UST JER Chapter 20

◄ JER 20 ► ║ ═ ©

20 Pashhur, whose father was Immer, was a priest and he was the chief supervisor in Yahweh’s temple. He heard Jeremiah prophesying these things. 2 So Pashhur beat me, Jeremiah, the prophet, and then put me in the stocks at the Upper Benjamin Gate in Yahweh’s temple. 3 The next day, Pashhur released me, Jeremiah from the stocks. Then I, Jeremiah said to him, “Yahweh is not going to call you Pashhur anymore. Instead, he is going to call you Terror on Every Side.

4 Yahweh will call you this because this is what he says regarding you: ‘Pay attention! I am going to make you a source of terror to yourself and to all your friends. You will watch as your enemies kill your friends with swords. I will let the king of Babylon conquer all the people of Judah. His soldiers will take some of them to Babylon, and they will kill others with swords. 5 I will enable their soldiers to take away everything valuable from this city—all its wealth, all the goods people worked hard to produce, and all its precious things—along with all the treasures that belonged to the kings of Judah. The enemies will plunder everything and carry it to Babylon. 6 And as for you, Pashhur, they will take you and everyone in your household, as captives to Babylon. You will die there, and people will bury you there—they will bury you and all your friends there, the ones you gave false prophecies to.’ ”

7 Then I, Jeremiah, said, “Yahweh, you persuaded me to become your prophet,

and I let you persuade me.

You were stronger than I was,

and you won.

Now people ridicule me throughout the day;

everyone makes fun of me.

8 Whenever I speak your messages, I shout, ‘Yahweh is going to cause you to experience violence and destruction!’

So because I tell people your messages,

they insult me throughout the day.

9 Sometimes I think to myself, “I will stop mentioning Yahweh,

and I will stop speaking messages from him.”

However, when I try to remain silent, his message became like a fire in my inner being,

that I cannot hold back.

I grow weary of trying to contain it,

and I cannot hold back from speaking Yahweh’s messages).

10 I hear many people whispering about me,

saying, “He is the man who proclaims that there will be things that cause us to be terrified all around us! We must tell the authorities what he is saying!”

All the people who pretended to be my friends

are watching for me to make a mistake.

They say, ‘Maybe we can trick him into saying something wrong,

and then we can defeat him and get our revenge on him.’

11 However, Yahweh is with me, and he defends me powerfully.

So those who persecute me will stumble and will not defeat me.

They will feel very ashamed because they did not succeed,

and no one will ever forget how God disgraced them.

12 Yahweh, the commander of the heavenly armies,

you examine those who do what is right.

You know what everyone thinks and what motivates them.

Allow me to see you punish those people who want to harm me,

because I have told you about my case and asked you to help me.”

13 Sing to Yahweh!

Praise Yahweh!

Because he rescues needy people

from the power of wicked people.

14 I curse the day my mother gave birth to me!

May no one celebrate that day.

15 As for the man who brought the news to my father,

and made him very happy by saying,

“Your wife has given birth to a baby boy”,

I wish someone would curse that man.

16 May Yahweh destroy that man as he did to the cities he destroyed in the past, without acting mercifully toward them.

May that man hear people crying out in distress in the morning

and hear enemy soldiers shout their battle cries at noon.

17 I say this because he did not kill me before I came out of my mother’s womb.

If he had, I would have died inside my mother

and never come out.

18 I wish that I had not come out of my mother’s womb

so that I would not have to experience all these difficult things that cause me to feel so miserable,

and so that I would not come to the end of my life feeling disgraced.