- Jeremiah 9 BSB ↗
At a school reunion the talk soon turns to what everyone has become. Who is a doctor, who went abroad, whose son got into which college, whose house has how many floors. Nobody means harm; it is simply how we measure a life. Near the end of Jeremiah 9 comes a quiet demolition of that whole scoreboard. Let not the wise boast of wisdom, the strong of strength, or the rich of riches. If you must boast, boast that you know the LORD — who acts with steadfast love, justice and righteousness on the earth, and delights in these. It is a startling line to find in a chapter full of tears, and that is exactly why it lands.
Where it sits in the story: Act 3, Israel, in its last years. The collection around the temple sermon (Jeremiah 7–10) continues. Here the weeping prophet appears most clearly, and the charge widens from idolatry to the collapse of trust between neighbours. Paul will later take up 9:24 twice — let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord (1 Corinthians 1:31; 2 Corinthians 10:17) — showing how this chapter's scale of values carried into the church.
What this chapter is doing: To show what disaster looks like before the enemy arrives — a society rotting from lies — to call the community to lament rather than denial, and to set out what a person may truly take pride in.
- 9:1–9 — Oh that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears! (In Hebrew Bibles this verse closes chapter 8.) Jeremiah longs for a desert lodging, far from a people whose tongues are bent like bows. Neighbour deceives neighbour, and every brother acts like a Jacob, a supplanter. Shall I not punish such a nation?
- 9:10–16 — The prophet weeps for the mountains and pastures now silent — no cattle lowing, no birds. Jerusalem will be a heap of ruins, a haunt of jackals. Why? Because they abandoned God's law and followed the Baals as their ancestors taught them. They will be scattered among the nations.
- 9:17–22 — Call for the mourning women, the skilled wailers, and let them teach their daughters dirges. Death has climbed in through the windows and entered the palaces; bodies lie like dung on the open field, like sheaves behind the reaper with no one to gather them.
- 9:23–26 — Then the famous turn: not wisdom, strength or riches, but knowing the LORD, who practises steadfast love, justice and righteousness, is the boast worth making. The chapter closes with a warning that outward circumcision means nothing without a changed heart — for Egypt, Edom, Ammon, Moab and Judah alike.
Key verse: Jeremiah 9:24 · So what: Jeremiah refuses to hurry past grief; he calls in the mourners and makes lament a skill worth teaching. Then he redraws the measure of a life: not what you know, can do or own, but whether you know a God who loves faithfully and acts justly — and whether that shapes you. For anyone tired of competing on the reunion scoreboard, it is a quietly freeing word.