That is the world today because God has been forgotten or rejected. God is dead.
What must the Lord think of the world today when nations of the recent past held high a Christian standard, imperfect as it was, but all have abandoned that and today are increasingly wicked and ripening for judgement. They can be described in Jeremiah’s words in these two verses. Cursed is the nation that abandons the Lord as their God and accepts paganism and Satanism. The world is very ill through travel sickness for it rushes around having dramatically lost its way.
[C]. JUDAH’S JUDGEMENT WILL LEAVE THE LAND FORMLESS AND VOID
{{Jeremiah 4:23 “I looked on the earth, and behold, IT WAS FORMLESS AND VOID; and to the heavens, and THEY HAD NO LIGHT.” Jeremiah 4:24-26 “I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and behold, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens had fled. I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a wilderness, and all its cities were pulled down before the LORD, before His fierce anger.”}}
We come now to a most interesting passage in Jeremiah, and one that creates very much debate and discussion because of its unusual connection with Genesis 1 verse 2. In fact the debate can be quite fierce, and because of a certain insistence by young earth creationism, then it has even caused divisions in churches. It is not my desire to add further to the debate, but it is hard to write and not show a bias to the way this author sees things. Also this commentary is on Jeremiah, not on Genesis so I will have some limitations. There will be also a passage from Isaiah to consider.
The verse in special focus is 23 – “I looked on the earth, and behold, it was FORMLESS AND VOID; and to the heavens, and THEY HAD NO LIGHT.” In the verses which follow, Jeremiah mentions that the mountains were quaking, the hills moved back and forth, there was no human being, all the birds had fled, what was once a fruitful land had become a wilderness, and all the cities had been pulled down. What Jeremiah is describing, is a scene of utter destruction through judgement. It was like a holocaust. He wrote this before the actual event because this is one of the vision type experiences he had from the Lord who revealed to the prophet what is going to happen.
The most severe judgement was going to fall on the land, caused by the Babylonian army, brought about by the sin and rebellion of Judah, and the land/earth would look like it had undergone devastation of the highest degree. Incidentally the Targum on Jeremiah paraphrases it as, [[“that is, the sun, moon, and stars, which were darkened by the smoke of the burning of Jerusalem; or which withdrew their light, as blushing at, and being ashamed of, the iniquities of his people, and who were unworthy of enjoying the light of them; and which this phrase may denote.”]] Jeremiah said the heavens had no light and in his context, we can’t properly understand that, but it suggests to me two things. The first is that he is quoting and placing this passage in Genesis chapter 1, and secondly, that the devastation, especially if everything was set alight, would obscure vision for a time. What we must understand so far, is that THIS CALAMITY IS DEVASTATION, AND CAUSED BY THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD. To appreciate it further we are going to look at early Genesis.
THE GENESIS VERSES IN PARALLEL
{{Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, Genesis 1:2 and the earth was FORMLESS AND VOID, and DARKNESS WAS OVER THE SURFACE OF THE DEEP, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Genesis 1:3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.}} In this passage we learn God created the heavens and the earth; the earth was formless and void; there was darkness; and that water covered the earth. The parallel to Jeremiah is absolute and what he writes is that for him, this is the same situation that existed in Genesis 1 verse 2, and he uses the same expression.
“Formless and void”, or “without form and void” in both Genesis and Jeremiah, and from Isaiah for that matter, from the Hebrew ((tôhû va-bhôhû)), is untranslatable. In order to convey its meaning, translations and commentators have used the following expressions – “without form and void”, “without order and beauty”, “without furniture and use”, “waste and void”, “emptiness, vacancy, barrenness, formless,” “lifeless mass”, desolate, “confusion and desolation.”
We must ask why this expression is used here in Genesis. We know why it is used in Jeremiah, related as it is, to utter devastation and severe judgement coming from God. It is such a strange expression and not one, one would associate with the goodness of God’s creation. Before we try to answer that, there is a passage to look at in {{Isaiah 45:18 for thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it. He established it and DID NOT CREATE IT A WASTE PLACE but formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else.”}} In that verse we are clearly taught that God did not create the earth a waste place, but in Genesis 1 verse 2 IT IS a waste place. Not only that but there is darkness all over, and water covers the earth. None of that lines up with God creating the earth to be inhabited as Isaiah says. The earth was not created in such a desolate condition. The translation “waste place” in the Isaiah verse is the very same word as in Gen 1 verse 2 - (tohuw).
The same expression is used in this next verse as well when prophesying the utter destruction upon Edom, {{Isaiah 34:11 “But pelican and hedgehog shall possess it and owl and raven shall dwell in it. He shall stretch over it the line OF DESOLATION and the plumb line OF EMPTINESS.” ???? tohû refers to the form, and therefore the phrase combining the two “tohû (va) bohu” denotes a state of utter confusion and desolation, an absence of all that can furnish, or people the land, as we have been looking at in Jeremiah. All the evidence we looked at from Jeremiah and Isaiah convincingly indicates that the expression, “tohû (va) bohu”, rendered “formless and void”, can only mean a destruction of major proportions. How then are we to understand the same expression in Genesis 1 verse 2? It has to be taken the same way.
