Jeremiah 11:23
And there shall be no remnant of them: for I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation. And there shall be no remnant of them: for I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation.
The verse pronounces certain punishment on the men of Anathoth for threatening Jeremiah, to fall in the year of visitation when the young men die by the sword and the sons and daughters die by famine until no remnant remains. The denunciation is awful against sin yet spoken in sorrow of heart over transgression, joined with a touching appeal to return to God that the mass of the people utterly fail to answer. The verse belongs to a judgment for breaking the covenant made when God brought His people out of Egypt; by breaking the Lord's covenant Israel forfeited its blessings so that God justly finds fault with them.
The judgment is expressed as branches being cut off from the olive tree representing Abraham's family and Israel. Those cut off can be grafted in again under the new covenant. The announcement came a few years before the promise of the new covenant, about 600 years before the birth of Christ and thus centuries before Christ, to make place for a second covenant established upon better promises. By Jeremiah's time the first covenant had become old and was ready to vanish away, until Christ would take away the first to establish the second.
The verse shows that faithful warning of presumptuous professors of religion brings hatred, persecution, and threats of death to silence the testimony, even when the reprover is harmless and gentle as a lamb, patient and laborious, without guile, weeping and praying and spending himself for their good. Persecutors seek to destroy their reprovers so they will no longer remember or be tormented by faithful testimony, with the same spirit as those who crucified Christ; in every age ungodly priests are ringleaders in the work, so that a man's foes are those of his own household and a prophet is without honor in his own country. The verse shows the Lord knows His servants, protects them against the devices of persecutors, pleads their cause, and executes vengeance on their enemies.
It comforts sufferers for well-doing and not for evil-doing to appeal to Him as the heart-searching and righteous Judge and commit their cause to Him, while watching their spirit so as not to be overcome with evil but by patient continuance in praying for enemies and showing them kindness to overcome evil with good.