Jeremiah 30:14

These verses belong to Jeremiah 30–33, often called the Book of Consolation or the Book of Comfort, because these chapters are full of promises that God will bring Israel and Judah back from exile and restore them. Jeremiah 30 opens with the LORD telling Jeremiah to write all his words in a book, and it goes on to speak of return, rebuilding and a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31–34). Before the healing comes, the LORD names the injury honestly, so that the hope that follows can be heard for what it is.

The setting is the Babylonian conquest. A first deportation came in 597 BC, and in 586 BC Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed and the people carried away to Babylon. The bruise and the wound are that national ruin, with its military defeat, the loss of the city, the temple and the nation’s independence, and the exile itself. Behind it lay the spiritual sickness that caused it: generations of idolatry, covenant unfaithfulness and the rejection of God’s prophets.

“For thus saith the LORD” puts the diagnosis in God’s own mouth. Yᵉhôvâh is the covenant name of the self-existent, eternal God, so the verdict that follows is his and it is true. The word for bruise, sheber, means a breaking, an injury or a disaster, a fracture used as a picture of ruin. Incurable is ʼânash, a verb whose meanings run from frail and feeble to sick, desperate and woeful. The wound, makkâh, is a blow or stroke and the injury it leaves, and grievous is châlâh, to be or become weak or sick. In the culture of the day, illness and injury were readily linked to God’s displeasure, and a wound declared incurable meant despair: no physician, alliance or army could reverse what had happened.

These same words come back through the passage. Sheber returns in verse 15, where the KJV translates it “affliction”, and so does ʼânash, “thy sorrow is incurable”. Makkâh returns in verse 14, “the wound of an enemy”, and in verse 17, “I will heal thee of thy wounds”. The injury God names at the start is the injury he heals at the end.

Isaiah used the same picture of the nation: “From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment” (Isaiah 1:5–6). Jeremiah traces the sickness to its source within: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

“All thy lovers have forgotten thee; they seek thee not.” Lovers translates ʼâhab, to love or have affection for someone. Judah is pictured as a wife who has gone after other men, a picture the prophets use often for Israel’s unfaithfulness (Ezekiel 16). Her lovers are the foreign nations, and their gods, that Judah courted for protection in place of the LORD, chiefly Egypt and Assyria. Caught between great powers, the kings of Judah kept looking for alliances, and the prophets counted this as spiritual adultery, a breach of the covenant with the LORD who was meant to be her only protector. Jeremiah had asked, “Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria” (Jeremiah 2:36–37), and Isaiah pronounced woe on “the rebellious children” who went down to Egypt for help (Isaiah 30:1–3). Yet the LORD’s word to the people who had “played the harlot with many lovers” ends, “yet return again to me, saith the LORD” (Jeremiah 3:1).

When disaster came, those allies put Judah out of mind. “Seek” here is dârash, to seek, inquire after, require or care for, and it is the same verb as in verse 17, where the nations call Zion one “whom no man seeketh after”. The lovers who would not seek her and the mockers who said nobody would are answered by the God who will. A psalm sums up the lesson of the forgotten alliances: “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help” (Psalm 146:3).

Then comes the hardest line in the passage: “for I have wounded thee with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one.” The verb, nâkâh, is the ordinary word for striking or smiting, and makkâh, the wound, is the noun that comes from it. God names himself as the one who struck. Enemy is ʼôyêb, one who hates, an adversary, and in a land that knew war and invasion the wound of an enemy meant a deliberate, crushing blow. Chastisement is mûwçâr, correction, discipline or instruction, and cruel one is ʼakzârîy, a terrible or cruel person, so the chastisement of a cruel one is the harsh treatment of an oppressive master. Judah’s suffering came from God’s own hand, and the word chastisement shows that even so severe a blow was meant to correct her.

The reason is given in the same words in verses 14 and 15: “for the multitude of thine iniquity; because thy sins were increased.” Iniquity, ʻâvôn, is perversity or moral evil, and the word carries with it the guilt and the punishment that belong to such evil. Sins, chaṭṭâʼâh, is the common word for sin, and it can also mean a sin offering. “Multitude” speaks of abundance, and “were increased” says the sins kept growing. Judah’s sin was a long history of rebellion, idolatry and covenant unfaithfulness that had grown until the judgment came, and the covenant itself had set out the curses that would follow disobedience (Deuteronomy 28).

