Over against their fluent and unctuous cant Jeremiah sets the terrible reality of his Divine message. Compared to this, their sayings are like chaff to the wheat; nay, this is too tame a figure—Jehovah's word is like fire, like a hammer that shatters rocks. He says of himself:—
"My heart within me is broken; all my bones shake:
I am like a drunken man, like a man whom wine hath overcome,
Because of Jehovah and His holy words."
Thus we have in chapter xxiii. a full and formal statement of the controversy between Jeremiah and his brother-prophets. On the one hand, self-seeking and self-assurance winning popularity by orthodox phrases, traditional doctrine, and the prophesying of smooth things; on the other hand, a man to whom the word of the Lord was like a fire in his bones, who had surrendered prejudice and predilection that he might himself become a hammer to shatter the Lord's enemies, a man through whom God wrought so mightily that he himself reeled and staggered with the blows of which he was the instrument.
The relation of the two parties was not unlike that of St. Paul and his Corinthian adversaries: the prophet, like the Apostle, spoke "in demonstration of the Spirit and of power"; he considered "not the word of them which are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power." In our next chapter we shall see the practical working of this antagonism which we have here set forth.
[CHAPTER IX]
HANANIAH
xxvii., xxviii.
"Hear now, Hananiah; Jehovah hath not sent thee, but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."—Jer. xxviii. 15.