John Calvin Commentary Jeremiah 16:10-13

"And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt show this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath Jehovah pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or what is our sin that we have committed against Jehovah our God? Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith Jehovah, and have walked after other gods, and have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not kept my law; and ye have done evil more than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk every one after the stubbornness of his evil heart, so that ye hearken not unto me: therefore will I cast you forth out of this land into the land that ye have not known, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; for I will show you no favor." — Jeremiah 16:10-13 (ASV)

He shows here what we have seen elsewhere—that the people flattered themselves in their vices, so that they could not be turned by any admonitions, nor be led by any means to repentance.

It was a great blindness, even madness, not to examine themselves when they were struck by the hand of God. For conscience should have been to them like a thousand witnesses, immediately condemning them.

But hardly anyone was found who examined his own life. And then, though God proved them guilty, hardly one in a hundred willingly and humbly submitted to His judgment; instead, the greater part murmured and made an uproar whenever they felt the scourges of God.

This evil, as Jeremiah shows, prevailed among the people; and he showed the same in the fifth chapter.

Therefore God says, When you shall declare these words to this people, and they shall say, ‘Why has Jehovah spoken all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is our sin?’—they will say this as if to imply that He rages so fiercely against them, as though they had acted wickedly against Him.

God no doubt intended to forestall what those perverse people might have said, for He knew that they possessed an untamable disposition. Since He knew that they would be so refractory as to receive no reproof, He strengthens His own prophet, as if He had said, “There is no reason for their perverseness to discourage you; for they will immediately oppose you and treat you as one doing them a grievous wrong. They will argue with you and deny that they ought to be considered guilty of such great crimes. If then they will thus petulantly cast aside your threatenings, there is no reason for you to be disheartened, for you shall have an answer ready for them.”

We now see how hypocrites gained nothing, either by their evasions or by wantonly rising against God and His prophets. At the same time, all teachers are reminded here of their duty not to vacillate when they have to deal with proud and intractable men.

As it appeared elsewhere, where God commanded His prophet to put on a bold front, that he might boldly encounter all the insults of the people (Jeremiah 1:18), the same is the case here. They will say to you, that is, when you threaten them, they will not willingly give way, but they will contend as though you accused them unjustly. For they will say, “What is our sin? What is our iniquity? What is the wickedness which we have committed against Jehovah our God, that He should declare this great evil against us?”

Thus we see that hypocrites vent their rage not only against God’s servants, but against God Himself—not indeed that they profess openly and plainly to do so. But what is the effect when they cannot bear to be corrected by God’s hand, but resist and show that they do not endure correction with a resigned mind? Do they not sufficiently prove that they rebel against God?

But Jeremiah here graphically describes the character of those who struggled with God. For they dared not wholly to deny that they were wicked, but they minimized their sin as far as they could, like Cain. Cain ventured not to assert that he was innocent, for he was conscious of having done wrong; and the voice of God, “Where is your brother?” (Genesis 4:9), strengthened the voice of conscience. But in the meantime, he did not cease to utter this complaint: “Greater is my punishment than I can bear” (Genesis 4:13).

So also Jeremiah introduces the people as speaking, “Oh, what is our iniquity? And what is the sin which we have committed against Jehovah our God, that He should speak this great evil against us?” They do not say that they were wholly without fault; they only object that the atrocity of their sins was not so great as to cause God to be so angry with them and to visit them with such a grievous punishment. They then exaggerated the punishment, that they might obtain some covering for themselves. And yet they did not say that they were innocent or free from every fault, but they speak of their iniquities and sins as though they had said, “We indeed confess that there is something which God may rebuke, but we do not acknowledge such a mass of sins and iniquities as to cause Him thus to thunder against us.”

But He then says, “You shall answer them, ‘Because your fathers forsook Me; they went after foreign gods, served and worshipped them; and Me they forsook and My law they kept not, and you have done worse.’” God in the first place accused their fathers, not that punishment should have fallen on their children, unless they followed the wickedness of their fathers, but the men of that age fully deserved to be visited with the judgment their fathers merited. Besides, well known is that declaration that God reckons the iniquities of the fathers to their children (Exodus 20:5; Exodus 34:7; Deuteronomy 5:9). And He acts thus justly, for He might justly execute vengeance for sins on the whole human race, according to what Christ says, “On you shall come the blood of all the godly, from righteous Abel to Zachariah the son of Barachiah” (Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51).

Thus then the Scripture often declares that children shall be punished with their fathers, because God will at one time or another require an account of all sins, and thus will make amends for His long forbearance. For as He waits for men and kindly invites them through His patience to repent, so when He sees no hope, He inflicts all His scourges. It is therefore no wonder that children are more grievously punished after iniquity has prevailed for many ages.

We therefore see that these two things are not inconsistent: that God connects the punishment of children with that of their fathers, and that He does not punish the innocent. We indeed see this fulfilled: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die; the children shall not bear the iniquity of their fathers, nor the father the iniquity of his child” (Ezekiel 18:4, 20). For God never blends children with their fathers unless they are their associates in wickedness. Yet there is nothing to prevent God from punishing children for the sins of their fathers, especially when they continually rush headlong into worse sins, when the children, as we shall hereafter see, exceed their fathers in all kinds of wickedness.

We further learn from this passage that those who cite against us the examples of the Fathers bring forward a vain pretext, as we see is done now by those under the Papacy. For the shield they boldly set up against us is this: that they imitate the examples of the fathers. But God declares here that those who did not repent when they saw that their fathers had been ungodly and transgressors of the law were worthy of double punishment.

