“Make ye him drunken: for he magnified himself against the LORD: Moab also shall wallow in his vomit, and he also shall be in derision.”
My Notes
What Does Jeremiah 48:26 Mean?
"Make ye him drunken: for he magnified himself against the LORD: Moab also shall wallow in his vomit, and he also shall be in derision." God's judgment on Moab is described as forced intoxication — Moab will be made drunk, will vomit, and will become an object of mockery. The imagery is deliberately humiliating: the proud nation reduced to a drunk wallowing in its own mess.
The cause is stated with clarity: "he magnified himself against the LORD." Moab's sin is self-exaltation against God. The word "magnified" (gadal) — to make oneself great — is the same word used positively for magnifying God. Moab used it for himself. He took what belongs to God and applied it to his own ego.
The drunkenness is judgment-as-metaphor: God will make Moab's judgment so disorienting, so destabilizing, so stripping of dignity that it will function like extreme intoxication. Loss of control. Loss of dignity. Public humiliation.
Reflection Questions
- 1.What do you magnify about yourself that belongs to God alone?
- 2.How does pride look from the inside versus from God's perspective?
- 3.Have you seen someone's self-magnification end in public humiliation?
- 4.What's the difference between healthy confidence and magnifying yourself 'against the LORD'?
Devotional
Moab magnified himself against God. And God's response is: make him drunk. Let him wallow in his vomit. Let him become a joke.
The deliberate indignity of this judgment matches the indignity of Moab's sin. Moab's crime was self-magnification — making himself great in the space that belongs to God. The punishment is the total loss of greatness: a nation wallowing in its own mess, unable to stand, the object of everyone's laughter.
This is what pride looks like from the other side. From the inside, self-magnification feels powerful and justified. From the outside — from God's perspective — it looks like a drunk person who doesn't know they're covered in their own vomit. The proud person thinks they're impressive. God sees them wallowing.
The derision — becoming a laughingstock — is the complete reversal of magnification. Moab wanted to be respected, feared, admired. The judgment produces the opposite: mockery. The thing Moab sought most desperately — greatness — becomes the thing most thoroughly destroyed.
Pride always invites this reversal. You magnify yourself, and God unmagnifies you. You make yourself great, and God makes you a joke. Not because God is cruel, but because self-magnification against the LORD is itself a form of intoxication — a delusional state that inevitably produces a crash.
What are you magnifying against God? And how stable does that magnification actually look from the outside?
Commentary
Trusted original commentary from respected historical Bible scholars and theologians.
For was not Israel a derision unto thee?.... In the time of his calamity, when the ten tribes were carried captive by…
Make ye him drunken - With the wine-cup of God’s fury, until terror deprive him of his senses.
The destruction is here further prophesied of very largely and with a great copiousness and variety of expression, and…
Cross References
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