Jeremiah 23:35

The Hebrew word behind “burden” is massâʼ. It comes from the root nâsâʼ, to lift or carry, so its first meaning is a load, something heavy to bear. In the prophets it is also the word for an oracle, a message from God that the prophet carries and delivers, very often a message of judgment. Isaiah heads his message against Babylon “The burden of Babylon” (Isaiah 13:1), and Nahum’s book opens “The burden of Nineveh” (Nahum 1:1). The full phrase, massâʼ Yᵉhôvâh, was the recognised way to speak of a weighty word from God, and Yᵉhôvâh is his covenant name, the LORD, the eternal God of Israel.

These verses close Jeremiah 23, a chapter given mostly to the false prophets and unfaithful shepherds of Judah. Jeremiah prophesied in the decades before the Babylonian exile, roughly 627 to 586 BC, under kings from Josiah to Zedekiah. The nation worshipped other gods alongside the LORD and oppressed the weak, and many prophets told the people what they wanted to hear, saying “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14, Jeremiah 14:13–14). Earlier in the chapter God says these prophets “speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:16). He says, “I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran” (Jeremiah 23:21), that they tell their own dreams (Jeremiah 23:25–26), and that they steal his words from one another (Jeremiah 23:30). Against all of that he sets his own word, which is like a fire and like a hammer (Jeremiah 23:29), and he tells the prophet who has his word to speak it faithfully (Jeremiah 23:28). Jeremiah’s true message held hope as well as judgment, for the same chapter promises a righteous Branch from David (Jeremiah 23:5–6).

Jeremiah, often called the weeping prophet, kept bringing heavy words of judgment, and the people grew tired of them. So “the burden of the LORD” became a sneer, a way of asking what gloomy load he had for them today. Some also attached the phrase to messages of their own making. A phrase that should have made people tremble had become a joke and a cliché, and this whole passage is God’s answer.

Verse 33 pictures the scene: “this people, or the prophet, or a priest” comes to Jeremiah and asks, “What is the burden of the LORD?” God gives Jeremiah the reply in advance, and it throws their word back at them: “What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the LORD.” They treat his word as a weight they would gladly put down, and he tells them that the real weight they will carry is his leaving them.

The verb for forsake, nâṭash, means to thrust off or cast away, to reject or let alone. It is a strong word for letting go of what was once held. Here it means God withdrawing his protection and favour and leaving the nation to the harvest of its sin, which came in the Babylonian invasion and the long captivity Jeremiah foretold (Jeremiah 25:8–11). “Saith the LORD” translates nᵉʼum Yᵉhôvâh. The word nᵉʼum means an utterance or declaration, and it marks what Jeremiah says as the LORD’s own word.

This was the judgment God had set down in the covenant itself. Deuteronomy 28 places blessings for obedience beside curses for disobedience, and it warns that if Israel would refuse to hearken to the voice of the LORD, all these curses would come upon them (Deuteronomy 28:15). Hosea had said the same to an earlier generation: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee” (Hosea 4:6). God’s forsaking here is just and deliberate, the answer of a holy God to a people who had heard his warnings again and again and laughed at them.

Verse 34 names the same three groups, “the prophet, and the priest, and the people”, and says that whoever “shall say, The burden of the LORD” will be punished, he and his house. The prophet, nâbîyʼ, is one who speaks for God, and the priest stood between God and the people in worship. The very people entrusted with God’s word were among the offenders, and the ordinary people had followed them, so the warning reaches every level of the nation.

The verb for punish, pâqad, means to attend to, visit, inspect, muster or appoint, and when God visits in anger it means to punish, to call someone to account. “I will even punish” puts God himself forward as the one who acts. Moses had already said that a prophet who presumed to speak a word in God’s name that God had not commanded him to speak should die (Deuteronomy 18:20). Peter warns that false teachers will rise among God’s people as false prophets did in Israel, and that their destruction is sure (2 Peter 2:1–3).

In place of the forbidden phrase, God gives his people new words. Verse 35 reads: “Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbour, and every one to his brother, What hath the LORD answered? and, What hath the LORD spoken?” Verse 37 gives the same questions for speaking to a prophet, with one word added: “What hath the LORD answered thee? and, What hath the LORD spoken?”

The verb for say, ʼâmar, is the everyday word for saying, telling or commanding, and here God supplies the very words his people are to use. To answer, ʻânâh, is to respond to words or to a situation, and it can also mean to testify. To speak, dâbar, is the plain verb to speak, mention or tell. The two questions put the weight back where it belongs, on what God has actually said. They ask after his answer and his word, and a prophet who has neither has nothing to give.

The first form of the questions belongs to everyone. In verse 35 each person asks “his neighbour” and “his brother”, so the whole community seeks God’s word together and holds one another to it. The second form, in verse 37, is put to a prophet, and it tests him: “What hath the LORD answered thee?” A man who claims to speak for God must be able to say what God has told him. Moses gave Israel this kind of test when he warned against the prophet who speaks presumptuously and told them how to know which words the LORD had spoken (Deuteronomy 18:20–22).

The New Testament gives believers the same charge: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1), and “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). People who keep asking what the LORD has spoken grow up into a faith that stands firm against every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14).

Verse 36 reads: “And the burden of the LORD shall ye mention no more: for every man’s word shall be his burden; for ye have perverted the words of the living God, of the LORD of hosts our God.” The phrase they cheapened is now taken from them, and God turns the word once more. The burden each man carries will be his own word. Their mocking and twisted speech will come back on them as a weight of guilt and judgment they must bear themselves.

