Jeremiah — Called Before Birth, Rejected in Life, Right About Everything

Foreordained, forbidden to marry, thrown in a pit — and vindicated by history

Called Before He Was Born

The doctrine of foreordination — that God calls certain of His children to specific missions before they are born — appears throughout LDS scripture. But it does not begin with Joseph Smith. It begins, in the most explicit terms, in the opening verses of the Book of Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 1:5

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.”

Three claims in one verse: God knew Jeremiah before birth. He sanctified him before birth. He ordained him a prophet before birth. This is not metaphor or poetry — it is the rationale God gives for why Jeremiah cannot decline the call. He was designated for this work before he existed in mortality.

Latter-day Saint doctrine teaches that all people existed as spirit children of God before their mortal birth, and that faithful spirits were foreordained to specific roles in mortality. Jeremiah 1:5 is the Old Testament's clearest statement of that doctrine. It is not an LDS invention — it is in the Bible.

Jeremiah's response to the call was honest: “Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child.” God's response was equally direct: “Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.” The call did not depend on Jeremiah's self-assessment of his qualifications.

Forbidden to Marry — His Life Was His Message

God told Jeremiah not to marry, not to have children, and not to attend funerals or feasts (Jeremiah 16:1–9). The reason given was devastating: the families of Judah were about to be destroyed by war, famine, and plague. Children born in Jerusalem would die violently. There was no point building a family that would not survive.

Jeremiah's celibacy was not an accident. It was a prophetic sign-act — his solitary life was itself a sermon about what was coming. He stood alone in Jerusalem, without wife or child, without the comfort of community, as a living symbol of the desolation his words were predicting. His message and his life were the same message.

This is the man who preached for forty years — from the reign of Josiah to the fall of Jerusalem — and was ignored for forty years. He did not stop. He was beaten, put in stocks, thrown in a pit, dropped into a cistern, imprisoned, and taken to Egypt against his will after the fall. And he kept preaching. Not because it was working. Because he had been called before he was born to do exactly this.

The Scroll and the Fire

At one point, Jeremiah dictated his prophecies to his scribe Baruch, who read them in the temple. The scroll was brought to King Jehoiakim. The king's response has become one of the most brazen images of defiance in scripture: as the scroll was read to him in his winter palace, he cut off each section with a penknife and threw it into the fire — until the whole thing was burned.

God told Jeremiah to write it all down again, and added additional prophecies about Jehoiakim specifically. You cannot destroy the word of God by destroying a manuscript. The word outlasted the king who burned it — the original scroll was replaced; the Babylonians came exactly as Jeremiah had said they would; Jehoiakim died in disgrace. His body was thrown outside the gates of Jerusalem like the carcass of a donkey, as Jeremiah had prophesied (Jeremiah 36:30).

The fire felt like victory. It was the opposite of victory. The man who burned the scroll is now remembered only because the man whose scroll he burned wrote him into history.

Thrown Into a Pit

As the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem intensified, Jeremiah continued to preach the same message: surrender. God had decreed that Babylon would take the city; resistance was futile; those who surrendered would live. The king's officials took this as defeatism and treason. They had Jeremiah lowered into a cistern with no water, only mud (Jeremiah 38:6). He sank into the mud.

An Ethiopian royal official named Ebed-melech went to the king and argued for Jeremiah's life. The king relented. Ebed-melech used old rags as padding under the ropes so they wouldn't cut Jeremiah's skin when they hauled him out. That detail — old rags under the ropes — survives because Jeremiah or Baruch thought it worth remembering. Someone showed him physical mercy in the middle of official cruelty. He noticed.

Jerusalem fell exactly as Jeremiah said it would. The temple was burned. The people were taken captive. The king who had refused to surrender was captured, watched his sons executed, then had his own eyes put out — the last thing he saw. Jeremiah, the man they'd thrown in a pit for telling the truth, was released from prison by the Babylonians and offered provisions and freedom to go wherever he chose.

Bought a Field as Jerusalem Burned

While Jeremiah was still imprisoned in the court of the guard and the Babylonian army was besieging Jerusalem, God told him to buy a field. His cousin came to him in prison with the offer. It must have seemed absurd — real estate transactions while the city was about to fall. But Jeremiah bought it, signed the deed, sealed it, had it witnessed, and stored the documents in a clay jar to preserve them.

Jeremiah 32:14–15

“Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Take these evidences, this evidence of the purchase, both which is sealed, and this evidence which is open; and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days. For thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.”

The purchase was an act of prophetic faith — not faith that things would improve tomorrow, but faith that God's long-term promises were reliable even when the immediate circumstances made them look impossible. Jeremiah bought the field not for himself but for the future. That is what he was always doing — preaching not to his own generation, which would not listen, but to the generations who would emerge from exile and inherit what he had held in trust for them.

Lamentations — He Wept for the City He Predicted Would Fall

Lamentations is almost certainly Jeremiah's work, written in the immediate aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction. Five poems of mourning over the city that wouldn't listen — and now lay in ruins. He did not write “I told you so.” He wept.

Lamentations 3:22–23

“It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”

That verse — “great is thy faithfulness” — comes from a man sitting in the rubble of the city he had spent forty years trying to save. It is not triumphalism. It is the faith that remains after everything else has been stripped away. Jeremiah had no comfort to draw from human success, political influence, or popular approval. He had the faithfulness of God. And he declared it new every morning, because every morning it was still true.

This is one of the most quoted verses in Christianity and is virtually unknown in its context. Most people who sing about God's faithfulness do not know they are quoting a man who had been beaten, imprisoned, thrown in a pit, and was now sitting in the smoldering remains of the city he loved. That context does not diminish the verse. It makes it almost unbearably powerful.

“I Know the Plans I Have for You”

Jeremiah 29:11 is the most quoted verse in the book and one of the most popular verses in modern Christianity: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

It appears on coffee mugs, graduation cards, and motivational posters. What is almost never noted is its context: Jeremiah is writing a letter to the exiles in Babylon — the people who had just lost their homes, their temple, their city, their independence. He is telling them to build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, and pray for the welfare of the city that conquered them. The plan is not a quick turnaround. It is seventy years of exile.

The promise of hope and a future comes after the instruction to settle in for a long captivity. That is the honest version of Jeremiah 29:11. God's plans do not always mean immediate rescue. Sometimes they mean seventy years in Babylon, faithfully building and planting and praying, trusting that the future God has promised will eventually arrive.

Jeremiah understood that better than anyone. He preached for forty years and watched everything he warned about happen. He sat in the ruins and wrote “great is thy faithfulness.” He bought a field in a city under siege because God said the land would be restored. He is the Old Testament's most sustained argument for faith as endurance — not faith as expectation of quick deliverance, but faith as the refusal to stop believing when everything around you has already fallen.