Meditation on Jeremiah
MEDITATION ON JEREMIAH BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS Jerusalem was certainly not the utopian ark of Zion the prophet Jeremiah wanted it to be nor was it the cradle of radical reform so that Judah’s wickedness might be extirpated at its root. King Josiah of Judah instituted some legal reforms. They were all right as far as they went, and included the death penalty for violators, but Jeremiah did not think much of them, for he was convinced that formal observances simply would not change the hardened hearts of the people: those hearts would have to be circumcised of their foreskins to enjoy the Lord. Judah was bound to be crushed for her sins; then and only then, when the full weight of his doom was on her, could she be intimate with the Lord. “Then the Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king, ‘have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill under every green tree, and she was a harlot there.’” Israel must be duly chastised for her harlotry. True prophets m...