Jer 4:1-9 – Break Up Your Fallow Ground, and Sow Not Among Thorns

[Study Aired February 21, 2021]

Jer 4:1  If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the LORD, return unto me: and if thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight, then shalt thou not remove.

Jer 4:2  And thou shalt swear, The LORD liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory.

Jer 4:3  For thus saith the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.

Jer 4:4  Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

Jer 4:5  Declare ye in Judah, and publish in Jerusalem; and say, Blow ye the trumpet in the land: cry, gather together, and say, Assemble yourselves, and let us go into the defenced cities.

Jer 4:6  Set up the standard toward Zion: retire, stay not: for I will bring evil from the north, and a great destruction.

Jer 4:7  The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an inhabitant.

Jer 4:8  For this gird you with sackcloth, lament and howl: for the fierce anger of the LORD is not turned back from us.

Jer 4:9  And it shall come to pass at that day, saith the LORD, that the heart of the king shall perish, and the heart of the princes; and the priests shall be astonished, and the prophets shall wonder.

The title of this study comes from verse 3 and is in effect an admonition to “occupy till I come”. That is what Christ told His disciples in this parable:

Luk 19:11   And as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable, because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the kingdom of God should immediately appear.

Luk 19:12   He said therefore, A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return.

Luk 19:13   And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, Occupy till I come.

The opposite of “occupy till I come” is to leave your ground “fallow”. It is “hiding your talent in the ground, and doing nothing with it:

Mat 25:24   Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed:

Mat 25:25   And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine.

The opposite of fallow ground and the way we ‘occupy and break up our fallow ground’ is “return[ing] unto… the Lord… in truth, in judgment and in righteousness, and seeking first the kingdom of God’. Returning to the Lord means that we are seeking Him and His kingdom before anything and everything else.

That is the admonition we are given here in Jeremiah 4:

Jer 4:1  If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the LORD, return unto me: and if thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight, then shalt thou not remove.

Jer 4:2  And thou shalt swear, The LORD liveth, in truth, in judgment, and in righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory.

Jer 4:3  For thus saith the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.

These three verses taken alone might lead us to believe we can simply repent of our sins and thereby avoid the fiery judgments of the wrath of God. However, Jeremiah goes on to make clear that is not the case:

Jer 4:7  The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the Gentiles is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an inhabitant.

We will discuss this verse more when we get to it, but suffice it to say “no man can enter the temple till the seven plagues of the seven angels is fulfilled”:

Rev 15:7  And one of the four beasts gave unto the seven angels seven golden vials full of the wrath of God, who liveth for ever and ever.

Rev 15:8  And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and from his power; and no man was able to enter into the temple, till the seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled.

Our next verse here in Jeremiah reveals that the ritual of circumcision was but a type of the spiritual circumcision of the heart:

Rom 2:28   For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:

Rom 2:29   But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

The Old Testament covenant the Lord made with Abraham was over 400 years prior to His covenant with Israel to keep the law of Moses. It was a covenant to ritually circumcise all the males in Abraham’s house. It was prior to the law of Moses and was a mere symbol of spiritual circumcision which would come only after the law brought us to Christ. This spiritual application is revealed here in Jeremiah even though it was not given them to see that physical circumcision was just a shadow of the coming spiritual reality:

Jer 4:4  Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

Removing the foreskins of our hearts is breaking up our fallow ground. Spiritual circumcision is the reality which is symbolized by physical circumcision and has the same meaning as physical water baptism. Both symbolize being washed and putting off the filthiness of our corruptible flesh. Notice how the outward physical symbols of the Old Testament and the law of Moses are being replaced with the inward spiritual realities of “the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2) in the New Testament:

Rom 2:28   For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:

Rom 2:29   But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

Rom 6:3  Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

Rom 6:4  Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

Eph 5:25   Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

Eph 5:26   That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,

Gal 6:2  Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

When the Lord finally gives the apostles the understanding that they are no longer under the law of Moses, it is also revealed that the only ‘water’ that will wash us clean of our sins is “the washing of water by the word”.

So, we need to know how does our believing Christ and His words cleanse us? How does His word cleanse and purify us? The answer is that it does so through physical and mental pain, symbolized by the fiery trials we endure when “judgment begins at the house of God”:

1Pe 4:12   Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:

1Pe 4:17   For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God?

“Fiery trials… [are] to try us”. There is no way to get to the tree of life but to go through the “flaming [fiery] sword [“trials”] which keeps the way [of] the tree of life”:

Gen 3:24   So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The “flaming sword… turns every way” because it is