The word for “word”, dâbâr, means word or speech, and in a separate sense a matter or thing. It stands in “every man’s word” and again in “the words of the living God”, so the verse sets man’s words and God’s words side by side. The verb for perverted, hâphak, means to turn about or overturn, to change or pervert. They had taken God’s words and turned them upside down, by mocking them, by fixing his name to their own messages, and by draining them of their weight.

The names of God in the verse show how serious that is. He is “the living God”, who acts and speaks, set against the dead idols Judah served. He is “the LORD of hosts”, who rules over every power, and he is “our God”, bound to Israel by covenant. The words of such a God are pure, “as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times” (Psalm 12:6). Israel was told to add nothing to his word and take nothing from it (Deuteronomy 4:2), and the Bible closes with the same warning (Revelation 22:18–19). Jesus says that men will give account of every idle word in the day of judgment, “For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (Matthew 12:36–37). Jeremiah’s own call to Judah in his temple sermon was to amend their ways and turn back (Jeremiah 7), and this verse shows where refusing that call leads.

Verse 38 shows the people refusing: “But since ye say, The burden of the LORD; therefore thus saith the LORD; Because ye say this word, The burden of the LORD, and I have sent unto you, saying, Ye shall not say, The burden of the LORD”. “The burden of the LORD” stands three times in this verse, and the verb to say runs all through it, because their sin lies in what they keep saying. Behind “But since” is ʼim, a particle meaning “if” or “when”: when you say it, this is what the LORD says.

God had already given them the command. “I have sent unto you” uses shâlach, to send, for God sending his messenger, Jeremiah, with the word that forbade the phrase. So their use of it was open defiance of a plain command. They say “this word”, dâbâr again, and the phrase that names God’s message becomes the evidence against them. To treat the word of Yᵉhôvâh lightly is to treat him lightly, and “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7).

Verse 39 gives the sentence: “Therefore, behold, I, even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of my presence”. “I, even I” puts the full weight of God’s own resolve behind it.

The verb for forget is nâshâh, to forget or neglect, and in its causative sense to remove. The word “utterly” is tied in this verse to nâshâʼ, which makes the forgetting complete. Some hear in these words a play on massâʼ and its root “to lift”: the people asked about the LORD’s burden, and he answers that he will take them up like a load and cast them away. Forsake is nâṭash again, the verb of verse 33, so the passage comes back to where it began.

The city is Jerusalem, which God gave “you and your fathers”. The word for fathers, ʼâb, reaches back through Israel’s history, so this judgment takes away a gift God had kept for generations. Jerusalem held the temple, the place God had chosen to dwell among his people. “Out of my presence” uses pânîym, the face. It is plural in form and always used as a singular, and its senses of front and presence grow from the face itself. To be cast from God’s face was to lose his favour and protection, and it came true in the fall of Jerusalem and the exile. David prays the opposite of this sentence: “Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11).

Verse 40 reads: “And I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you, and a perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten.” Reproach, cherpâh, is disgrace and public scorn, the loss of honour before others. Shame, kᵉlimmûwth, means disgrace or shame, and the two together make the sentence full. Both “everlasting” and “perpetual” render ʻôwlâm, a word for time stretching out of sight, past or future. In Israel a person’s name and the honour of the family counted for a great deal, so a reproach that outlived one generation was a heavy judgment.

The last words turn the passage once more. “Shall not be forgotten” uses shâkach, the usual verb to forget, which English renders the same way as the nâshâh of verse 39. The people God forgets are the ones whose shame will be remembered. Isaiah promises the reverse to the people God redeems: “thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more” (Isaiah 54:4).

The question of verses 35 and 37, “What hath the LORD spoken?”, has its fullest answer in Christ. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). Jesus is the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), and who was made flesh (John 1:14). He is the Prophet Moses promised (Deuteronomy 18:15), and he said, “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me” (John 7:16). He spoke what the Father commanded him (John 12:49), and his words came from the Father who dwelt in him (John 14:10). His words “are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63), Peter confessed that he has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68), and his words will outlast heaven and earth (Matthew 24:35). He is “the faithful witness” (Revelation 1:5), the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3). Like Jeremiah he warned against false prophets, who are known by their fruits (Matthew 7:15–20). Whoever refuses to believe in him is condemned already (John 3:18), and whoever continues in his word knows the truth, and the truth makes him free (John 8:31–32).

Jesus also speaks of a burden, and the English word is shared: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest... For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30). Judah treated God’s word as a load to be mocked, and Christ invites the weary to take up his. He could make that offer because he carried the true weight himself. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4–6). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). He redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), and God “made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). So “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1–4).

The forsaking and the reproach of this passage meet at the cross. God told Judah, “I will forsake you”, and Christ cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), so that those who trust him hear, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). Judah was given an everlasting reproach, and Christ became “a reproach of men, and despised of the people” (Psalm 22:6). Through him comes the new covenant Jeremiah himself foretold, with God’s law written in his people’s hearts (Jeremiah 31:31–34). He is the true Shepherd of Jeremiah 23:1–6 who gathers his flock. Where Judah was cast out of God’s presence, his people receive the Comforter, who abides with them for ever (John 14:16–17), a place prepared in the Father’s house (John 14:3), and an inheritance that is incorruptible and fades not away (1 Peter 1:4).

This passage shows a God who speaks, whose word is heavy because it is his, and who cares how it is handled. He holds prophets and priests to account first, and he holds every hearer to account as well. The questions he gave Judah are still the right ones to bring to any teaching: what has the LORD answered, and what has the LORD spoken? We have his word written, “given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16–17), and the Bereans show how to receive it, searching the scriptures daily to see whether what they heard was so (Acts 17:11).

The same God who forsook a people that despised his word sent his Son to be forsaken in their place. The burden Judah mocked fell in the end on Christ, and for all who come to him the word of the LORD brings rest and life, under a burden that is light.