Jeremiah 13

Loincloth

Jeremiah is the longest book of the Bible. And it is largely, not entirely, but largely, a book of warning. These are not, I believe, coincidental facts. If you believe that the Bible is a divinely inspired collection of writings, knit together over centuries not by random occurences or human argument, but rather sovereignly directed by the Holy Spirit, then if the longest book in the Bible is a book that is warning people to not fall into idolatry, or continue in their idolatry, then that probably is something to reflect upon.

The longest book of the Bible spills a lot of precious ink and takes up reams of valuable parchment (in its time) reflecting on how insidious and how attractive it is for us as humans to worship false gods, and how much it grieves God that that is what we are prone to do. It is warning, to be sure, but not a bloodless intellectual warning. The Lord is portrayed as grieving the distance that lies between Him and Israel, weeping tears and saying that He feels for His people the way a husband who dotes on His wife feels when He discovers that she has been consistently unfaithful to Him.

I have been reflecting on this. Jeremiah is a beautifully written book. It’s poetry is on par with the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes- it’s full of incredible imagery and emotion- this chapter is just one example. And yet I have never asked anyone what their favorite book of the Bible is and have them say ‘Jeremiah’. Even though it is the longest book of the Bible and beautifully written.

To be fair, it’s not my favorite either. Why? Because it is written to be a convicting book- it is written to convict us of our sin and to show us the extent to which we grieve God’s heart. Isaiah also convicts the people of God of sin, but he intersperses his writings with hymns of praise and speaks frequently, prophetically, of Christ who is to come and just generally is more focused on the blessings of the future that are coming whereas Jeremiah focuses more on the judgment that is here and now, and only refers sporadically, although unmistakably, to the coming of the Lord and the joy that will be ours in the end.

So it is a beautiful book, but a hard read. So it is good that the sheer length of the volume reminds us, compels us, really, to pay close attention to Jeremiah and to reflect deeply on why it is that of all the prophets, the weeping prophet was given the greater sum of divinely inspired words. Every generation of every peoples everywhere throughout all time are always given to some form of idolatry and are always grieving the heart of God in some way, and we who are a part of a culture, part of a nation, part of a generation, are not immune to these things. So Jeremiah calls us, even as he called the Jewish people of old, to reconsider our practices, to rethink our assumptions, in the light of the Word of God and he calls us to a life marked by devotion to God the Father through faith in Jesus Christ that is given to us by the Holy Spirit.

Which brings me, of course, to the dirty loincloth.

This story is the equivalent of a tell me you’re not married story without telling me you’re not married.

A trip to the Euphrates River and back for Jeremiah is roughly 700 miles. So to go there and back again assuming good weather and an agreeable donkey would take roughly 5 weeks. And Jeremiah did it twice. Which would be 2.5 months under the best of circumstances of travel time to prove something which would have shocked no one- if you bury fine linen next to a river it will get ruined.

What is going on? Well on the one hand it’s quite simple and requires no effort on my part to explain it to you because the Lord Himself explains it to Jeremiah and to us in the text. The rotten, mildewed loincloth is the pride of Judah. Idolatry has spoiled them such that they have become good for nothing. The loincloth was meant to be beautiful and elegant, a point of pride for its owner, but it has become like a soiled rag- and there will be no pride left in Judah when their eyes are opened to their sorry state of being.

But why choose this manner to act out this rather simple truth that Jeremiah has already explained a dozen times up to this point?

2 reasons.

The Euphrates was in the part of the world that was controlled by Babylon at this time. The Lord is saying that His people will be taken into Babylon and there will their pride be utterly destroyed, for how can you have any pride when you are an enslaved people in a foreign land?

Psalm 137 “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!” O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”

This Psalm, like every Psalm of Lament is not meant to be read as prescriptive theology. It is rather what worship looks like when we are absolutely devastated as a people, when our world is shook to its foundation and all we have are 2 things left, our personal bitterness and our faith that God is still good. A parent who has watched their children be murdered before them is going to want revenge. They are going to want justice, and they are going to look for God for justice. And that is not wrong or evil. Our God is a God of justice. But if the Lord had enacted justice fully upon the people of Israel not one would be left alive. If the Lord had enacted justice fully upon the human race, not one would be left alive. So it is that we live by grace, by mercy, and the grace and mercy of God are gifted to us through the Cross, and only through the Cross.

