Today’s Passage: Jeremiah 32
We come now to one of the most quietly astonishing scenes in all the book. Jerusalem is in her final agony. The armies of Babylon have thrown up their siege ramps around the walls, famine is beginning to bite in the streets, and Jeremiah himself, for telling the plain truth about what is coming, sits under guard in the courtyard of the king’s palace. And it is precisely there, in a shut-up city under a doomed sky, that the LORD tells His prophet to do a thing that makes no earthly sense: to buy a field. Not to flee, not to hoard silver against the famine, but to hand over seventeen shekels for a plot of ground in a town the enemy already holds, and then to sign and seal the deed with great care, because one day, God says, “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” Out of that acted parable rises Jeremiah’s great prayer, and out of the prayer comes God’s own answer, beginning with the question that towers over the whole chapter: “Is anything too difficult for Me?”
As you read, hold this: Faith buys a field in a doomed city, for nothing is too hard for the God of all flesh.
Context The world of Jeremiah 32
The chapter fixes its own date for us with unusual care: the tenth year of Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. That places us in the year 587 BC, with Jerusalem perhaps a year from her fall. The Babylonian army has settled in for the long, grinding work of a siege, and Jeremiah, who has spent decades warning that this very hour would come, has been locked up by a frightened king who could not bear to hear it said aloud. Zedekiah wanted the prophet silenced, not because Jeremiah was wrong, but because he was right, and the truth was unbearable.
Into this hopeless setting the ancient custom of land ge'ullah, pronounced geh-oo-LAH. Strong's H1353, redemption, the right or act of redeeming. This is a word soaked in the tenderness of the whole Old Testament. The right of redemption belonged to the go’el, the kinsman-redeemer, the near relative whose loving duty it was to step in and buy back what a struggling family member could not keep, so the inheritance would never be lost. It is the very word that beats through the book of Ruth, where Boaz redeems Naomi’s field and marries Ruth to raise up her line. Here Jeremiah plays that kinsman’s part in the shadow of the city’s fall, and the picture reaches out toward its fullest meaning in Christ, our great Redeemer, who at infinite cost bought back what we had forfeited and secured for us an inheritance that no invading army can ever seize. When Jeremiah weighed out his silver for a field in enemy hands, he was quietly rehearsing the gospel: love that pays the price of redemption when everything visible says the cause is lost. suddenly matters. In Israel a family’s land was meant to stay in the family, and when a relative fell into need, the nearest kinsman had both the right and the duty to buy the field back so the inheritance would not be lost. So when Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel comes offering his field in Anathoth, he is calling on Jeremiah to act as the redeemer. To any sane observer it was throwing money into the fire, for the land lay in enemy hands and the whole country was about to be carried into exile. But Jeremiah buys it anyway, and does the paperwork with the sober thoroughness of a man closing a deal in peacetime, precisely because God had told him the exiles would return and ordinary life would one day begin again in this very soil.
Jeremiah 32:1–5 (BSB)
¹ This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. ² At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah the prophet was imprisoned in the courtyard of the guard, which was in the palace of the king of Judah. ³ For Zedekiah king of Judah had imprisoned him, saying: “Why are you prophesying like this? You claim that the LORD says, ‘Behold, I am about to deliver this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will capture it. ⁴ Zedekiah king of Judah will not escape from the hands of the Chaldeans, but he will surely be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon, and will speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye. ⁵ He will take Zedekiah to Babylon, where he will stay until I attend to him, declares the LORD. If you fight against the Chaldeans, you will not succeed.’”
The scene is set with painful honesty. Here is a man in prison for telling the truth, and here is a king who would rather jail the messenger than heed the message. Notice that Zedekiah cannot actually refute a word Jeremiah has said. His complaint is not that the prophet is lying but that he keeps saying what the king does not want to hear: the city will fall, Zedekiah himself will be carried to Babylon, and no amount of fighting will change it. There is a whole portrait of the human heart in that little exchange. We can lock a prophet in a courtyard, but we cannot silence the word of the LORD, and refusing to listen to a hard truth has never once made it untrue. Everything Jeremiah is about to do stands against this bleak backdrop, a nation stubbornly deaf and a doom already closing in.
