Reading for the Commemoration of the Prophet Jeremiah

Today is the day we commemorate Jeremiah, appointed by God to be a prophet to Judah. Our devotion comes from Commentary on Jeremiah, part of the Concordia Classic Commentary Series.

Devotional Reading

To this prophetic office God had appointed Jeremiah before He had formed him in his mother’s womb. An artist seeks a suitable piece of marble which he can shape into that object his mind has conceived. God does not need to seek His material, He creates it to suit His purpose.

He was determined to have a prophet unto the nations, and with that in mind, He formed and shaped Jeremiah’s body and soul. While not changing the manner in which sinful parents beget sinful children, He gave to this child the character, the temperament, the gifts and talents which would qualify him for this high and important office.

“A prophet unto the nations,” not only to his own comparatively small nation, under vassalage to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, but to all the nations living at his time, small and great. . . . And as long as nations shall exist on earth, so long will Jeremiah be the prophet ordained by the Lord unto these nations. He has lessons for our nation and our Church also, lessons as timely and as important today as they were 2,500 years ago. . . .

Jeremiah is an intensely human personality, a man whom we can understand and love, and yet a person endowed with such mysterious power from on high that we at times are overawed by his grandeur.

Jeremiah, so humanly weak, and yet so divinely firm; his love so humanly tender, and at the same time so divinely holy; his eyes streaming with tears at beholding the affliction about to come upon his people, yet sparkling with fiery indignation against their sins and abominations; his lips overflowing with sympathy for the daughter of Zion, only to pronounce upon her almost in the same breath the judgment and condemnation she so fully deserved.

Truly so remarkable and powerful a personality, at the same time so lovable, that we cannot fail to recognize in him an instrument especially chosen and prepared by the God of grace and strength and wisdom.

Devotional reading is adapted from Commentary on Jeremiah, pages 23 © 1952 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Prayer

Lord God, heavenly Father, through the prophet Jeremiah, You continued the prophetic pattern of teaching Your people the true faith and demonstrating through miracles Your presence in creation to heal it of its brokenness. Grant that Your Church may see in Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the final end-times prophet whose teaching and miracles continue in Your Church through the healing medicine of the Gospel and the Sacraments; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. (1042)

Prayer is from Treasury of Daily Prayer, page 466 © 2008 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.