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Overview
- Cover the books of Jeremiah & Lamentations in 12 lessons
- Equip yourself to lead a Bible study
- Imagine the Bible’s historical world
- Study word origins and definitions
- Explore thoughtful questions on key themes
- Go deeper with optional projects
- Add your notes with extra space and wide margins
- Find the flexibility to fit the time you have
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781615217656 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tyndale House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Series: | LifeChange , #45 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
The Navigators is an interdenominational, nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people "know Christ and make Him known” as they look to Him and His Word to chart their lives.
Navigators have invested their lives in people for more than seventy-five years, coming alongside them life on life to study the Bible, develop a deepening prayer life, and memorize and apply Scripture, The ultimate goal is to equip Christ followers to fulfill 2 Timothy 2:2—to teach what they have learned to others.
Today, tens of thousands of people worldwide are coming to know and grow in Jesus Christ through the various ministries of The Navigators. Internationally, more than 4,600 Navigator staff of 70 nationalities serve in more than 100 countries.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Lesson One
JEREMIAH 1–4
The Prophet's Calling and Message
1. For getting the most from Jeremiah, one of the best guidelines is found in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, words Paul wrote with the Old Testament first in view. He said that all Scripture is of great benefit to (a) teach us, (b) rebuke us, (c) correct us, and (d) train us in righteousness. Paul added that these Scriptures completely equip the person of God "for every good work." As you think seriously about those guidelines, in which of these areas do you especially want to experience the usefulness of Jeremiah? Express your desire in a written prayer to God. __________________________________________________
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2. Near the middle of this book of Jeremiah — in 23:29 — God says that His Word is like fire and like a hammer. He can use the Scriptures to burn away unclean thoughts and desires in our hearts. He can also use Scripture, with hammer-like hardness, to crush and crumble our spiritual hardness. From your study of Jeremiah, how do you most want to see the "fire-and-hammer" power of God's Word at work in your own life? Again, express this longing in a written prayer to God.
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3. Think about these words of Paul to his younger helper Timothy: "Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). As you study God's word of truth in Jeremiah, he calls you to be a "worker." It takes work — concentration and perseverance — to fully appropriate God's blessings for us in this book. Express here your commitment before God to work diligently in this study of Jeremiah.
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4. Glance ahead throughout the pages of Jeremiah. If your Bible includes topic headings, note all of these. Allow your eyes also to take in any particular phrases or sentences in the text that catch your attention. What are your overall impressions of this book?
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5. In one sitting if possible, read attentively through all of Jeremiah 1–4, taking notes and underlining or highlighting as you go. What impresses you overall as the key features and themes of this part of the book?
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The word of the Lord came to me, saying ... (1:4). "This verse is the heart of the prophetic experience."
6. What do chapters 1–4 reveal most about God's heart for His people and His relationship with His people?
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7. What do these chapters identify most clearly and specifically as Israel's wrongdoing? What exactly were God's people most guilty of, and most in need of repentance for?
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8. In particular, how would you summarize what these chapters teach us about the sin of idolatry?
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9. What do these opening chapters of Jeremiah teach us most about repentance, from God's perspective?
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10. Verses 2 and 3 of Jeremiah 1 mention the kings under whose reigns Jeremiah lived and ministered. What are the most important things you already know about these kings and their reigns?
"The three kings named here [in 1:2-3], Josiah the reformer, Jehoiakim the tyrant, and Zedekiah the weathercock, touched three extremes of royal character that created changes in the spiritual climate which were fully as violent as those of the political scene."
In the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah (1:2). This "was one year after the beginning of that king's reformation movement (2 Chronicles 34:3)." This time of Jeremiah's call also "coincided approximately with the death of the last great Assyrian ruler, Ashurbanipal, an event which signaled the disintegration of the Assyrian empire under whose yoke Judah had served for nearly a century. Against the waning power and influence of the Assyrians, Judah asserted its independence under Josiah, and for a time the prospects for a secure national future appeared promising."
11. As the Lord calls Jeremiah to ministry in 1:4-19, what do you see as the most important things the Lord communicates to Jeremiah — and the things that will be most valuable for him to remember throughout his ministry?
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I appoint you ... to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant (1:10). "The prophet's job description includes six tasks, and four of them are negative. Two to one, his words to the nations will be words of judgment. ... This verse is not only Jeremiah's job description, it is also a helpful plot-summary of his book. He lives in such evil days that judgment will outnumber grace two to one."