Jeremiah 32:6–8 (BSB)
⁶ Jeremiah replied, “The word of the LORD came to me, saying: ⁷ Behold! Hanamel, the son of your uncle Shallum, is coming to you to say, ‘Buy for yourself my field in Anathoth, for you have the right of redemption to buy it.’ ⁸ Then, as the LORD had said, my cousin Hanamel came to me in the courtyard of the guard and urged me, ‘Please buy my field in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for you own the right of inheritance and redemption. Buy it for yourself.’” Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD.
Watch how gently and how surely God prepares His servant. Before Hanamel ever arrives, the LORD tells Jeremiah exactly who is coming and what he will say, so that when the cousin walks into the courtyard with his request, Jeremiah recognizes at once the hand of God behind an ordinary family transaction. “Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD.” That is a beautiful and important thing to notice. The command to buy the field did not come as thunder from the sky; it came dressed as a relative in financial trouble asking for a favor. God so often works like that, weaving His purposes quietly into the plain events of an ordinary day, and the person walking closely with Him learns to recognize His voice even in the knock at the door.
Jeremiah 32:9–12 (BSB)
⁹ So I bought the field in Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and I weighed out seventeen shekels of silver. ¹⁰ I signed and sealed the deed, called in witnesses, and weighed out the silver on the scales. ¹¹ Then I took the deed of purchase—the sealed copy with its terms and conditions, as well as the open copy— ¹² and I gave this deed to Baruch son of Neriah, the son of Mahseiah, in the sight of my cousin Hanamel and the witnesses who were signing the purchase agreement and all the Jews sitting in the courtyard of the guard.
Here is faith with its sleeves rolled up. Jeremiah does not merely say a hopeful word; he weighs out the silver, seventeen shekels of good money, and he does the whole thing by the book. He signs the deed, seals it, gathers witnesses, keeps both the sealed copy and the open copy, and hands it all to his faithful scribe Baruch to be safely stored. And he does every bit of this in full public view, in front of his cousin and the witnesses and all the Jews sitting in the courtyard. Think of how that must have looked to the onlookers, half of them wondering if the prophet had lost his mind, spending real silver on land the enemy would trample within the year. But that was exactly the point. This was a sermon acted out in the open, a promise you could hold in your hand, and its careful, deliberate ordinariness was itself the message: business as usual is coming back to this land, so buy the field.
Jeremiah 32:13–15 (BSB)
¹³ In their sight I instructed Baruch, ¹⁴ “This is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: Take these deeds—both the sealed copy and the open copy of the deed of purchase—and put them in a clay jar to preserve them for a long time. ¹⁵ For this is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.”
Now the meaning of the whole strange transaction is spoken plainly. Seal the deeds in a clay jar, Jeremiah tells Baruch, and preserve them for a long time, and then comes the reason for all of it: “Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” That is the sunrise hidden inside the siege. The deed in the jar is a wager on the faithfulness of God, a piece of paper that says the exile will not be the end of the story. There will come a day when the smoke has cleared and the returned people are once more haggling over property and planting vineyards and passing fields down to their children, and on that day someone will open this jar and find that the weeping prophet had believed the promise enough to spend his own silver on it. Hope, when it is real, does more than feel; it buys a field and files the deed away for a coming day.
Jeremiah 32:16–19 (BSB)
¹⁶ After I had given the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah, I prayed to the LORD: ¹⁷ “Oh, Lord GOD! You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for You! ¹⁸ You show loving devotion to thousands but lay the iniquity of the fathers into the laps of their children after them, O great and mighty God whose name is the LORD of Hosts, ¹⁹ the One great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are on all the ways of the sons of men, to reward each one according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds.
Having obeyed, Jeremiah now prays, and see where he begins. He does not start with his confusion; he starts with God. “Oh, Lord GOD! You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for You!” That is exactly the right place to stand when a command of God runs clean against everything your eyes can see. Before he lets himself wonder how a doomed field could ever be worth buying, he lifts his gaze to the God who flung the stars into being and holds the whole earth in His hand, the God whose eyes miss nothing and whose loving devotion runs on to thousands. When faith is bewildered, it steadies itself first on the sheer greatness of the One it is trusting. If He made the heavens and the earth, then a scrap of ground in Anathoth is no problem at all.
