Jeremiah 5:12, commentary and pictures

The people belied the Lord and cast off His warning, declaring that He was not speaking and that no calamity would fall upon them, neither warfare nor hunger. Both the common people and their rulers joined in this denial, refusing the warnings sent through His prophets and insisting that disaster would not come. In that setting the prophets were dismissed as having no true word from God in them, and their messages were treated as powerless, empty wind. Against that contempt God declared that His own words in the prophet's mouth would be made as fire, and the unbelieving people as wood to be consumed by it.

Their unbelief and refusal to heed instruction brought the destruction of Jerusalem and the carrying away of the people into captivity. To deny the threatened judgments of God does not turn them aside or avert their fulfillment. The corruption and ripening judgment pictured here belong also to later scenes of the same character, where the same denial and moral decay reappear.

The verse portrays also the church in the act of denying the Lord and rejecting His covenant claim upon her, saying in effect that He is not her Lord. She pleads that entire consecration to Him is impossible, even while His grace and presence and cleansing are freely offered to make it possible. By that plea she treats her solemn pledge to Him as a vow meant to be broken.