NOTES for Jer 10:1-25
The passion of the prophet's preaching largely follows from the contrast between truth and falsehood, which touch the very heart of a person. This is not about preferring one religion or system of views and values over another, or choosing between one “god” and another. Beside the absolute reality of the God of Israel, every religious alternative proves not simply false but utterly absurd. In our days of religious tolerance, when normal people (thank God!) do not kill one another for belonging to different faiths, it can be difficult for us to understand this passion. We may say that the prophet oversimplifies the beliefs of the “pagans,” that of course they did not consider a wooden idol to be the deity itself but only its image, and so forth... But the point is that the prophet was least of all concerned with a scholarly analysis of one set of religious ideas or another. He was torn apart by the contradiction between the voice of Truth speaking within him—the Truth that had become the most objective reality for him—and the emptiness and horror of worshiping anything other than God: between truth and falsehood.