--- title: "Jeremiah 37 - Study King James Bible with maclarens expositions of holy scripture" description: "Read Jeremiah 37 with maclarens expositions of holy scripture commentary. 1 And king Zedekiah the son of Josiah reigned instead of Coniah the son of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made king in the land of Judah." image: "/_app/immutable/assets/missing.C7wGMEZ6.jpg" url: "https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37" --- [ Read](/kjv/jeremiah/37)[ Commentary](/study/jeremiah/37)[ Interlinear](/interlinear/jeremiah/37) Audio 1 And king Zedekiah the son of Josiah reigned instead of Coniah the son of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made king in the land of Judah. 2 But neither he, nor his servants, nor the people of the land, did hearken unto the words of the LORD, which he spake by the prophet Jeremiah.* 3 And Zedekiah the king sent Jehucal the son of Shelemiah and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest to the prophet Jeremiah, saying, Pray now unto the LORD our God for us. 4 Now Jeremiah came in and went out among the people: for they had not put him into prison. 5 Then Pharaoh’s army was come forth out of Egypt: and when the Chaldeans that besieged Jerusalem heard tidings of them, they departed from Jerusalem. 6 ¶ Then came the word of the LORD unto the prophet Jeremiah, saying, 7 Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; Thus shall ye say to the king of Judah, that sent you unto me to enquire of me; Behold, Pharaoh’s army, which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt into their own land. 8 And the Chaldeans shall come again, and fight against this city, and take it, and burn it with fire. 9 Thus saith the LORD; Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldeans shall surely depart from us: for they shall not depart.* 10 For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Chaldeans that fight against you, and there remained *but* wounded men among them, *yet* should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city with fire.* 11 ¶ And it came to pass, that when the army of the Chaldeans was broken up from Jerusalem for fear of Pharaoh’s army,* 12 Then Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem to go into the land of Benjamin, to separate himself thence in the midst of the people.* 13 And when he was in the gate of Benjamin, a captain of the ward *was* there, whose name *was* Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of Hananiah; and he took Jeremiah the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away to the Chaldeans. 14 Then said Jeremiah, *It is* false; I fall not away to the Chaldeans. But he hearkened not to him: so Irijah took Jeremiah, and brought him to the princes.* 15 Wherefore the princes were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him, and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan the scribe: for they had made that the prison. 16 ¶ When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cabins, and Jeremiah had remained there many days;* 17 Then Zedekiah the king sent, and took him out: and the king asked him secretly in his house, and said, Is there *any* word from the LORD? And Jeremiah said, There is: for, said he, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon. 18 Moreover Jeremiah said unto king Zedekiah, What have I offended against thee, or against thy servants, or against this people, that ye have put me in prison? 19 Where *are* now your prophets which prophesied unto you, saying, The king of Babylon shall not come against you, nor against this land? 20 Therefore hear now, I pray thee, O my lord the king: let my supplication, I pray thee, be accepted before thee; that thou cause me not to return to the house of Jonathan the scribe, lest I die there.* 21 Then Zedekiah the king commanded that they should commit Jeremiah into the court of the prison, and that they should give him daily a piece of bread out of the bakers’ street, until all the bread in the city were spent. Thus Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison. [Jeremiah 36](/study/jeremiah/36) [Jeremiah 38](/study/jeremiah/38) ## Commentary To verse 1 Jeremiah **ZEDEKIAH** **Jer_37:1** . Zedekiah was a small man on a great stage, a weakling set to face circumstances that would have taxed the strongest. He was a youth at his accession to the throne of a distracted kingdom, and if he had had any political insight he would have seen that his only chance was to adhere firmly to Babylon, and to repress the foolish aristocracy who hankered after alliance with the rival power of Egypt. He was mad enough to form an alliance with the latter, which was constructive rebellion against the former, and was strongly reprobated by Jeremiah. Swift vengeance followed; the country was ravaged, Zedekiah in his fright implored Jeremiah’s prayers and made faint efforts to follow his counsels. The pressure of invasion was lifted, and immediately he forgot his terrors and forsook the prophet. The Babylonian army was back next year, and the final investment of Jerusalem began. The siege lasted sixteen months, and during it, Zedekiah miserably vacillated between listening to the prophet’s counsels of surrender and the truculent nobles’ advice to resist to the last gasp. The miseries of the siege live for ever in the Book of Lamentations. Mothers boiled their children, nobles hunted on dunghills for food. Their delicate complexions were burned black, and famine turned them into living skeletons. Then, on a long summer day in July came the end. The king tried to skulk out by a covered way between the walls, his few attendants deserted him in his flight, he was caught at last down by the fords of the Jordan, carried prisoner to Nebuchadnezzar at Riblah away up in the north beyond Baalbec, and there saw his sons slain before his eyes, and, as soon as he had seen that last sight, was blinded, fettered, and carried off to Babylon, where he died. His career teaches us lessons which I may now seek to bring out. **I. A weak character is sure to become a wicked one.