And ye, hearken not to your prophets, nor to your diviners, nor to your dreamers, nor to your soothsayers, nor to your sorcerers, who speak unto you saying Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon.
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For they prophesy falsehood unto you, to remove you far from your land, and that I should drive you out, and ye should perish.
Judah's prophets were telling the nation what it wanted to hear: Babylon's yoke would soon be broken. God's answer through Jeremiah is that the message is a lie. Believing it will cost them the land they think they are defending.
God's warning carries a promise with it. The nation that takes Babylon's yoke keeps its land. One writer weighs the cost of refusing that warning against the safety these prophets sold:
"But any nation that will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will leave on its own land, to work it and dwell there, declares the Lord." (verse 11.) To be stubborn and refuse God's word of warning is the sure road to seeing that word fulfilled in our own misery and ruin. To obey is better than sacrifice in the worst of times just as much as in the best. But the prophets of men predict whatever suits their masters' wishes and their own immediate interests, and they only speed up the evil against which they promise a safety as hollow as it is loud.
These men were not crude frauds. They used the words of true prophecy, and the people liked what they heard.
It was more popular to prophesy smooth things and deceptions, and nothing is so dear to the human heart as to have God's approval on its own desires. That is why prophets were popular who would say, "Thus says the Lord," when the Lord had not spoken. We should not suppose that these prophets were always inventing lies, but they corrupted the word of God and made it suit man's taste (2 Cor. 2:17). They had to copy the real prophets in many of their expressions, and yet in the end they produced only their own empty speculations.
Dreamers belonged to the same trade. Scripture gives a test for them.
Scripture groups such dreamers with false prophets. Their dreams may have been a hypnotic state that evil spirits could use, to turn the people away from the Lord to idolatry. If what they predicted came true, the people still must not listen to them for that reason. God allowed it as a test, to prove whether Israel loved the Lord. Deut. 13:1-5. We have the same warning in the New Testament about the gospel and the confession of Jesus Christ come in flesh. Gal. 1:8-9; 1 John 4:1. In Jer. 27:9 the 'dreamers' stand alongside the 'diviners.'
The next chapter names one such man. Hananiah announced that Babylon's yoke was broken, and he used God's name to say it.
The sign of the bonds and yokes meant that God had decreed that all must submit to the yoke of the King of Babylon. In Jeremiah 28 Hananiah speaks against this, and he does it with "thus says the Lord" (v. 11) on his lips. To do such a serious thing was to speak "revolt against the Lord" (v. 16), however devout and hopeful it might sound. God had made Nebuchadnezzar His servant and given him power and dominion. Hananiah's doom was therefore sealed and carried out that same year (Jer. 28:17)! He had spoken a lie like the diviners and soothsayers — the spiritualists of the nations (Jer. 27:9-10).
Timing is part of the test.
It is always a mark of false prophecies that in a day of evil they promised prosperity. When the people of God have turned away from Him, false prophets prophesy smooth things. They have their glowing dreams of progress and of the spread of the Lord's work and blessing. The coming of great things and pleasant things is always their message. A true prophet, by contrast, in a day of evil warns of the coming of the Lord to judge the ungodly.
Obeying God's word here cost the faithful their good name.
Notice that the path of faith at such a time exposed the prophet — and those who needed the Lord's word — to two charges: that they did not care about their country's honour and freedom, and that they proudly refused to submit to the powers that ruled over Palestine and the surrounding kingdoms. This is not the least of the trials of a sensitive spirit. Notice, further, that the path of faith always goes with the actual message of God for the condition His people were in at that time.
- The lie flatters. Men's prophets say what their masters wish and what their own interests need. Their promised safety is as hollow as it is loud.
- The lie borrows God's name. These speakers copied the real prophets' language. They attached "thus says the Lord" to words God never spoke.
- The lie has a tell. Promising prosperity in a day of evil marks the false voice. The true prophet warns of coming judgment.
- The lie kills. Hananiah's hopeful message was revolt against the Lord, and he died that same year. In this verse the promise of freedom ends in exile and death.
- The truth costs. Faith took the yoke and bore the charge of disloyalty and pride. That yoke was what kept a nation in its own land.