So the LORD is at work in the history of his people, in judgment as in blessing. He set Jeremiah over the nations “to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10), and this passage holds both halves of that charge. Isaiah gave the same reason for Judah’s distance from God: “your iniquities have separated between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:2), and Lamentations confesses after the fall, “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned” (Lamentations 1:8). Paul states the principle for all of us: “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

“Therefore all they that devour thee shall be devoured.” Devour is ʼâkal, to eat, and figuratively to devour or consume, and the same verb stands on both sides of the sentence: those who ate Judah up will be eaten up. Each clause of the verse turns an act back on the one who did it. Adversaries is tsar, from a root meaning to cramp, and its senses include narrow and distress, but its usual meaning is adversary, as here. These enemies, “every one of them”, will go into captivity, the very fate they forced on Judah. In “they that spoil thee shall be a spoil”, the verb spoil stands on two words in the Hebrew, shâʼaç and shâçâh, both meaning to plunder, and the noun spoil is mᵉshiççâh, plunder or booty. Those who stripped Judah of her wealth will be stripped of theirs. “All that prey upon thee will I give for a prey” turns the hunters into the hunted, and “will I give” says who does it. The LORD who struck his people now takes up their cause.

For a people at the lowest point of their history, who felt abandoned by God and helpless before ruthless conquerors, this promised that their God still ruled and would bring justice on their behalf. Isaiah has the same reversal: “And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine” (Isaiah 49:26), and he pronounces judgment on Babylon itself (Isaiah 13). The LORD “shall judge the world in righteousness” (Psalm 9:8), and Mary sang that he “hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree” (Luke 1:52).

Verse 17 is the LORD’s answer to everything before it: “For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD.” Restore is ʻâlâh, the ordinary verb to go up or bring up, which the KJV renders “restore” here. Health is ʼărûwkâh, wholeness, soundness given back to what was damaged, like new skin growing over a wound. Heal is râphâʼ, a verb that properly means to mend and so to cure. Wounds is makkâh once more, the blows of verses 12 and 14, now healed by the one who dealt them. “Saith the LORD” is nᵉʼum Yᵉhôvâh, an utterance or solemn declaration of the LORD, and it seals the promise with his authority. The God who said “Thy bruise is incurable” is the God who says “I will heal thee”.

He gives his reason: “because they called thee an Outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after.” Outcast is nâdach, to push off, thrust away or banish, and so one driven out. Zion, the city and its people, had been driven from her land, and the nations scorned her. To be a forsaken nation was the deepest disgrace among the peoples, because it implied that her God had abandoned her. “Seeketh after” is dârash again. Her lovers would not seek her (verse 14), the nations said nobody ever would, and the LORD answers their scorn with his healing. He is the God who seeks out and restores the forsaken, and his reason for healing lies in his own compassion and faithfulness to his covenant.

The promises that follow speak of the return and the rebuilding of the city (Jeremiah 30:18–21), and the next chapter promises the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31–34). The hope rests on God’s own thoughts toward his people: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). He had promised to gather them from all the nations where he had driven them (Jeremiah 29:14), and he did it when he brought them back from Babylon. A psalm blesses him as the God “who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases” (Psalm 103:2–4).

Judah’s wound is a picture of the wound sin has dealt all of us. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and we are saved by grace through faith, “not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Jesus came as the physician for exactly this sickness: “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick” (Matthew 9:12), and “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Mark 2:17).

Verse 13 says there is none to plead Judah’s cause. John writes, “if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), sent “to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke 4:18).

Verse 14 speaks of the wound of an enemy and the chastisement of a cruel one, laid on Judah for her many sins. Isaiah foretold the one who would bear the blow for us, and the KJV uses the word chastisement there too: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4–6). Peter applies it to the cross, “by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Peter 2:24), and Paul says God “hath 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). Where Judah’s lovers forgot her, Christ “loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25–27), because “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). He is the mediator of the better covenant that Jeremiah foretold (Hebrews 8:6–13).

The reversal of verse 16 reaches its fullest form in his victory. On the cross he triumphed over the powers that held us, “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15), and when he ascended “he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8). He will return as the righteous judge (Revelation 19:11–16) and bring all oppression to an end, and in the new heaven and new earth “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:1–4).

And the Outcast of verse 17 points to him as well. He was “despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3), so that we who were far off are “made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13), and are “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints” (Ephesians 2:19). The Son of man “is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10).

These six verses show us two things that belong to God together. He tells the whole truth about sin, and he names himself as the one who struck. He is also the healer, who answers the wound with health and the scorn of the nations with his own care. The cure comes from the hand that wounded, just as Hosea said: “he hath torn, and he will heal us” (Hosea 6:1).

One by one the human remedies fall away in this passage: the lovers forget, the advocate is absent, the bandage and the medicine are gone. What remains is the LORD, and he is enough. Over a people the world dismissed as one “whom no man seeketh after”, he speaks the last word: “I will restore health unto thee.” The wounds of sin are real and deep, and the God of Jeremiah heals them, finally and fully in Christ, by whose stripes we are healed.