Jeremiah 4:16, commentary and pictures

In its setting the verse belongs to the address to Israel and Jerusalem before the chapter turns to scenes of greater, last-day desolation. It stands as an awful denunciation of sin spoken in sorrow of heart over transgression, making a most touching appeal to return to God which the mass of the people meet with utter lack of response. The coming of watchers from a far country and giving out their voice against the cities of Judah means that evil forces have broken up the foundations of stable government and have entrenched themselves in the large cities. Those cities have become Sodom-like cesspools of prostitution, vice and widespread disease.

Union of God's church with the world is fornication and adultery against God. His people who so unite with the world and reject His message face judgment. The warning is not limited to old Jerusalem and the Jewish nation before Christ, for Zion and Jerusalem represent the church in all ages, so it applies to the time just before the second coming of Christ. It predicts the great coming war of Armageddon and warns of the time just before the day of the Lord when all the nations of the earth shall be prepared for battle. Its announcement of hostile forces against Jerusalem and Judah points to the wider gathering of nations for judgment.

The naval and military buildup urged as a guarantee of peace fulfills this warning, and carried to its end means the destruction of earthly kingdoms. The outcome it threatens is certain divine action with the sound of the trumpet and alarm of war, destruction upon destruction, the whole land laid waste, the fruitful field become a wilderness, and every city forsaken and broken down at the presence of Jehovah and before His fierce anger. The earth mourns and the heavens are black because He has spoken, purposed, and will not repent nor turn back. That breaking down of all the cities means wickedness in all the cities becomes so appalling as to call for the personal visitation of Jehovah for their destruction, and His personal visitation to destroy evil is at the end of time.

The desolation of Judah pictures the earth after Christ's coming, when the wicked have been slain and no people remain. It shows the awful confusion and trouble that will come upon the earth when people are no longer worthy of God's favor, before God creates new heavens and a new earth. What the ancient prophets wrote is for admonition in this very time upon whom the ends of the ages are come. The descriptions of gasping before murderers and assembling in troops at harlots' houses are literally fulfilled by widespread prostitution and vice in modern cities, showing that corruptions must very soon call for the presence of Jehovah to visit them with destruction.