** **** Moral weakness and inability to resist strong pressure was the keynote of Zedekiah’s character. There were good things in him; he had kindly impulses, as was shown in his emancipation of the slaves at a crisis of Jerusalem’s fate. Left to himself, he would at least have treated Jeremiah kindly, and did rescue him from lingering death in the foul dungeon to which the ruffian nobility had consigned him, and he provided for his being at least saved from dying of starvation during the siege. He listened to him secretly, and would have accepted his counsel if he had dared. But he yielded to the stronger wills of the nobles, though he sometimes bitterly resented their domination, and complained that ‘the king is not he that can do anything against you.’ Like most weak men, he found that temptations to do wrong abounded more than visible inducements to do right, and he was afraid to do right, and fancied that he was compelled by the force of circumstances to do wrong. So he drifted and drifted, and at last was smashed to fragments on the rocks, as all men are who do not keep a strong hand on the helm and a steady eye on the compass. The winds are good servants but bad masters. If we do not coerce circumstances to carry us on the course which conscience has pricked out on the chart, they will wreck us. **II. A man may have a good deal of religion and yet not enough to mould his life.** **** Zedekiah listened to the prophet by fits and starts. He was eager to have the benefit of the prophet’s prayers. He liberated the slaves in Jerusalem. He came secretly to Jeremiah more than once to know if there were any message from God for him. Yet he had not faith enough nor submission enough to let the known will of God rule his conduct, whatever the nobles might say. Are there not many of us who have a belief in God and a general acquiescence in Christ’s precepts, who order our lives now and then by these, and yet have not come up to the point of full and final surrender? Alas, alas, for the multitudes who are ‘not far from the kingdom,’ but who never come near enough to be actually *in* it! To be not far from *is* to be out of, and to be out of is to be, like Zedekiah, blinded and captived and dead in prison at last. **III. God’s love is wonderfully patient.** **** Jeremiah was to Zedekiah the incarnation of God’s unwearied pleadings. During his whole reign, the prophet’s voice sounded in his ears, through all the clamours and cries of factions, and mingled at last with the shouts of the besiegers and the groans of the wounded, like the sustained note of some great organ, persisting through a babel of discordant noises. It was met with indifference, and it sounded on. It provoked angry antagonism and still it spoke. Violence was used to stifle it in vain. And it was not only Jeremiah’s courageous pertinacity that spoke through that persistent voice, but God’s unwearied love, which being rejected is not driven away, being neglected becomes more beseeching, ‘is not easily provoked ‘to cease its efforts, but ‘beareth all’ despite, and hopeth for softened hearts till the last moment before doom falls. That patient love pleads with each of us as persistently as Jeremiah did with Zedekiah. **IV. The long-delayed judgment falls at last.** **** With infinite reluctance the divine love had to do what God Himself has called ‘His strange work.’ Divine Justice travels slowly, but arrives at last. Her foot is ‘leaden’ both in regard to its tardiness and its weight. There is no ground in the long postponement of retribution for the fond dream that it will never come, though men lull themselves to sleep with that lie. ‘Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is thoroughly set in them to do evil.’ But the sentence will be executed. The pleading love, which has for many returning autumns spared the barren tree and sought to make it fit to bear fruit, does not prevent the owner saying at last to his servant with the axe in his hand, ‘Now! thou shalt cut it down.’ ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#website","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com","name":"Real Bible Believers","description":"RBB","publisher":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#/schema/person/e966585dde703268e7f6ae890ea98509"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/search?q={search_term_string}","query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37#primaryimage","inLanguage":"en-US","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/_app/immutable/assets/missing.C7wGMEZ6.jpg","contentUrl":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/_app/immutable/assets/missing.C7wGMEZ6.jpg","width":672,"height":448,"caption":"Real Bible Believers"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37#webpage","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37","name":"Jeremiah 37 - Study King James Bible with maclarens expositions of holy scripture","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37#primaryimage"},"author":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#/schema/person/e966585dde703268e7f6ae890ea98509"},"description":"Read Jeremiah 37 with maclarens expositions of holy scripture commentary. 1 And king Zedekiah the son of Josiah reigned instead of Coniah the son of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made king in the land of Judah.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/","name":"Home"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study","name":"Study Bible"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture","name":"maclarens expositions of holy scripture"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"item":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah","name":"Jeremiah"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":5,"item":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/study/maclarens-expositions-of-holy-scripture/jeremiah/37","name":"37"}}]},{"@type":["Person","Organization"],"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#/schema/person/e966585dde703268e7f6ae890ea98509","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#personlogo","inLanguage":"en-US","url":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/android-chrome-512x512.png","contentUrl":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/android-chrome-512x512.png","width":512,"height":512},"logo":{"@id":"https://realbiblebelievers.com/#personlogo"},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/RBiblebeliever","https://www.facebook.com/RBibleBelievers"]}]} ```