Were Jeremiahs complaints to God justified?

Were Jeremiahs complaints to God justified?

The question posed in the Book of Jeremiah is: what is the will of God? That in itself is the question of theodicy. However Jeremiah's life characterized by suffering raise the question on a directly personal basis. His complaints against God, in their intensity can only be compared to those of Job.

Jeremiah was a priest and a prophet; his opponents were priests and 'prophets' who chose to be ignore to his preaching. In the early stages of his career he was protected by the Princes; however when he favored peace with what he called God's servant, Nebuchadnezzar, he was accused of treason.

Jeremiah was born in Anatoth a village located north of Jerusalem. His is the first instance within the classical prophets of a messenger of God whose life and being bear equal weight to his message. (That holds equally true of Moses, but his status exceeds that of a classical prophet.) Jeremiah life in fact fuses with his message; his life in permeated by Faith alternated by Doubt. He experiences personal insult and is grieved by the people's sins. He craves the friendship and goodwill of his neighbors, yet he cannot disregard the evil perpetrated by them. The evil he decries so eloquently focuses on disobedience to basic social ethics; failure to protect the poor, the orphans and widows. He is preoccupied and obsessed with social justice. He is not primarily troubled by the evil government practices (as was the case of Elijah and Amos) but rather the people themselves who have become infected with evil - a social disease of individuals ho corrupted themselves and in turn the government . The reforms instructed by Josiah had either failed to make the people 'holy' being inherently insufficient and/or seem to have been rejected by Josiah's successors.

We are told that God spoke to Jeremiah in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah (1:2) i.e. 627BCE. Most scholars believe Jeremiah to have been a mere youth at the time of his call. In as much as Josiah began his renewal in 622, one can assume the king to have been devoted to renewal and it would be equally logical for his prophet equally devoted to renewal. The question which begs to be answered is: why does Jeremiah fail to praise or even comment on Josiah's renewal call? No positive comments appear regarding Josiah; in fact one finds only criticism of the Temple (7:1-15 and 26:1-24). Several explanations can be postulated: Jeremiah as a messenger of God may have been a perfectionist, hence nothing was good enough. Alternatively the renewal may have been purely ritualistic hence it would have failed to affect a meaningful change in the people's heart. While these explanations are somewhat plausible it appears that the answer lies in the numbers. Jeremiah's ministry took place after the reign of Josiah.King during Jeremiah's lifetime was Josiah's son Jehoiakim. Josiah's reforms remain unmentioned because they had already been rejected by his ...