When the Heavens Are Brass Text: Jeremiah 14:1-6
Introduction: The Language of Judgment
We live in a thoroughly sentimentalized age. When disaster strikes, whether it be a hurricane, a pandemic, or a drought, our first and only instinct is to speak in the therapeutic language of empathy and the technical language of meteorology or epidemiology. We talk about atmospheric pressure, viral loads, and economic consequences. We organize relief efforts and praise first responders. All of this has its place, but it is a place that is decidedly downstream. Our secular culture is utterly incapable of asking the most important question, the ultimate question: what does it mean? What is God saying?
To modern man, a drought is simply a meteorological event, an unfortunate and random convergence of weather patterns. To the biblical man, a drought is a sermon preached in the universal language of thirst. It is a covenantal lawsuit. It is God speaking, and He is not mumbling. When God withholds the rain, He is reminding a nation that He is the one who gives it. He is turning off the spigot to get the attention of the people who have forgotten who owns the water company.
The prophet Jeremiah is summoned here not as a weather forecaster but as a court reporter. He is tasked with taking down the divine indictment against the covenant-breaking people of Judah. What we are about to read is not Jeremiah's lament, though he is a weeping prophet. It is the word of Yahweh concerning the drought. This is God's commentary on the empty cisterns and the cracked earth. And we must have ears to hear, because God still speaks this way. He speaks through blessing, and He speaks through judgment. And when a people has become deaf to the language of blessing, He begins to shout in the language of judgment.
This passage is a portrait of a society unravelling from the top down, from the nobles to the farmers to the very beasts of the field. And it is unravelling because it has detached itself from the central, life-giving reality of the covenant God. They have sown the wind of idolatry, and they are now reaping the whirlwind of a cloudless sky.
The Text
That which came as the word of Yahweh to Jeremiah in regard to the drought:
"Judah mourns, And her gates languish; They sit on the ground in mourning, And the outcry of Jerusalem has gone up.
Their mighty ones have sent their underlings for water; They have come to the trenches and found no water. They have returned with their vessels empty; They have been put to shame and dishonored, And they cover their heads.
Because the ground is dismayed, For there has been no rain on the land, The farmers have been put to shame; They have covered their heads.
For even the doe in the field has given birth only to forsake her young Because there is no grass.
The wild donkeys stand on the bare heights; They pant for air like jackals; Their eyes fail For there is no vegetation."
(Jeremiah 14:1-6 LSB)
The Divine Author of the Calamity (v. 1)
We begin with the source of this message.
"That which came as the word of Yahweh to Jeremiah in regard to the drought:" (Jeremiah 14:1)
The first thing we must establish is the authority behind this analysis. This is not Jeremiah's hot take on the agricultural crisis. This is not an editorial in the Jerusalem Post. This is the word of Yahweh. The drought itself is a divine utterance, and Jeremiah is simply the inspired interpreter. God is both the author of the calamity and the author of the commentary on the calamity.
This is the great stumbling block for moderns. We want to bifurcate the world. We want God to be in charge of the spiritual, the internal, the "religious" things. We want to leave the weather, the economy, and politics to the experts. But the God of the Bible is not a God of the gaps; He is the God of everything. He is the one who "sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matt. 5:45). And by implication, He is the one who withholds it. This is a direct fulfillment of the covenant curses laid out with stark clarity in Deuteronomy. "The heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you shall be iron. Yahweh will make the rain of your land powder and dust" (Deut. 28:23-24). This drought is not bad luck; it is God keeping His promise.
If we do not start here, with the sovereign Word of God as the ultimate explanation for reality, then all our other explanations will be nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We will blame climate change, or the government, or our political enemies, but we will never look up. We will never ask the one question that matters: Lord, what are you saying to us?
The Collapse of the Public Square (v. 2)
The description of the judgment begins with its corporate and public nature.
"Judah mourns, And her gates languish; They sit on the ground in mourning, And the outcry of Jerusalem has gone up." (Jeremiah 14:2 LSB)
This is not a private sorrow. The entire nation, "Judah," mourns. The center of public life, "her gates," languishes. In the ancient world, the gates of the city were the hub of commerce, law, and social interaction. It was the courthouse, the stock exchange, and the city council all in one. For the gates to languish means that the lifeblood of the nation is drying up. Business has ceased, justice is forgotten, and the normal, cheerful hum of a healthy society has been replaced by a corporate cry of anguish.
They "sit on the ground in mourning," a posture of deep humiliation and grief. This is a society brought to its knees, not in repentance, but in despair. The "outcry of Jerusalem," the capital, has gone up. But as we will see later in the chapter, it is a cry of pain, not a cry of penitence. And there is a universe of difference between the two.