Jeremiah 32:20–25 (BSB)
²⁰ You performed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and You do so to this very day, both in Israel and among all mankind. And You have made a name for Yourself, as is the case to this day. ²¹ You brought Your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and with great terror. ²² You gave them this land that You had sworn to give their fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey. ²³ They came in and possessed it, but they did not obey Your voice or walk in Your law. They failed to perform all that You commanded them to do, and so You have brought upon them all this disaster. ²⁴ See how the siege ramps are mounted against the city to capture it. And by sword and famine and plague, the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it. What You have spoken has happened, as You now see! ²⁵ Yet You, O Lord GOD, have said to me, ‘Buy for yourself the field with silver and call in witnesses, even though the city has been delivered into the hands of the Chaldeans!’”
The prayer now walks back through the whole story of God’s dealings with His people, and it is a wonderful pattern for our own praying. Jeremiah remembers what God has done: the signs and wonders in Egypt, the strong hand that brought Israel out, the good land flowing with milk and honey that He swore to give the fathers. Then he tells the hard truth without flinching, that the people would not obey, and so this disaster has justly come, and there stand the siege ramps to prove that every word God spoke has come true. And only after all of that does he lay his honest puzzlement before the LORD: and yet, in the very teeth of all this ruin, You told me to buy a field. Notice he does not accuse God or refuse the command. He obeys first and questions second, bringing his real bewilderment straight to God in prayer. That is how a faithful heart handles a promise it cannot yet understand: it does the thing God said, and then it kneels down and asks Him to help it see.
Jeremiah 32:26–27 (BSB)
²⁶ Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah: ²⁷ “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for Me?
And now God answers, and His answer is the summit of the whole chapter. He takes up Jeremiah’s own opening words and turns them back to him as a question that settles everything: “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too difficult for Me?” Jeremiah had begun his prayer by declaring that nothing is too hard for God; now God says, in effect, you have said it, so believe it all the way down. He is the God of all flesh, the Maker and Ruler of every living thing, of Babylon’s armies and Judah’s exiles alike, and there is no corner of the earth or the future that lies outside His hand. That single question is meant to be carried out of this chapter and into every impossible-looking corner of our own lives. When the walls are closing in and the promise makes no sense, this is the word to stand on: the God who owns all flesh has never once met a thing too hard for Him.
Jeremiah 32:28–35 (BSB)
²⁸ Therefore this is what the LORD says: Behold, I am about to deliver this city into the hands of the Chaldeans and of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, who will capture it. ²⁹ And the Chaldeans who are fighting against this city will come in, set it on fire, and burn it, along with the houses of those who provoked Me to anger by burning incense to Baal on their rooftops and by pouring out drink offerings to other gods. ³⁰ For the children of Israel and of Judah have done nothing but evil in My sight from their youth; indeed, they have done nothing but provoke Me to anger by the work of their hands, declares the LORD. ³¹ For this city has aroused My wrath and fury from the day it was built until now. Therefore I will remove it from My presence ³² because of all the evil the children of Israel and of Judah have done to provoke Me to anger—they, their kings, their officials, their priests and prophets, the men of Judah, and the residents of Jerusalem. ³³ They have turned their backs to Me and not their faces. Though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to discipline. ³⁴ They have placed their abominations in the house that bears My Name, and so have defiled it. ³⁵ They have built the high places of Baal in the Valley of Ben-hinnom to make their sons and daughters pass through the fire to Molech—something I never commanded them, nor had it ever entered My mind, that they should commit such an abomination and cause Judah to sin.
Before the great promise of restoration, God lays out with sober honesty exactly why the judgment is coming, and we must not rush past it. The city will be captured and burned, and God names the reason plainly: this was a people who turned their backs to Him and not their faces, who would not listen though He taught them again and again, who filled even His own temple with idols and, most terrible of all, built the high places of Baal in the Valley of Ben-hinnom and made their own children pass through the fire to Molech. God says of that horror that it never even entered His mind that they should do such a thing. This is the darkness that the coming grace will have to answer. The judgment is not arbitrary cruelty; it is the just and grieved response of a holy God to a people who had given themselves over to evil with both hands. And it makes the promise that follows all the more staggering, that God would still choose to do good to a people like this.
