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Jeremiah 6:10-15
We could call Jeremiah 6:10-15 and I Thessalonians 5:1-3 “signs of the times” scriptures. They tell us that times of great crisis, particularly the coming day of the Lord, are often preceded by a concerted effort to minimize just how bad things are. We see this in the two phrases, “'Peace, peace' when there is no peace,” and “they say 'peace and safety,' and then sudden destruction comes.” The Day of the Lord, which may be just a few years ahead, will seem from the outside like the world shifting from relative peace to total war in the blink of an eye. That is the way it will seem to unaware and non-Christians. In both cases—in Judah's day of the Lord and this coming Day of the Lord—the result is inescapable destruction. What God brought upon Judah in Babylon, by the Chaldeans, affected everybody in Judah. The book of Lamentations shows how deeply it affected them. The same will happen with the coming Day of the Lord. It will affect not only all of Judah or even all of the church but every last person on earth. No one is going to escape. These two prophecies go hand-in-hand. They are typically framed in the sense that “relative” peace reigns—that is, major martial conflict is absent. There is always war happening somewhere. But people have a way of saying, “Well, that there is war here and war there is not too bad. At least it's not affecting me. I am at peace.” But there will be a definite time when that peace ends very suddenly, and the world will be plunged into war. That is how Jeremiah and Paul present it in these prophetic passages, and this is most scholars' primary interpretation of them.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
The Peacemakers
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