Jeremiah 1:10

The Lord appointed Jeremiah to a position of authority over the nations in the sense that he would announce God’s will for them. He would announce both good news and bad, oracles of judgment and messages of comfort and encouragement. The verbs in this verse anticipate the whole message of this book, as one might expect in an introduction. [Note: See Hobart E. Freeman, An Introduction to the Old Testament Prophets, p. 243-44.] Four of them are destructive, and only two are constructive, reflecting the predominantly negative emphasis of Jeremiah’s ministry. The Lord compared Jeremiah’s work to that of two types of workers: a farmer and an architect.

"This is a paradigm of the spiritual life, for God has first to remove the sin before the sinner can begin to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ (cf. Ephesians 4:15; 2 Peter 3:18)." [Note: Harrison, Jeremiah and . . ., p. 50. See also Kenneth L. Barker, "Jeremiah’s Ministry and Ours," Bibliotheca Sacra 127:507 (July 1970):223-31.]

". . . the Bible gives us a realistic message that Jeremiah preached into his own days, a message I am convinced the church today must preach if it is to be any help in the post-Christian world." [Note: Schaeffer, p. 36.]

"First, we may say that there is a time, and ours is such a time, when a negative message is needed before anything positive can begin. There must first be the message of judgment, the tearing down. There are times, and Jeremiah’s day and ours are such times, when we cannot expect a constructive revolution if we begin by overemphasizing the positive message. . . .

Second, with love we must face squarely the fact that our culture really is under the judgment of God. We must not heal the sickness lightly. We must emphasize the reality." [Note: Ibid., pp. 70, 71.]

"What we are is God’s gift to us; what we do with it is our gift to Him." [Note: Warren W. Wiersbe, "Jeremiah," in The Bible Exposition Commentary/Prophets, p. 77.]