This is a picture of a nation whose public square has become hollowed out because it has forsaken the God who establishes public order. When a nation collectively turns its back on God, its public life begins to rot from the inside out. The institutions become brittle, the commerce becomes corrupt, and the joy evaporates, replaced by a pervasive sense of mourning for something that has been lost, even if no one can quite name what it is.
The Humiliation of Human Strength (v. 3-4)
The judgment is no respecter of persons; it strikes both the powerful and the foundational workers of the land.
"Their mighty ones have sent their underlings for water... They have returned with their vessels empty; They have been put to shame and dishonored... Because the ground is dismayed... The farmers have been put to shame..." (Jeremiah 14:3-4 LSB)
Here we see the social order in action, but it is an order of futility. The "mighty ones," the nobles, the men of influence, still have servants to command. But their authority is useless. They can send their underlings, but they cannot make it rain. They come to the cisterns, the great public works projects designed to store water, and they find nothing. All their human ingenuity, all their wealth, all their power, results in empty jars.
The result is "shame and dishonor." This is a public humiliation. Their best-laid plans have failed. Their resources have proven inadequate. They cover their heads in grief, a sign of utter disgrace. At the same time, the "farmers," the backbone of the agrarian economy, are also put to shame. Their hard work, their knowledge of the land, their sweat and toil, have produced nothing. The ground itself is "dismayed," a powerful personification of land that is cracked, broken, and defeated.
This is what happens when a civilization relies on its own strength. It is what happens when we trust in our technology, our economy, our political leaders, or our own hard work to save us. God has a way of showing us that our best efforts, apart from His blessing, are nothing more than a surefire recipe for empty jars and public shame. He is teaching Judah, and us, that man does not live by bread alone, or by water alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And right now, the word proceeding from His mouth is "drought."
The Unraveling of the Created Order (v. 5-6)
The final two verses of our text are perhaps the most terrifying, for they show that the consequences of human sin are not limited to human society. The judgment spills out and infects the natural world.
"For even the doe in the field has given birth only to forsake her young Because there is no grass. The wild donkeys stand on the bare heights; They pant for air like jackals; Their eyes fail For there is no vegetation." (Jeremiah 14:5-6 LSB)
This is a picture of creation coming apart at the seams. A doe is the very image of gentle, fierce maternal instinct. For a mother deer to abandon her newborn fawn is a sign that the most basic, hard-wired impulses of the created order are breaking down. It is an unnatural horror. This is not the sentimental world of Disney, where nature is a benevolent force. This is the world under the curse of man's sin, groaning and travailing in pain (Romans 8:22).
The wild donkeys, animals known for their incredible hardiness and ability to survive in the wilderness, are now desperate. They stand on the bare heights, not grazing, but panting for air like predators after a chase. Their eyes are failing. They are going blind from starvation. This is a comprehensive, systemic collapse. When man, who was appointed as God's vice-regent over creation, breaks covenant with God, the entire creation under his dominion suffers the consequences. The shockwaves of our rebellion are felt throughout the cosmos.
Broken Cisterns and Living Water
This entire passage is a detailed illustration of what Jeremiah had already diagnosed earlier in his ministry. "For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:13).
The drought is the physical manifestation of a spiritual reality. Judah had forsaken the fountain of living waters, Yahweh Himself. They had turned to the idols of the surrounding nations, to political alliances, and to their own strength. They had spent generations hewing out their own cisterns, their own religious systems, their own sources of security. And now, in the day of trouble, they find that their cisterns are broken. They hold no water. Their vessels are empty. Their mouths are parched. Their world is dying of thirst.
And so is ours. Our world is filled with sophisticated, high-tech, broken cisterns. We hew them out of materialism, sexual license, political ideologies, and self-help psychologies. And we are a people dying of thirst. We see the languishing gates in our civic discourse. We see the shame of our mighty ones in their failed policies. We see the breakdown of the natural family, an abandonment of the young that makes the doe in the field look faithful by comparison.
The outcry of Jerusalem has gone up. But it is not a cry for God. It is a cry for relief, a cry for a different politician, a cry for a new program. It is the panting of the wild donkey, not the prayer of a penitent child.
The only answer to the sermon of the drought is to return to the fountain of living waters. The shame and dishonor that Judah experienced is the very shame and dishonor that the Lord Jesus Christ took upon Himself when He hung upon a cross. On that cross, He looked out upon a spiritually desiccated world and cried out, "I thirst" (John 19:28). He endured the ultimate drought of God's presence so that He could become for us a fountain of living water.
He is the one who stood up in the temple on the last day of the feast and cried out, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water'" (John 7:37-38). The answer to the empty cisterns of Jeremiah 14 is the overflowing life of Jesus Christ. The only sane response to the judgment of God is to flee to the grace of God, to abandon our broken cisterns, and to drink deeply from the one who alone can satisfy our thirst.