Jeremiah 32:36–41 (BSB)
³⁶ Now therefore, about this city of which you say, ‘It will be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword and famine and plague,’ this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ³⁷ I will surely gather My people from all the lands to which I have banished them in My furious anger and great wrath, and I will return them to this place and make them dwell in safety. ³⁸ They will be My people, and I will be their God. ³⁹ I will give them one heart and one way, so that they will always fear Me for their own good and for the good of their children after them. ⁴⁰ I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never turn away from doing good to them, and I will put My fear in their hearts, so that they will never turn away from Me. ⁴¹ Yes, I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will faithfully plant them in this land with all My heart and with all My soul.
Now watch the great turn, and let your heart soar with it. The same God who has just spoken of banishing His people in furious anger now says, “I will surely gather My people,” and He will bring them home and make them dwell in safety. And He piles promise upon promise until the words nearly run over. “They will be My people, and I will be their God.” He will give them one heart and one way. He will cut an everlasting covenant with them and never turn away from doing them good, and He will do more than restore them from the outside, for He will put His own fear within their hearts so that they will never again turn away from Him. This is the very grace that Jeremiah has been reaching toward all through his book, the covenant written not on stone but on the heart, the God who does for His people what they could never do for themselves. And hear the astonishing tenderness of it: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will faithfully plant them in this land with all My heart and with all My soul.” God does not restore His people grudgingly. He does it with delight, with His whole heart poured into their good. There is the God we are dealing with, and there is why the deed went into the jar.
Jeremiah 32:42–44 (BSB)
⁴² For this is what the LORD says: Just as I have brought all this great disaster on this people, so I will bring on them all the good I have promised them. ⁴³ And fields will be bought in this land about which you are saying, ‘It is a desolation, without man or beast; it has been delivered into the hands of the Chaldeans.’ ⁴⁴ Fields will be purchased with silver, and deeds will be signed, sealed, and witnessed in the land of Benjamin, in the areas surrounding Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah—the cities of the hill country, the foothills, and the Negev—because I will restore them from captivity, declares the LORD.”
And so the chapter closes by circling straight back to the field, tying the great covenant promise to the small silver transaction in the courtyard. God gives His people a wonderful reason to trust the good He has sworn: just as surely as He brought all this disaster upon them, and no one could doubt that, for the siege ramps were right there, so surely will He bring upon them all the good He has promised. The judgment they can see is the pledge that the restoration will be just as certain. And then, marvelously, He picks up Jeremiah’s own deed and multiplies it across the whole land: fields will be bought here again, purchased with silver, the deeds signed and sealed and witnessed, in Benjamin and around Jerusalem and through all the towns of Judah, “because I will restore them from captivity.” One prophet’s lonely act of faith in a doomed city becomes a picture of the ordinary, glad, buying-and-selling life that God Himself guarantees will return. That is what faith does. It hears a promise that seems impossible, it counts out its silver on the strength of God’s word alone, and it files the deed away, sure that the God of all flesh will keep every good thing He has said.
Study notes Going deeper
The towering word of this chapter is God’s question, “Is anything too difficult for Me?” It is one of those truths the Scriptures return to again and again, because we are so quick to forget it whenever our circumstances look impossible. Long before Jeremiah, God asked it of Abraham and Sarah when a child seemed out of the question; and centuries after Jeremiah, the same certainty was spoken to a young woman in Nazareth who was told she would bear the Son of God.
"For no word from God will ever fail." Luke 1:37 (BSB)
The angel’s word to Mary is the New Testament’s echo of the word to Jeremiah in the courtyard: what God has promised, He is able to perform, and no purpose of His can be thwarted. That is why Jeremiah could weigh out his silver for a field in a city under siege, and why every believer since can rest the full weight of the soul on a promise not yet seen. When your circumstances say the cause is lost, remember Whom you are trusting: the God who made the heavens and the earth, the God of all flesh, for whom nothing is ever too hard. Learn the Word, buy the field, and give thanks.