At any rate, the ruined loincloth certainly represents the destruction of the pride of Judah, the remnant of Israel, which will happen in a foreign land, in Babylon, near the Euphrates.

But why the Euphrates in particular? Jeremiah did not need to go nearly that far to enter into the Babylonian Empire properly.

The Euphrates is the symbol of the line between good and evil, between the Godly and the ungodly, it is a body of water that divides, symbolically, the sheep from the goats.

The Euphrates is first mentioned very early in the Bible, it is the fourth river listed as flowing out of the Garden of Eden. Then it is spoken of specifically in the Lord’s covenant with Abraham, and remember Jeremiah is concerned with the Covenants in particular in much of his writing, the Euphrates marks the North East border of Israel. It is Israel’s rightful border, according to God’s promise.

Genesis 15:18 “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your offspring I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,”

Israel only realized that promise briefly during David’s reign and part of Solomon’s and then never came close to realizing it after the Kingdom split in two. But that is the given border under the Abrahamic Covenant, to God’s people. And this would have been common knowledge at that time in a way that it isn’t necessarily today among God’s people.

So Jeremiah walks hundreds of miles to this ideal border of Israel, and he buries this fine linen sash there. Right at the border. What are borders anyway? Our own nation is having one heckuva debate right now about borders and what they are for. But one thing has been true through all of time- borders are where the conflict happens. Borders are where the wars break out. Borders are where allegiances are suspect? Whose side are you on, literally or figuratively? It is the border between Gaza and Israel, between India and Pakistan, between Ukraine and Russia, between the Congo and Rwanda, it is the border where the fights break out and where things get muddy, shall we say.

The Lord tells Jeremiah to bury the loincloth at the border. And I think this is because the promised borders of Israel had proved useless. They had done no good. Foreign gods had come in anyway and enticed God’s people into idolatry.

But the Lord doesn’t just tell Jeremiah to bury the loincloth. He tells him to ‘hide’ it. Hide from what? The Jewish people will be unable to hide. If the loincloth symbolizes the Jewish people who try to hide from God, then Jeremiah symbolizes the Lord who literally put the loincloth there- He literally created Israel and put it there, and there is no hiding from the Lord or hiding from the destruction that is coming. He shall find us wherever we are because He put us there.

Then we get to the wine.

Jeremiah 13:12–14 ““You shall speak to them this word: ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Every jar shall be filled with wine.” ’ And they will say to you, ‘Do we not indeed know that every jar will be filled with wine?’ Then you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord: Behold, I will fill with drunkenness all the inhabitants of this land: the kings who sit on David’s throne, the priests, the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And I will dash them one against another, fathers and sons together, declares the Lord. I will not pity or spare or have compassion, that I should not destroy them.’ ””

Prophesy to the people something that sounds like a blessing, like a positive prophecy. Every jar shall be filled with wine. That’s good- there will be no shortage in the land, the grapes will grow healthily and there will be workers to pick them and craftsmen to make the jars...amen! Yes indeed every jar will be filled with wine. Do we not indeed know this? Jeremiah it is you with your long face and weeping and prediction of destruction that needs to hear this more than any of us- we already know it! We know that the crops will be good and that the Lord will bless us!

And then the other shoe drops and Jeremiah, prompted by the Lord, says, all of you will be drunk, from the kings on down.

And that statement alone would make people uneasy. That doesn’t sound like prosperity that sounds like chaos and lack of moderation. But then Jeremiah makes his point all the more clear: In their drunkeness they will turn on one another, even within their own families, and the Lord will not protect His people from turning on each other. This is not a normal drunkeness.

There are 2 ways this can be interpreted, one literal and the other spiritual, and they are probably both accurate.

One is that until quite recently with all manner of drugs and entertainment, historically the best way to escape reality that the whole world pretty much knew of and took advantage of, was to get drunk. And when Nebuchadnezzar came into Judah and set siege to Jerusalem you can bet that many people, knowing what was coming and looking at either death or exile for them or their families, you can bet many of them drank themselves into a drunken stupor and also, in all likelihood, blamed each other and different political views for the troubles that were now theirs.