NOTES for Jer 32:1-25
The prophets often prophesied not only in words but also through actions. Quite often, such actions looked strange, to say the least, in the eyes of those around them. The purchase of a plot of land in a besieged city seemed just such an act. It was obvious to everyone that the city was doomed, although people preferred not to say so aloud. Yet Jeremiah makes this purchase at God's direction precisely as a prophetic act. In the context of everything the prophet had said about the people and their future, the meaning of this step was perfectly clear: Jeremiah was thereby confirming once again that the country and the people did have a future, though not at all the future for which many in the besieged city hoped in defiance of the circumstances.
They hoped for a miracle like the one that had occurred nearly a century and a half earlier during the Assyrian siege, when the city was saved by God's miraculous intervention. Jeremiah said directly that no such miracle was to be expected. This is understandable: during that earlier siege the whole city prayed, fasted, and repented, whereas now, when the Babylonian army had approached the walls, nothing of the kind was happening.
Hope for a miracle remained, but for some reason the people were convinced it would happen by itself, without any effort on their part. This confidence rested partly on a peculiar national and religious self-assurance. The inhabitants knew that Jerusalem was God's city and that it contained the only Temple of Yahweh on earth. Therefore, they reasoned, they could sleep peacefully: surely the Lord would not allow His house to be profaned and destroyed. Jeremiah did not advise the people of Jerusalem to hope that God would defend their sins for the sake of His house. The city was doomed, and the prophet had no intention of concealing this from his fellow citizens.
Jeremiah knew something else as well: the people did, nevertheless, have a future. But they had to seek it not in the past, clinging to a way of life that was passing away and had already been rejected by God, but in the future—a future that still had to be created. It had to be created above all by understanding what had happened, repenting of the sins committed, and turning anew to God, whom the people had in fact abandoned while formally preserving their fidelity to Him. Then land would once again be bought and sold in Jerusalem. The land would again be entrusted to the people for whom God had intended it, but not before those people became truly God's—not in word, but in deed.