Jeremiah was not popular, for he saw that Judah’s problem was her sin, her rebellion against the Lord. He knew that God was using Babylon as an instrument of punishment. He condemned Judah for worship of idols, which even included child sacrifice. As a society we in the West have no grounds for complacency when we abort so many lives each year. Yet he also cared for his country, even though God had told him not to pray for the nation. A prophet of God is someone who is dedicated to God’s view of things, rather than man’s view. This is something all of us in churches (and not just the so-called progressive churches (which are actually regressing into paganism)) should take hold of. Jeremiah’s advocacy of accepting the Babylonian domination led to him be branded a traitor. There is a time when we need to submit to God’s discipline and learn from it, rather than fight against it.
While he was concerned with the nation as a whole, he was also concerned with individual responsibility, and this is a theme of the whole Bible. We have an unfortunate tendency to swing from one extreme to the other, from excessive individualism to excessive corporatism. At the beginning Jeremiah is told that he will destroy and build (Jer 1:10). During his lifetime he saw only the destroying, but his ministry was laying a foundation for the future (1 Pet 1:10-12).
The book of Jeremiah uses poetry, in particular poetic repetition. But there is also a significant amount of prose, rather more than in the other prophets. It is the longest book in the Bible. It is also laid out thematically rather than chronologically.
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