Ezek. 16:8, 22, 60; Hosea 2:15
Or, betrothals. In this book Jehovah God considers Himself a Husband to His beloved elect, Israel, and Israel a wife to Him (Jer. 2:2, 22; 3:1, 14; 31:32). Jer. 2:1-37; 3:1-5 can thus be regarded as a conversation between a husband and his wife. See note Exo. 20:62.
cf. James 1:18; Rev. 14:4
Or, harvest; produce from the earth. God gained some increase from the earth as produce, and Israel was the firstfruits of this produce. God treasured Israel as holiness to Him, as the firstfruits of His increase from His field.
Referring to the idols. By worshipping idols, Israel made themselves vain, nothing.
Israel exchanged the reality of their God, their glory, for the vanity of idols (cf. Rom. 1:23-25).
Jeremiah, a book full of speaking concerning Israel’s sin and God’s wrath, chastisement, and punishment, reveals that God’s intention in His economy is to be the fountain, the source, of living waters to dispense Himself into His chosen people for their satisfaction and enjoyment. The goal of this enjoyment is to produce the church, God’s counterpart, as God’s increase, God’s enlargement, to be God’s fullness for His expression (John 3:29-30; Eph. 3:16-19, 21). This is the heart’s desire, the good pleasure, of God in His economy (Eph. 1:5, 9; 3:9-11). The full development of this thought, sown as a seed in this verse, is in the New Testament (John 4:10, 14; 7:37-39; 1 Cor. 10:4; 12:13; Rev. 22:1, 17).
Israel should have drunk of God as the fountain of living waters that they might become His increase as His expression, but instead they committed two evils: they forsook God as their fountain, their source, and they turned to a source other than God. These two evils govern the entire book of Jeremiah. The hewing out of cisterns portrays Israel’s toil in their human labor to make something (idols) to replace God. That the cisterns were broken and could hold no water indicates that apart from God Himself dispensed into us as living water, nothing can quench our thirst and make us God’s increase for His expression (John 4:13-14).
A reference to the Nile.
I.e., the Euphrates.
Apostasy is a matter of leaving the way of God and taking another way to follow things other than God. It is to forsake God and turn to idols (v. 13).
This word concerning ornaments and attire indicates that God is our ornament and attire, i.e., our beautification. Although God was Israel’s beautification, Israel forgot Him.
cf. Rev. 21:2
Israel’s forsaking of God for idols and their breaking of God’s commandments began with the worshipping of the golden calf at Mount Sinai (Exo. 32:1-6). Later, in his respeaking of the divine law Moses charged Israel especially that when they entered the good land, they were to tear down the idols, destroy the places of idol worship, and slaughter the idol worshippers (Deut. 7:2, 5). Israel, however, did not obey the commandment to utterly destroy the idol worshippers. As a result, Israel could not fully possess the good land, and there was war repeatedly between Israel and the people in the land. After David had fought all the inhabitants of the land and gained nearly the entire land, and Solomon, his son, had built the temple in about 1000 B.C., in his old age Solomon was led by his many heathen wives to worship idols (1 Kings 11:1-8). Nearly all his descendants continued his apostasy. Eventually, Israel’s worshipping of idols and their breaking of the law reached its peak at the time of Jeremiah. At that time Israel was in the sunset of the divine revelation. Cf. note Judg. 2:121a.
