The message has different content, as we will see in a moment. It was delivered about five years after the first, in the eighteenth year of King Josiah.
Now we want to focus on the second message of the prophet to the nation. So the tragedy of this nation was that it had begun to lose its sense of God, and thus had begun to lose its sense of self. That reflects the wisdom of the great commandment Jesus gave us: "Love your neighbor as yourself." If you have no sense of who you are as a person, then you will not look at any one else as a person, either. And if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love your neighbor. When you lose God, you no longer can love yourself. This is always the consequence of a heart which rejects or turns from the living God. They began to dislike and hate themselves. They began to act like animals and to think of themselves in that way. When these people turned from the living fountain of God they became like animals, Jeremiah said.
That is the inevitable tragedy which occurs in any life. When someone starts turning from God he also loses himself.
The tragedy is that when people forsake God they lose the sense of their own worth. That is why this book of Jeremiah, though written thousands of years ago, is still as relevant and up-to-date and pertinent to our day as it was when first written. The tragedy of Judah is the tragedy of people today. In our last study we saw that the prophet's first message to Judah had to do with God's revelation of the tragic condition of the nation, and the way of return yet open to them. We turn this morning to the second message in Jeremiah's ministry to Judah, just before their final exile into the land of Babylon at the hand of king Nebuchadnezzar.
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