“To whom the word of the LORD came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign.”
My Notes
What Does Jeremiah 1:2 Mean?
"To whom the word of the LORD came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign." Jeremiah's prophetic ministry begins during the reign of Judah's last great reformer — Josiah — in approximately 627 BC. Jeremiah was likely a teenager or young man when the call came. The thirteenth year of Josiah's reign places Jeremiah's calling five years before Josiah's discovery of the Book of the Law (622 BC) and the great reformation that followed.
The timing is significant: God calls Jeremiah during reform, not during crisis. The prophet will spend his entire career watching the reformation fail, the nation backslide, and the Babylonian destruction approach. His ministry begins in hope and ends in exile.
Reflection Questions
- 1.When did God's word first 'come' to you — and what was the context?
- 2.How does Jeremiah's calling during a hopeful season prepare you for the possibility that your assignment will be harder than the calling felt?
- 3.What does forty years of faithful but seemingly fruitless ministry teach about how God measures success?
- 4.Where are you in your calling — the hopeful beginning, the difficult middle, or the tested end?
Devotional
The word came. In the days of Josiah. In the thirteenth year. Jeremiah's calling has a date, a context, and a ruler — the specificity grounds the prophetic word in historical reality.
Jeremiah is called during the best period of Judah's final century. Josiah is reforming. The temple is being restored. The Book of the Law will be found in five years. There's reason for hope. And into that hopeful moment, God calls a young man whose entire career will be defined by watching the hope collapse.
Jeremiah will preach for forty years. He'll watch Josiah die in battle. He'll watch Josiah's sons reverse every reform. He'll watch Babylon approach, besiege, and destroy Jerusalem. He'll be beaten, imprisoned, thrown in a cistern, and dragged to Egypt against his will. His ministry will be forty years of telling people what they don't want to hear and watching them not listen.
And it starts here. In the days of Josiah. In the hopeful years. The call to the hardest ministry in the Old Testament comes during the easiest season. God doesn't tell Jeremiah at the burning bush: this will destroy your life. He says: before you were formed in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I ordained you a prophet to the nations.
The beauty of the calling and the brutality of the ministry will coexist for four decades. Jeremiah's entire life is proof that God's call doesn't guarantee an easy assignment. It guarantees a faithful God walking with you through an assignment that would break anyone who walked it alone.
The word came. And Jeremiah's life was never the same.
Commentary
Trusted original commentary from respected historical Bible scholars and theologians.
To whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah,.... This was the beginning of the prophecy of Jeremiah, so that…
Came - literally, was (and in Jer 1:4); the phrase implies that Jeremiah possessed God’s word from that time onward, not…
We have here as much as it was thought fit we should know of the genealogy of this prophet and the chronology of this…
in the days of, etc.] See introductory note.
in the thirteenth year of his reign c.b.c. 626. The period included in…
Cross References
Related passages throughout Scripture