In and Out of the Cistern

“So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern… letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud.” – Jeremiah 38:6

I don’t know about you, but it feels painful at times to read about the life of Jeremiah. There’s no greater proof, I suppose, that following God can mean suffering. In this, Jeremiah points to and fleshes out the life of Jesus himself. F. B. Meyer writes, “Jeremiah has always a fascination to Christian hearts because of the close similarity that exists between his life and that of Jesus Christ. Each of them was ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’; each came to his own, and his own received him not; each passed through hours of rejection, desolation, and forsakenness. And in Jeremiah we may see beaten out into detail, experiences which, in our Lord, are but lightly touched on by the evangelists.”

We see in these chapters the details of Jeremiah’s prophetic word being rejected by his own people. We witness the stratagems of murderers who did not want Jeremiah’s blood directly on their hands. We see the vicissitudes and cowardice of a king who, like Pilate, sat back and let it happen. We see in the life of both Jeremiah and Jesus the words of Stephen: “which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute?” (Acts 7:52). As Jeremiah is lowered into the cistern, we hear words from Psalm 69: “I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold… Deliver me from sinking in the mire… Let not… the pit close its mouth over me” (69:2, 14-15)

But God rescues his prophet. In Jeremiah’s case, salvation came from a nobody: an Ethiopian foreigner who was a slave and likely emasculated. We may not even know his real name: “Ebed-melech” simply means “servant of the king.” This nobody, despite majority opposition from those with greater power, publicly confronts the king and rescues Jeremiah. Not only that, he cares for his body, finding linens and rags to pad Jeremiah’s armpits as he was lifted up, not unlike Joseph of Arimathea, who cared for Jesus’ body by wrapping it in linens. God too rescued his son, by raising him from the pit of death to life. Because of this, we who also suffer can do so with the hope of new life. We can have courage like Ebed-melech to act against injustice. We can learn to care for our bodies and be kind to others. We can cry out in prayer and eventually come to say, “you who seek God, let your hearts revive. For the Lord hears the needy… Let heaven and earth praise him” (69:32-34).