A pot that is boiling ... tilting toward us from the north (1:13). This "seething cauldron, tilting dangerously as the fire settled, made a terribly appropriate picture of the menace from the north (the old invasion route of Assyria, soon to be that of Babylon); and it remains as apt as ever to the human scene where, from one quarter after another, human aggressiveness lets loose a scalding stream of havoc."
Get yourself ready! ... I have made you a fortified city. ... I am with you and will rescue you (1:17-19). "Jeremiah is given strong encouragement for his hard task, because his message would be neither welcome nor popular with his people. To fulfill his duties, nothing less than utter commitment to God and to his strength would suffice. With God, Jeremiah would be invincible. In his darkest hours these words sustained him mentally, emotionally, and spiritually."
12. How do you especially see God's grace, protection, and provision for Jeremiah coming through in chapter 1?
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Worthless (2:5). Their worthlessness involved "exchanging the real for the unreal, the eternal for the ephemeral. 'Worthlessness' here is hebel, the 'vanity' of Ecclesiastes 1:2, etc."
In 2:1-3, "there is the freshness of spring in the Lord's first words to Israel, recapturing the ardor of young love — that readiness of the beloved to go anywhere, put up with anything, so long as it could be shared with her partners. ... To begin on such a note was the way to awaken any spark of longing or compunction that might still lie dormant in the hearers (for affection can disarm us where a scolding only rankles). ... Whatever else was wrong with Israel — and there was no lack of it — the violated marriage was fundamental."
Those who deal with the law did not know me; the leaders rebelled against me (2:8). "A holy calling does not make a holy man. The priests of Jeremiah's day were handling the Scriptures, studying the Bible, and teaching God's Word, but they did not know God himself (see John 5:39-40). Their ministry was a dead ritual rather than a living relationship."
Broken cisterns that cannot hold water (2:13). "The best cisterns, even those in solid rock, are strangely liable to crack ..., and if by constant care they are made to hold, yet the water collected from clay roofs or from marly soil has the color of weak soapsuds, the taste of the earth or the stable, is full of worms, and in the hour of greatest need it utterly fails."
On your clothes is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor (2:34). "With God dethroned, nothing is unthinkable: not even murder — here quite literally, since the regime of King Manasseh (in whose reign Jeremiah was born) had 'filled Jerusalem from one end to another with innocent blood' (2 Kings 21:16; to which we may add the question, What of our own society's murders of convenience? What is more innocent than an embryo?)"
13. What do you see as the particular messianic significance of the promises in Jeremiah 3:14-17?
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Return, faithless people ... for I am your husband (3:14). "That is the divine call, the free invitation of God to come to him for salvation. It is the free offer of the gospel that is offered to all men, women, and children in Jesus Christ. But notice what the Lord goes on to say." I will choose you — one from a town and two from a clan — and bring you to Zion (3:14). "That is divine election, God's choice. God's choosing stands behind God's calling."
"Now, surprisingly, God presses home the point by a change of tone from judgment to grace. ... Notice the great vista opened up in verses 15-18. Characteristically, God is not content with short-term answers to a crisis, but looks on to perfection. ... What is said here of the shepherds (i.e., rulers) and of the ark and the nations reveals the scale of this transformation, with God's people ideally governed (3:15), his earthly throne no longer a mere ark but his entire city (note the astonishing boldness of verse 16); his Jerusalem the rallying point of all nations, now converted; and his divided Israel home and reunited. It brings us right into the era of the new covenant, and indeed to the new heavens and earth and the 'New Jerusalem' of Revelation 21–22, whose 'temple is the Lord God' (Revelation 21:22), and whose open gates admit 'the glory and honor of the nations' (Revelation 21:26).
"If so distant a prospect was worth unveiling to the old Israel, six centuries before Christ, it must be doubly relevant to us who have reached its foothills."
14. From chapter 4 of Jeremiah, how would you summarize the warnings given by the Lord to His people?
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"The visions come thick and fast in chapter 4, bombarding us with the terrors of invasion."
"Jeremiah 4 is a living nightmare of divine judgment. The terrible things that befall Judah for refusing to turn back to God are jumbled all together."
