A Great Teaching Tool: Jeremiah’s Prophetic Acts

Last week I shared my initial encounter with God’s heart through an experience of spiritual travail.

Jeremiah, often called the weeping prophet, mentions prayer, praying, and intercession somewhere between thirty-seven and fifty-five times, depending on the translation.

For me, chapter thirty is central to understanding God’s heart.

Even though judgment is inevitable, His desire for restoration is unmistakable.

I hope you will read the whole chapter, but if time is short, here is a glimpse.

5 “For this is what the Lord says: ‘I have heard a sound of terror, Of fear, and there is no peace. 6 Ask now and see if a male can give birth. Why do I see every man With his hands on his waist, as a woman in childbirth?

And why have all faces turned pale? 7 Woe, for that day is great, There is  none like it; And it is the time of Jacob’s distress, Yet he will be saved from it.

10 Do not fear, Jacob My servant,’ declares the Lord, ‘And do not be dismayed, Israel; For behold, I am going to save you from far away,

And your descendants from the land of their captivity. And Jacob will return and be at peace, without anxiety, And no one will make him afraid.

11 For I am with you,’ declares the Lord, ‘to save you; For I will completely destroy all the nations where I have scattered you. Only I will not destroy you completely, But I will discipline you fairly And will by no means leave you unpunished.’

15 Why do you cry out over your injury? Your pain is incurable. Because your wrongdoing is great and your sins are numerous, I have done these things to you.

16 Therefore all who devour you will be devoured, And all your adversaries, every one of them, will go into captivity. Those who plunder you will become plunder, And all who plunder you I will turn into plunder.

18 This is what the Lord says:‘ Behold, I will restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob And have compassion on his dwellings. The city will be rebuilt on its ruins, And the palace will stand in its rightful place.

19 From them will come a song of thanksgiving And the voices of those who celebrate. I will multiply them and they will not decrease. I will honor them and they will not be insignificant.’”

Despite this promise of restoration, one of Jeremiah’s recurring themes is God telling him not to intercede for the people.

Jeremiah 7:16: “Do not pray for this people.”

Jeremiah 11:14: The prohibition is repeated.

Jeremiah 14:11: Again, he is forbidden to intercede.

By chapter 15, we are told that even the intercession of Moses and Samuel could not turn God’s judgment away.

The tension here is agonizing, and it is personal to me because Jeremiah is deeply identified with God’s grief.

And I have encountered this grief firsthand.

Yet in this book, there came a point where covenant rebellion hardened the people so severely that God forbids the prophet from further pleading on their behalf.

Instead, He instructs Jeremiah to perform prophetic acts that reveal the inevitability of what is soon to take place.

Good teachers know that when you want your audience to understand and remember a lesson, you use illustration.

When God asked His prophets to do this, we call them prophetic acts.

Depending on the theologian, the prophetic acts in Scripture number between twenty-four and thirty-three, most attributed to Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah.

I found nine directives given to Jeremiah that can be described as prophetic acts.

Firstly, some of these involved Jeremiah’s personal life.

Like Hosea being told to marry a prostitute, the prophet’s life became a living picture of how God viewed His covenant with His people.

They were His bride, yet they were committing adultery with other gods.

In His Private Life

Jeremiah was forbidden to marry or have children, a sign that devastation was coming and families would soon be left widowed and childless.

God also banned him from attending both funerals and feasts because joy and normal social life were about to disappear from Judah.

Jeremiah was told to buy his cousin’s field and sign the deed publicly, then place it in a jar and bury it. Even with destruction imminent, God was promising future restoration and return to the land.

Public Displays

Then, in chapter 13, God instructed him to buy a linen waistcloth, wear it without washing it, bury it near the Euphrates, and retrieve it later when it had become ruined and useless.

As a priest, this would have felt reprehensible, and the symbolism was profound.

Judah’s pride and idolatry had corrupted their covenant with God, yet they believed His faithfulness would shield them from the consequences of that.

That object lesson stayed with me for the last two weeks. It impacted me so much that next week’s blog will be dedicated solely to the message within this act.

The living Word of God at work changes our hearts, and the power of this action worked on mine.

Next, two prophetic pictures appear in Jeremiah 18 and 19.

First, he is sent to the potter’s house to watch a potter reshape spoiled clay into another vessel.