In Genesis you see the waste and desolation and emptiness in verse 2 and the darkness and the watery “drowning”. There is no darkness in God and He does not create darkness. GOD IS LIGHT AND IN HIM IS NO DARKNESS at all. The only other time he covered the earth with water was in Noah’s judgement. The watery covering over all the earth must mean JUDGEMENT. So too, must the darkness, because darkness is associated with sin and judgement. Jeremiah would tell you that.
One thing I think needs to be said. When I was young, and looking into these matters, I read and heard that Genesis 1 verse 2 can be translated as “and the earth BECAME without form and void,” and I used to believe that. It was a very convenient way of making the argument for a judgement that befell the earth. In studying this a lot more over recent times, it is almost certain that the word “became” is wrong and we must be accurate, not accepting a translation of convenience. The best way of looking at this is “and the earth was existing formless and void”, or “the earth existed formless and void” (it was in that state before God began to compose the modern function and structure of the earth in the 6 days.)
Creation Science (Creation Ministries) and the Young Earth Movement are very dogmatic in trying to force on Christian people that the whole universe is 6 000 years old and that everything in the whole of creation is no more than 6 000 to 10 000 years old. This is not only naïve, but incredibly stupid because it holds up Christianity for ridicule. I am not going to develop all the arguments against their position (they are so many) and I have written on that in another paper.
I want to say that nearly all the young earth people I know are very well meaning and accept the inspired scriptures. Because of their averred hatred for evolution and geological time they endorse a young universe. It is naïve. It’s like out on the frying pan and into the fire.
When God created the heavens and the earth, all that was done a long time in the past and that is verse 1. However the situation in verse 2 is NOT what was created when He created the universe in verse 1. Verse 2 begins with the situation of it existing in that state, and from verse 3 onwards, God sets about to refashion the old earth for the creation of our current world. I do like a quote from a commentator – [[Isaiah 45:18 tells us that the Lord God did NOT originally create the Earth in such a desolate condition. The word "vain" (KJV) in Isaiah 45:18 and the term "without form" in Genesis 1:2 are from the very same Hebrew word (tohuw). These verses by themselves, when rightly divided in either language, destroy the core premise of Young Earth Creationism. Genesis 1:2 compared with Isaiah 45:18 rules out God initially making the Earth as a formless mud ball about 6,000 years ago, then turning on the work lights and starting the decorating process. It just did not happen that way.
As the verse clearly says, the Earth was already there. Although it is "without form and void" on the surface of the planet and covered in waters, it is most certainly already the formed planet Earth. It even has a name . . . it's called THE EARTH. Since nowhere else in the Genesis narrative does the Spirit tell us about God establishing the Earth's geologic structure, we can safely assume that the planet's geology is already fully established, as well. Further, there is already nuclear decay in the mantle producing the heat that drives the Earth's tectonic and volcanic processes. And the dynamo at the Earth's core is already generating the magnetic field which protects the Earth's surface from lethal radiation.]] (From “The Bible – Genesis & Geology”)
This is how I see the matter, much to the antagonism of a few in Answers in Genesis or Creation Science, Creation Ministries, and whatever other names they have. I believe in the consistency of the scriptures and when “formless and void” in all other passages is used for a severe judgement from God, so too, does it hold true in Genesis 1 verse 2. I will not accept the nonsense I saw on the Creation Science site on the internet where Adam was in Eden and a tyrannosaurus Rex was bending down to him and he was feeding it fruit. These are dreams. The stark reality is that God created a good world which was in light and proper order but in Genesis 1 verse 2 we have it desolated and in darkness and with all the signs of judgement. Yes, there was a judgement on this earth, and darkness and water and waste and emptiness are all signs of God’s judgement, as we clearly see in Jeremiah 4 verse 23 where the wording is “fierce anger”. Jehovah’s fierce anger left Judah formless and void as it left a previous era on earth.
Now what was that judgement? Frankly I do not know, but I believe all the geological ages, and the dinosaurs and mega fauna, and the age of the universe, all belong to that past era. What I hold to, is that there is a timeless gap between the first two verses of Genesis chapter 1 (what some call the Gap Theory), but I think there is overwhelming evidence for a big break between the first two verses of chapter 1 of Genesis.
Yes, that judgement may have been when Satan rebelled in heaven and Lucifer was cast down to the earth, and the earth was cursed. Whatever the judgement was, it was huge as was the one on Judah in Jeremiah chapter 4. For any one who wants to criticise me for this, I ask you the following, (1) Explain verse 2 of Genesis chapter 1 and how it does not fit into the way God creates: (darkness, watery covering, waste, desolation, etc.) (2) Explain why the other three references to “formless and void” all associate with judgement of God, yet you claim Genesis 1 verse 2 does not. Put aside your chains of a young earth and think honestly. And, NO, I do not believe in evolution. No human life was on earth before God created Adam 6000 years ago.
I will close the consideration of Genesis with another quotation - Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary: [[“2. the earth was without form and void - or in "confusion and emptiness," as the words are rendered in Isaiah 34:11. This globe, at some undescribed period, having been convulsed and broken up, was a dark and watery waste for ages perhaps, till out of this chaotic state, the present fabric of the world was made to arise.”]]