Break up your unplowed ground and do not sow among thorns (4:3). "He exhorts the people of Judah to break up their neglected and untilled hearts, which had become as hard as an uncultivated field. ... The plow of repentance and obedience was needed to remove the outer layer of weeds and thorns that had resulted from idolatry."
Circumcise your hearts (4:4). "The hard encrustation on their hearts must be cut away. Nothing less than removal of all natural obstacles to the will of God would suffice. Outward ritual must be replaced by inward reality (see Deuteronomy 10:16; Romans 2:28-29)."
I said, "Alas, Sovereign Lord! How completely you have deceived this people ..." (4:10). "It is the first of many glimpses into his troubled mind; and his surprise at his own vision of verses 5-9 chimes in with the New Testament's dictum that such prophecies came not by the impulse of man but from God (2 Peter 1:20-21)."
They know not how to do good (4:22). "Good, in Scripture, is not only plain and simple ('very near,' Deuteronomy 30:14); it has heights and depths which we must be taught even to see (as in, for example, the Sermon on the Mount) and inspired to love and do."
"Jeremiah's psalm style is especially evident in his second psalm of lamentation (Jeremiah 4:19-31)."
I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens, and their light was gone (4:23). "While the Genesis story was all expectancy, this is the opposite: an abandonment, a reversion, and a divine unmaking ... (4:25-26)." In 4:23-26, "the striking repetition of 'I looked' ... ties this poem together and underscores its visionary character, as the prophet sees his beloved land in ruins after the Babylonian onslaught. Creation, as it were, has been reversed."
I will not destroy it completely. (4:27). Notice how this promise is repeated at 5:10,18 and with particular emphasis at 30:11. This statement "shines very brightly. It is a constant theme, not only here but throughout the prophets. Without it the Old Testament would not have been worth writing, and the New Testament would never have materialized. Its context here [in 4:23-27] of a silent, devastated world makes the point that only God's 'Yet ...' has rescued or will rescue anything at all from the battlefield that we have made of his creation."
27 Here we see both God's wrath as well as His mercy — and "both of these ... reflect his intense commitment to us — both the seriousness with which he takes us and the determination to complete the work of grace that he has begun."
15. What would you select as the key verse or passage in Jeremiah 1–4 — one that best captures or reflects the dynamics of what these chapters are all about?
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16. List any lingering questions you have about Jeremiah 1–4.
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For the Group
In your first meeting, it may be helpful to turn to the front of this book and review together the "How to Use This Study" section.
You may want to focus your discussion for lesson 1 especially on the following core biblical concepts, all of which are dealt with extensively in Jeremiah. (These themes will likely reflect what group members have learned in their individual study of this week's passage — though they'll also have made discoveries in other areas as well.)
• sin
• judgment
• repentance
• grace
• salvation
The following numbered questions in lesson 1 may stimulate your best and most helpful discussion: 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 15, and 16.
Look also at the questions in the margins under the heading "For Thought and Discussion."
A Moving and Powerful Message
In the first half of this book, Jeremiah "labors to develop the theme of national sinfulness from the statement of the prophet's credentials to the final judgment. As a unit it forms a somewhat disjointed whole with varying kinds of literary forms interwoven: oracles of hope and doom and autobiographical, biographical, and conversational (dialogue) narrative. ... Thus he interweaves and repeats the theme of national sinfulness and coming judgment, often going back over material already presented, as a fugue does in music. The effect is powerful and moving."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jeremiah & Lamentations"
by .
Copyright © 2013 The Navigators.
Excerpted by permission of NavPress.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
How to Use This Study 5
Introduction: The Book of Jeremiah: Judgment and Hope 11
1 The Prophet's Calling and Message (Jeremiah 1-4) 17
2 The Message of Judgment Intensified (Jeremiah 5-10) 29
3 Dialogues with God (Jeremiah 11-14) 41
4 Potter and Clay (Jeremiah 15-20) 49
5 Prophecies Against Judah (Jeremiah 21-24) 61
6 The Cup of His Wrath (Jeremiah 25-29) 69
7 From Sorrow to Hope (Jeremiah 30-33) 79
8 Under Siege (Jeremiah 34-38) 91
9 Jerusalem's Fall, and Afterward (Jeremiah 39-45) 101
10 Judgment Against the Nations (Jeremiah 46-49) 113
11 Judgment Against Babylon, and an Epilogue (Jeremiah 50-52) 123
12 A People's Desolation (The Book of Lamentations) 135
Study Aids 151