Jeremiah 7:20, commentary and pictures

The declaration is that divine anger and fury would be poured out upon this place — Jerusalem and the cities of Judah and the land itself — falling upon man and upon beast and upon the trees of the field and upon the crops and fruit of the ground, kindling a burning that shall not be quenched. The judgment reaches people and animals and trees and the produce of the land together, with nothing withdrawn from its consuming course.

The cause was Judah's idolatry and the abominations of Tophet, with treachery and shamelessness and false idolatrous worship and feasts, in wilful rebellion and disobedience and refusal to turn back to God despite the prophets' calls. Mere outward temple worship was of no avail while the people remained ungodly, for incense and burnt offerings and sacrifices presented with a wrong state of heart are no offerings at all. The spirit in which an act is done gives it its character as obedience or disobedience, and since a wrong heart often cannot be seen except as it appears in other acts, those other acts are brought up to show the character of the offerings. The utterance belongs to Jeremiah's denunciations of sin and warnings to the people, revealing his sorrow over their transgression and his appeals for them to return to God, which the people largely ignored.

The threatened punishment would soon come by Babylon as the swift avenger, bringing the downfall of Judah as an independent nation into captivity and forced exile, with Zion left in utter ruin. Unquenchable does not mean everlasting, but fire sent by God that no man can quench or put out or stop before it completes its work, burning as long as there is material to feed upon and going out by itself when the material is devoured, not burning forever after its work is done. Those who held the judgment to burn without end so expressed its unsparing completeness. In that sense the verse proves that the unquenchable fire of Isaiah 66:24 and Mark 9:43-48 symbolizes the complete destruction of the wicked in the second death, which is the wages of sin.

The verse does not prove the law to be one thing and sacrifices another thing, nor does it divide the Mosaic code into two separate laws. The Judean youths saw their nation's captivity and exile as the consequence of this evil sowing, and it warned Daniel and his companions against joining Babylon's idolatry.