Through this, God asserts His authority over nations as a potter over clay.

He has the right to destroy and remake, yet He also makes clear the intrinsic tendency to mercy.

It is, in fact, His mercy that necessitates judgment.

Then there were the public displays.

Jeremiah is told to smash a clay flask before the elders and priests to show what would happen if she refused to change.

Later, in chapter 27, Jeremiah is instructed to wear a yoke on his neck.

Through this, God tells Judah He is telling them to submit to Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. And when the false prophet Hananiah breaks the wooden yoke, Jeremiah prophesies an iron one instead.

Hananiah could not overturn the word of the Lord. His resistance only confirmed the certainty of what was coming and made the prophetic word more sure. 2 Peter 1:19–20.

Jeremiah was not acting on his own instincts in his demonstrations.

After being taken to Egypt, Jeremiah buries large stones at Tahpanhes to signify that Nebuchadnezzar’s throne would extend there.

He also instructs Seraiah to read Babylon’s judgment aloud, tie the scroll to a stone, and throw it into the Euphrates.

This symbolized that though God used Babylon to discipline Israel, theirs would be a final fall under God’s judgment.

These symbolic actions revealed the consequences of Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness.

Their false security in performing religious rites while their hearts were far from God grieved Him deeply.

But Jeremiah’s prophetic acts reveal both the inevitability of judgment and the promise of restoration.

I find myself wondering whether your heart is stirred.

Mine feels heavy, as though I had swallowed a stone.

And it sits in my stomach.

It is God’s work that brings us to the realization of the condition of our hearts without His intervention and mercy.

A prophetic ministry often involves allowing the Word to test and form us until our life embodies its message.

If you have ever been given a scroll that was sweet at first but became bitterness or a fire in your belly, consider yourself in good company.

God continues to give His people, the church, and the nations prophetic pictures through the lives of His servants.

He still uses parables and prophetic acts.

There are people whose obedience embodies a message God wants to tell His people even more than the words they speak.

I could give modern examples, but for the sake of space I will leave that for another day.

Jeremiah 30:24 says, “The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back until He has performed and accomplished the intent of His heart. In the latter days you will understand this.”

I would say we are in the last days, and it is time we understood this.

Behold the kindness and severity of God.

So how do we apply the book of Jeremiah to modern intercession?

There can be a temptation to view intercession primarily through the lens of cultural or political victory.

It might be easy to think that expansion of God’s kingdom should be seen in the overturning of evil temporal governments or nations.

Yet this mirrors the mindset of the false prophets in Jeremiah’s day, like Hananiah in chapter 28.

False prophets espoused that victory will be soon and complete and even declare peace and

safety to be the will of God.

They assert national supremacy and the immediate breaking of Babylon’s yoke.

The false prophets of Jeremiah’s time would rather see the system conquered than accept that God was using a secular nation to humble and discipline His own people.

So, for us too, we might consider that God’s kingdom is revealed in the transformation of human hearts rather than political dominance.

We should be careful not to give in to the impulse to pray against God’s corrective discipline.

When systems collapse or cultures become hostile, our instinct is often to pray, “God, make them conform or remove them for the sake of our comfort.”

Jeremiah tells us to pray for and bless the cities where we live. But let’s not mistake that for investing our faith in them.

Jeremiah shows us that sometimes God allows institutional shaking to expose the church’s own idolatry and its reliance on anything other than wholehearted submission to His Lordship.

Bended knees and submitted hearts are the substantiation of His kingdom, not the rise of a political party or even adoption of godly laws.

They were looking for the Messiah to overthrow the government during Jesus’ time, but He had a different plan.

He said His kingdom is not of this world.

I suggest we begin with what is within our control.

That we prioritize asking God to purify our hearts and have dominion over the space between our ears before we seek to dominate the world around us.

Perhaps true intercession begins not with demanding that God reshape nations around us, but with allowing Him to search and reshape us first.

Jeremiah carried the burden of God’s heart before he ever carried a message to the people.

Maybe we are called to do the same.

When our hearts are purified we are more likely to pray prayers that align with God’s heart.

May our lives prophesy just as much as the message contained in our words.

Lord help us.

Perhaps a return to the simplicity of the Lord’s prayer.

Lord, let Your kingdom come. Let Your will be done.

In me.

All my love, friends.