Before You Were Born I Knew You

About a hundred years after Isaiah, in a town called Anathoth, an hour's walk from Jerusalem, there lived a priest's son named Jeremiah.

Judah had a good king in those days. Josiah had been crowned when he was eight years old. (That is a whole country run by someone who still had some of his baby teeth.) Now Josiah was grown, and in the thirteenth year of his reign, the LORD spoke to young Jeremiah.

"Jeremiah," God said. "Before I made you inside your mother, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart for myself. I have chosen you to be my prophet to the nations."

(A prophet is God's messenger. He does not make up the message. He says what God tells him to say.)

Jeremiah's knees went wobbly. The nations! Not only Anathoth, not only Jerusalem, but faraway countries with kings and armies and chariots.

"Oh no, Lord GOD!" he cried. "I don't know how to speak. I'm only a boy!"

Jeremiah was not the first person to try that excuse. Moses had tried it at the burning bush, when he told God he was no good with words. (It had not worked for Moses either.)

"Do not say, 'I'm only a boy,'" the LORD answered. "You will go to everyone I send you to. You will say whatever I tell you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you, and I will rescue you."

Then the LORD reached out his hand and touched Jeremiah's mouth.

"There," God said. "I have put my words in your mouth. Today I am giving you a job over nations and kingdoms: to pull up and to tear down, to wreck and to knock over, to build and to plant."

That was six jobs, and four of them were for knocking things down. Even with a good king, many of God's people had turned away from him to bow down to idols, and much of what they had built would have to come down first. The building and the planting God was keeping for later.

Then God asked, "What can you see, Jeremiah?"

Jeremiah looked. "A branch from an almond tree."

"You have seen well," said the LORD, "for I am watching over my word to make it happen."

(In Jeremiah's language, the word for almond tree sounds almost like the word for watching. Every year the almond was the first tree to wake up and bloom, while it was still nearly winter, so the branch was a promise: God was wide awake.)

So the boy who said he could not speak became God's spokesman for more than forty years. People laughed at him. A priest had him beaten and locked his feet in wooden stocks. Once his enemies lowered him into a deep well, and he sank into the mud at the bottom. Jeremiah cried over his people often, and still most of them would not listen.

But Jeremiah could only carry God's words. He could not make anyone listen. The tearing down came, just as God had said, when Babylon's army broke through Jerusalem's walls. The building and the planting were still waiting.

Babylon gave way to Persia, and Persia to Greece, and Greece to Rome. Then an angel came to a young woman named Mary and told her the name of her son before he was born. God had known this child forever. Nobody ever needed to touch his lips, because every word he spoke came straight from his Father. He touched the tongue of a man who could not hear and could hardly talk, and the man spoke clearly. He told his frightened friends, "Do not be afraid." And when he sent his friends out to every nation to build and to plant, he said, "I am with you always."

The almond branch had been right. God had been wide awake all along, watching over his word, and now he had come himself, as Jesus.