“Am I a God near by,” says the Lord, “and not a God far off?” [Jeremiah 23:23].
YHWH’s question, found at the beginning of the alternate Old Testament lesson for this upcoming Sunday [23:23–29, the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year C], feels like comfort at first hearing. Of course we want a nearby God, accessible and intimate. But Jeremiah won’t let us rest in that assurance. The God who is near is also the God who fills heaven and earth, from whom no secrets are hidden. Divine proximity in this part of the prophet’s text means exposure rather than refuge, penetrating presence rather than protective shelter.
Jeremiah’s words are offered during the final, desperate years before Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonian Empire around 600 BCE. The southern kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital, faces an impossible choice: submit to Babylon’s overwhelming power or resist and risk annihilation. In this crisis, competing prophetic voices claim divine authority with equal conviction.
The false prophets sound entirely credible—they use proper theological language, appeal to dreams as vehicles of revelation, speak faithfully “in [YHWH’s] name” [23:25]. They offer exactly what King Zedekiah and his political establishment want to hear: God will destroy Babylon, restore Jerusalem’s glory, and vindicate the nation’s defiant choices. Their message isn’t obviously fraudulent; it’s patriotically appealing and theologically plausible.
But authentic divine word, Jeremiah insists, operates by different rules entirely. It comes like fire that transforms and hammer that shapes, not like the smooth reassurances that leave existing power structures comfortably intact. The wheat of genuine revelation and the straw of wishful thinking may look remarkably similar until tested by divine flame [23:28].
This leaves us with a powerful interpretive crisis—one the text itself refuses to resolve neatly. We’re invited not to master the art of prophetic discernment, but to inhabit the uncertainty of distinguishing true word from false comfort, authentic encounter from manufactured hope.
The Credibility of False Comfort
What makes this passage so unsettling for me is that the false prophets aren’t obvious charlatans operating on society’s margins. They hold respected positions, use accepted methods of divine consultation, and speak with the authority of established religious practice. Dreams, after all, had biblical precedent as vehicles of revelation. Think of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams or Daniel in the Babylonian court. Jeremiah’s contemporaries know the proper forms, the traditional language, the expected appeals to divine authority.
More troubling still, their message sounds entirely reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to believe that YHWH would defend Jerusalem, overthrow foreign oppression, and vindicate the faithful? Their prophecy fits perfectly with deeply held theological convictions about divine protection and national destiny. It offers hope in a hopeless situation, divine endorsement for policies of resistance, assurance that faithfulness will be rewarded.
Meanwhile, Jeremiah—the prophet we now recognize as authentic—appeared to many as a traitor. His message of inevitable defeat and necessary submission to Babylon sounded like political defeatism at best, treasonous collaboration at worst. Jeremiah narrowly escaped execution multiple times for undermining national morale. The “true” prophet looked like the enemy of faith and nation, while the “false” prophets appeared as loyal defenders of both.
The Jeremiah text, therefore, creates a crisis of discernment that extends far beyond ancient Jerusalem. When false prophecy comes wrapped in patriotic fervor, theological respectability, and institutional authority—when it tells us exactly what we want to hear about God’s endorsement of our preferences—how do we distinguish authentic divine word from sanctified wishful thinking?
Even in our own time, God’s name can be invoked to baptize any number of causes—campaign slogans that assume divine backing, public prayers that signal partisan allegiance, sermons that reinforce the cultural comfort zones of their hearers. The challenge is that much of it sounds right, feels plausible, and matches our own convictions. That is what makes Jeremiah’s warning so unnervingly contemporary.
Divine Confidence in an Anxious World
Remarkably, God shows no anxiety about this competition between competing claims. “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream,” YHWH declares with startling confidence, “but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully” [23:28a]. There’s a competitive quality here, but it’s the kind of competition where one participant—YHWH—is utterly secure in the outcome.
The distinction, when revealed, will be absolute. “What has straw in common with wheat?” [23:28b]. The obvious answer: nothing. Straw and wheat are categorically different substances—one nourishes, the other lacks any nutritional value whatsoever.
But authentic divine word offers a harsh kind of nourishment. YHWH’s word comes “like fire” and “like a hammer that breaks a rock into pieces” [23:29]. The Old Testament scholar Robert Alter suggests these images may be linked—the fire and hammer of the blacksmith’s forge, where metal is heated until malleable and then shaped through precise, forceful striking. Or perhaps the sparks that fly when hammer strikes stone, creating illumination through collision and friction.
This is word that transforms through intensity rather than gentle persuasion, that breaks apart what needs breaking rather than leaving comfortable illusions intact. Unlike the smooth reassurances of false prophecy, authentic divine encounter creates crisis rather than resolving it neatly. It forces choices rather than enabling everyone to feel validated in their current positions.
Living in the Tension
I think that it’s here that the text becomes most challenging for us post-modern Christians. Jeremiah doesn’t provide his original audience with a foolproof method for distinguishing true prophecy from false. The wheat and straw will be revealed by divine fire—not by our cleverness, our orthodoxy, or our powers of discernment.
The text leaves us, as a colleague has noted, “with the issue of true and false prophecy unresolved in the present tense moment.” We cannot game this system or turn it into a test of our spiritual sophistication. The fire will do its revealing work, but on God’s timeline, not ours.
Why would God allow such ambiguity? My sense is that certainty can make us careless—eager to wield truth as a weapon rather than receive it as a gift. Ambiguity keeps us dependent, keeps us listening, keeps us from assuming that God’s word will always match our instinctive desires or the mood of the moment.
This means we’re invited to inhabit uncertainty rather than claim false certainty. In our own time, when virtually everyone—even me—has a platform and competing voices claim divine authority with equal conviction, when religious and political rhetoric blend seamlessly, when we’re constantly told that God clearly endorses this position or that cause—Jeremiah’s refusal to give us easy answers becomes both more frustrating and more necessary.
The alternate OT reading this Sunday offers no “but the good news is…” turn to soften its sharp edges. Instead, it leaves us with fire and hammer imagery that continues to work long after we’ve finished reading, breaking apart our comfortable assumptions about how easily we can distinguish authentic divine encounter from sanctified self-interest.
I think that’s precisely where the Jeremiah text means to leave us—not with answers we can master, but with questions that master us; not with certainty we can claim, but with a divine presence that claims us, exposing our secret places while promising transformation through the very intensity we’d rather avoid.
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