Let us now notice the sins which God mentions: He says that they had forsaken Him. Those people could not make any excuse for going astray, like the unfortunate heathens, to whom no prophet had been sent and no law had been given. Therefore, the heathens had somewhat more of an excuse than the Jews.

The truth indeed respecting all was that they were all apostates, for God had bound the human race to Himself, and all those who followed superstitions were justly charged with the sin of apostasy. Yet there was a greater atrocity of wickedness in the Jewish people, for God had set His law before them; they had been brought up, as it were, in His school; they knew what true religion was; they were able to distinguish the true God from fictitious gods.

We now then see the meaning of the expression, They have forsaken Me: and it is twice repeated because it was necessary thus to prove the Jews guilty, that their mouths might be stopped. For we have seen that they were to be thus roused from their insensibility, since they would have never yielded nor acknowledged their sins unless they were constrained.

He says further, that they went after foreign gods, served them, and worshipped them. Now this statement further aggravates their sins, for the Jews preferred their own inventions to the true God, who had by so many signs and testimonies manifested His glory and made known His power among them.

Since God had abundantly testified His power, it was by no means a tolerable ingratitude in them to follow strange gods, of whom they had only heard. The heathens indeed vainly boasted of their idols and spread abroad many fables to allure unfortunate men to false and corrupt worship, but the Jews knew who the true God was. To believe the fables of the heathens, rather than the law and their own experience—was not this the basest impiety? This then was the reason why God complained that foreign gods were worshipped by them.

Then He adds, They served and worshipped them. The verb ‘to serve’ is often used by the Hebrews to express worship, as we have stated elsewhere. And thus is refuted the folly of the Papists who deny that they are idolaters because they worship pictures and statues with dulia (that is, with service, if we may so translate it) and not with latria, as if Scripture, in condemning idolatry, never used this verb. But God condemns the Jews here because they served strange gods, because they gave credit to the false and vain fictions of the heathens; and then He adds the outward action, that they prostrated themselves before their idols.

At the end of this verse He shows how He had been forsaken: because they kept not His law. He then confirms what I have already stated, that there was on this account a worse apostasy among the Jews, for they had knowingly and willfully forsaken the fountain of living water, as we have seen in the second chapter. Therefore, simple ignorance is not what is here rebuked, as though they had sinned through error or want of knowledge; rather, they had rejected the worship of God, as it were, deliberately. The rest I shall defer until tomorrow.

Prayer: Grant, Almighty God, that as we in various ways daily provoke Your wrath against us, and You do not cease to exhort us to repent—O grant, that we may be pliant and obedient and not despise Your kind invitations, while You set before us the hope of Your mercy, nor make light of Your threatenings. But grant that we may so profit by Your word as to endeavor to anticipate Your judgments. And may we also, being allured by the sweetness of Your grace, consecrate ourselves wholly to You, that thus Your wrath may be turned away from us, and that we may become receivers of that grace which You offer to all who truly and from the heart repent, and who desire to have You propitious to them in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

[Exposition continues from previous day's lecture]

I was constrained yesterday to leave unfinished the words of the Prophet. He said that the children were worse than their fathers, and gave the reason: Because they followed the wickedness of their evil heart and did not listen to God. He seems to have said the same thing before of the fathers. It might then be asked, why does He say that the children had done worse than their fathers and pronounce their sins worse?

Now we have already seen that sins became worse before God when the children strengthened themselves in wickedness by following the examples of their fathers. We must also notice that not only had the law been set before them, but prophets had also often been sent to them, who added their reproofs. And this is what Jeremiah seems to have expressed at the end of the verse, by saying that they did not listen, though daily spoken to by the prophets. It was then their obstinacy that God so severely punished: they had imitated their wicked fathers, and then they not only had despised, but also through their obstinate wickedness had rejected all the warnings which the prophets gave them.

Then follows a threat: I will eject you, He says, or remove you, from this land to a land which you do not know, nor your fathers. For they had followed unknown gods and went after inventions of their own and of others. God now declares that He would be the vindicator of His own glory by driving them to a land unknown to them and to their fathers.

He immediately adds, There shall you serve other gods day and night. We must take notice of this kind of punishment, for nothing worse could have happened to the Jews than to be constrained to adopt false and corrupt forms of worship, as it was a denial of God and of true religion.

As this appears hard at first sight, some mitigate it, as though the worship of strange gods would be that servitude into which they were reduced when they became subject to idolaters; but this is too remote. I therefore do not doubt that God abandoned them because they had violated true and pure worship and had gone after the many abominations of the heathens.

Thus He shows that they were worthy to be dealt with in this way, those who had in every way contaminated themselves and, as it were, plunged themselves into the depth of everything abominable. And it is certainly probable that they were led by constraint into ungodly ceremonies when the Chaldeans had the power to treat them, as they usually did, as slaves, without any measure of humanity. It is therefore a probable conjecture that they were drawn to superstitions, and that endlessly; so that they were not only forced to worship false gods, but were also constrained to do so by way of sport, as their conquerors daily triumphed over them.

And He confirms this clause by what follows, For I will not, etc., for the relative אשר asher, is here to be taken for a causative particle: For I will not shew you favor, or mercy. That is, I will not turn the hearts of your enemies so as to be propitious or kind to you. By these words, God shows that He would not only punish them by subjecting them to their enemies or by allowing them to be driven into exile, but that there would be an additional punishment by rendering their enemies cruel to them. For God can either tame the ferocity of men or, when He pleases, can rouse them to greater rage and cruelty when it is His purpose to use them as scourges.

We now then understand the whole design of what the Prophet says: that the Jews who had refused to worship God in their own land would be led away to Chaldea, where they would be constrained, willingly or unwillingly, to worship strange gods, and that without end or limits.