Jeremiah 28 sets up a confrontation between two prophets and their proclamations. The reader of Jeremiah knows that Jeremiah is a true prophet and Hananiah is not, but the people who first heard the words of Hananiah were in a much more difficult situation. What Hananiah preached sounded authoritative, and it even appealed to aspects of God’s character. Ultimately, however, Hananiah was not preaching the word of God but words of man. His preaching was not only contrary to God’s Word but destructive to those who listened to it, for it offered cheap grace and empty hope of a quick return from exile. For this reason, Jeremiah prophesied a swift end to Hananiah’s ministry and life. God’s word prevailed for the sake of God’s glory and the good of his people. This chapter is an important one for us to consider, for it helps us to appreciate why God’s Word is so important. It reminds us that competing “words” are not a new phenomenon. It encourages us to treasure the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as words of eternal life.
When we consider our own day, steeped as it is in the postmodern notion that all truth is relative, we ought to find encouragement in Jeremiah 28 as it reinforces the importance of God’s Word. Indeed, without the revelation of God, and specifically the Scriptures, there is no definitive way to point to truth. This is something that Johan Bavinck understood very well. In his book Personality & Worldview, J.H. Bavinck highlighted a danger similar to the one that faced the hearers of both Jeremiah and Hananiah. Commenting on the variety and also peculiarity of different ways to view life and the world, Bavinck argued that “every worldview thought up by a human is a revelation of the personality, of who that person is,” while at the same time “every worldview is an attempt at conquering the self.”[1] Especially when it comes to solving the riddle of life, “every worldview … bear[s] the traits of the heart and is a revelation of the tendencies that move that heart.”[2]
The problem with this observation is that it points in the direction of relativism. If every worldview reflects an individual personality, then no worldview has room to claim supremacy over any other because my personality is as equally valid as your personality. Now, it is, in a way, a good thing to affirm the fact that “in the deepest questions, the worldview can never free itself from the life of the personality because our thinking is always at the same time a matter of our intellect and heart.”[3] Such an affirmation undercuts the claim of any human who has constructed a worldview that he thinks is absolute.
But we all still want some absoluteness because we still want to say that something “is” without having to qualify that this “is” is just “my truth.” And here Bavinck brings revelation into the equation to change the calculus. He writes that “if there were only worldviews that were born of human beings—if there were no revelation, or the word thought from God, given by God, that was thus objective, that could and would have to be a guiding standard”, then relativism would have to be the ground of all things.[4] But if there is revelation, “as soon as God speaks and breaks human darkness, everything changes. The human being gains a firm place to stand.”[5] Thus, J.H. Bavinck concludes,
Belief in revelation cuts through relativism. It breaks relativism. It brings calm in the midst of the commotion caused by worldviews. We can retain that belief only when we remember clearly that the gospel was not a human product, that it cannot be born of the human being, because it breaks the human being inwardly, because it does not know the dichotomy of the heart that seeks God without seeking and that finds God without finding him. The gospel portrays a living posture toward the living God. That is something that a human being always sidesteps—and must sidestep—because while there is a mysterious compulsion within his essence that is drawn toward God, he also never wants to follow it.[6]
Why is God’s Word so important? Because it is not bound by any kind of “he said, she said” argument. Rather, God’s Word prevails over the other “words” that compete for our hearts and attention. Therefore, let’s appreciate all the more the word of God so that we might hold fast to the truth.
[1] J. H. Bavinck, Personality and Worldview, ed. James Perman Eglinton (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2023), 174.
[2] Bavinck, 175.
[3] Bavinck, 175.
[4] Bavinck, 176.
[5] Bavinck, 176.
[6] Bavinck, 176–77.
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