Jeremiah 15:18
Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail? Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters that fail?
The verse is Jeremiah's anguished complaint that his pain feels perpetual and his wound incurable and refusing to be healed, asking whether God will prove to him like a deceiver and like a stream that runs dry. The complaint follows his joy in God's words and his isolation in carrying out God's work, and God answers it by calling him back to faithful service with promises of strength, protection, and deliverance.
In its own time it voices his weeping sorrow over Israel's desperate sinfulness and transgression within the awful denunciations against sin and touching appeals to return to God in Jeremiah 3 through 21. There he is almost utterly discouraged by the utter lack of response from the mass of the people to God's messages through him, yet still pleads with God for them. The prophecy to which the verse belongs represents the Advent messages and the final deliverance of the faithful.
Jeremiah 15:16-18 parallels the eating of the little book, where eagerly receiving God's word brings joy sweet as honey and then turns to bitterness and sorrow like wormwood and gall when at the appointed time in 1844 Christ did not come as expected and the integrity of the word seemed involved. In that fulfillment the verse gives voice to the earnest believers after the expected time of Christ's return passed, whose hopes were deeply wounded and whose lasting suffering felt unhealed while God's promises seemed to have failed. It expresses the lasting anguish of those who trusted God's word but faced painful disappointment, as if their suffering would not end and God's promise were a false hope or a stream run dry, leading the 1844 Adventists to ask whether the Lord would prove untrue even while their confidence in him remained unshaken and they expected further light. The mistake was in the event expected, not in the time, and the experience became a lasting trial of faith and patience in which enduring the digesting process proves that what was eaten was not unto death but to nourishment and support.