Jeremiah’s Call (Ch. 1). 

        We have already referred to the call itself, but the accom­panying “visions “need closer attention. We use the inverted commas because it is virtually certain that God spoke to him through two things he will have seen many a time before.

        His eye fell on a branch of waker (i.e. almond), which had already awakened to the first breath of the coming spring and burst into blossom although the other trees seemed still wrapped in their winter sleep. Then the voice of God told him that even so the purposes of God were on the verge of waking into fulfilment, for He was waking over them (see R.V. mg. for word-play). Much that follows in Jeremiah is only under­standable as we grasp that he was dominated by the know­ledge that the judgment of God would break forth in his own day.

        Then as he looked at the clouds, they seemed to take the form of a huge, boiling cauldron leaning over from the north, ready to discharge its contents over Judali and Jerusalem. The stress does not lie primarily on the north, for the geography of Palestine demanded that invasion must come from the north, unless, indeed, it came from Egypt. Rather it is the supplementing of the former message by its stress that the instruments of God’s doom were even then being prepared to be poured out as the hot anger of God over the land.