From light into darkness

These are the days when again the world prepares for the holiday build around lights, candles and trees. The right moment to intersperse the holiday mood with a grey shade. The prophet Jeremiah is often labeled the “suffering servant” or “suffering prophet”. The book of Jeremiah lacks a happy-end. At the end of his days Jeremiah looked back at 40 years of prophetic ministry. More than the half of it, 22 years in the second half of his ministry, was without any repentance among his hearers. And in the end, as a culmination of his ministry, he was blamed for all the misery which had reached the people of Judah (Jer. 44:15-19). Although his ministry did start so well.
The call to ministry came to Jeremiah in the 13th year of king Josiah (Jer. 1:1). Josiah was already a god-fearing king before that date, because the Second Book of Chronicles states : “For in the eighth year of his reign while he was still a youth, he began to seek the God of his father David” (2 Chr. 34:3). But his dedication was limited exactly to that: “seeking” God. The years of idolatry and apostasy during his grandfather Manasseh had left the country almost without any testimony about the will of God.
When during the reconstruction of the temple the book of the law was found, it turned out to be something new to the king (2 Chr. 34:19). All the years Josiah did not have any access to the written word of God. Evidentially Manasseh had not only killed the men of the word of God, but also extinguished almost all the written word of God.
That is the reason why God send His man Jeremiah to Josiah. The Second Book of Chronicles tells us that Josiah began to purge the land in his 12th year (2 Chr. 34:3). So had a sense of what God’s will was years before the book of the law was found. If we compare the date of the begin for the public action of Josiah with the begin of the ministry of Jeremiah we see a difference of one year. Should Josiah have begun his cleansing already before Jeremiah appeared on the scene? The book of Jeremiah tells otherwise. Jeremiah prophesized against idolatry in the days of Josiah (Jer. 3:6). That must have happened before the purging.
The crux of the matter is the different system of calendars used in Jeremiah and Chronicles. The book of Jeremiah was written in Judean cultural context. Chronicles was written after the return from the Babylonian captivity. The Israelites had adopted a lot from the Babylonians, including a new system of counting the years, the so called accession-year system. The accession-year system distinguished a king’s accession year (the incomplete calendar year in which he began to reign) and reckoned by the number of New Year days a king lived in his reign. In the nonaccession-year system the remainder of a previous king’s last year is counted as the first year of his successor, and then subsequent years are calculated. In the days of Jeremiah they used the nonaccession- year system.
In other words: There is no difference in years between the begin of Josiah’s action and the ministry of Jeremiah. The 12th year of Chronicles is the same year as the 13th year in the book of Jeremiah. It was Jeremiah who instructed Josiah in the ways of the Lord. And what an effect that had. The kingdom of Judah saw the best days since Salomon and even better. The temple finally became the one and only place of worship. All the high places were destroyed. The people lived through an unseen spiritual revival. And among the most important preachers, if not even the one most important, was Jeremiah. But after the successful impact of his sermon he withdrew from the events. When the book of the law was found, the king didn’t turn to him for further investigation. Jeremiah obviously returned home to Anathoth. From there he returned back to the stage in Jerusalem after the death of Josiah, when he continued his ministry of calling the people to repentance.
Jeremiah started his ministry with an awakening most of us haven’t been in yet – may be we’d like to see something similar. But are we ready to pay the price Jeremiah had to pay? After such a tremendous start on his shoulder rested the heavy burden of over twenty years of fruitless ministry, thanklessness and even being blamed for the whole. Jeremiah started from the light of a revival and went into the darkness of hardened hearts and judgment. He didn’t see the happy-end. He even didn’t build on the good old days, when his sermons lit the fire. He had only the word of God to preach and live on.
It is not without reason that Christmas is celebrated at the darkest time of the year. At the darkest time the light is nearer. The ministry of Jeremiah should remind us of the cost and beware us from overemphasized expectations.