Jeremiah 23:25–29

Jeremiah 23:25 — "I have heard what the prophets have said…" The passage opens with God as the sovereign listener — a reversal of the usual prophetic dynamic in which the prophet claims to have heard God. Here, God announces what He has heard from those who falsely invoke His name. The repeated exclamation "I had a dream! I had a dream!" is almost mocking in its breathlessness, capturing the self-aggrandizing theatrics of pseudo-prophets who manufacture divine authority through spectacular personal experience. The doubling of the phrase ("I had a dream!") in the Hebrew mimics the excitement with which these figures promoted their visions, while God's detached "I have heard" signals calm omniscient judgment over their noise.

Jeremiah 23:26 — "How long will this be in the heart of the prophets…" The rhetorical question "How long?" expresses divine patience worn thin — the same anguished formula found throughout the Psalms and in Moses' intercession. Critically, Jeremiah locates the source of false prophecy not in demonic external inspiration but in the prophets' own hearts: "the prophets of the deceit of their own heart." This is a profound anthropological diagnosis. The Hebrew lēb (heart) here denotes the seat of will, reason, and imagination. The false prophets are not merely deceiving others — they are themselves deceived, their inner lives disordered and self-referential. Catholic tradition will recognize in this the dynamics of concupiscence and the darkened intellect described after the Fall (CCC 405).

Jeremiah 23:27 — "They intend to cause my people to forget my name…" The theological stakes become explicit: the real aim of false prophecy is amnesia — the forgetting of the divine Name. In the ancient Near East, to know someone's name was to be in living relationship with them. To forget God's name is therefore not a failure of memory but a rupture of covenant identity. Jeremiah draws a direct line between these dream-prophets and Israel's Baalist ancestors: the mechanism of spiritual destruction is the same regardless of whether the competing allegiance is an explicit idol or simply an intoxicating human dream. The word "Baal" itself means "master/lord," suggesting that any voice claiming the authority of God but rooted in human self-interest is functionally Baalite — it enslaves to a false master.

Jeremiah 23:28 — "The prophet who has a dream, let him tell a dream; and he who has my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the straw to the wheat?" This verse is not a blanket condemnation of all dreaming — God does communicate through dreams in Scripture (Gen 37; Matt 1:20). Rather, it insists on faithful differentiation: the dream-prophet should accurately represent his experience as a dream, while the one who bears God's Word must speak that Word with fidelity ('emet, faithfulness/truth). The rhetorical comparison — "What is the straw to the wheat?" — is both agricultural and sacramental in its imagery. Straw is the empty husk, volumetrically impressive but nutritively worthless; wheat is the dense, life-giving kernel. Human religious imagination (straw) may be abundant and impressive-looking, but it cannot sustain the soul. Only the Word of God (wheat) genuinely feeds.

Jeremiah 23:29 — "Isn't my word like fire?… like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" The passage reaches its climax with two bold similes. Fire purifies, illuminates, and consumes — it cannot be contained or domesticated. The hammer-and-rock image is equally forceful: God's Word does not merely persuade or suggest; it shatters. The "rock" may allude to the hardened human heart (Ezek 36:26), the stony ground Jesus describes in the parable of the sower, or the institutional structures of a corrupt religious establishment. Both images communicate the active, sovereign energy of divine speech — the dabar Yahweh is not one voice among many human voices but an ontologically distinct reality that transforms whatever it strikes.

Typological / Spiritual Senses: At the anagogical level, the contrast between straw and wheat anticipates Christ's own self-identification as the Bread of Life (John 6:35) — true wheat from heaven as opposed to the manna that could not ultimately satisfy. The "fire" of God's Word finds its New Testament fulfillment in Pentecost (Acts 2:3), where tongues of fire rest on the Apostles, commissioning authentic proclamation. The "hammer" breaking stone typologically foreshadows the piercing Word that breaks open hearts of stone at Pentecost (Acts 2:37: "they were cut to the heart").

Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage. First, the Church's teaching on the relationship between Scripture and Tradition (Dei Verbum §9–10) resonates deeply here: authentic divine revelation is not privately generated but is received, transmitted faithfully, and interpreted within the living community of the Church under the guidance of the Magisterium — precisely the faithful transmission ('emet) Jeremiah demands of the true prophet. The false prophets of Jeremiah 23 are cautionary icons of what happens when religious authority is severed from this accountability.

Second, the Catechism's teaching on private revelation (CCC 67) is directly illuminated by this passage: "Throughout the ages, there have been so-called 'private' revelations… It is not [the Church's] role to make known some new Gospel… but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history." Jeremiah's criterion — does this word draw people toward God's Name or away from it? — remains the Church's standard for discerning private revelation.

St. John of the Cross, in The Ascent of Mount Carmel (II.19–22), warns extensively against attachment to visions and locutions, echoing Jeremiah almost precisely: the soul attached to spiritual experiences rather than naked faith in God's Word is in grave peril. He urges directors to test every alleged vision against Scripture and sound doctrine.

St. Jerome, commenting on Jeremiah, notes that the false prophets speak "de corde suo" — from their own heart — which he links to the sin of pride: the prophet who refuses to be an instrument becomes an obstacle. Pope Benedict XVI in Verbum Domini (§5) speaks of the Word of God as possessing its own dynamism that "achieves what it proclaims" — a precise theological unpacking of the fire-and-hammer metaphor of verse 29.

Contemporary Catholics inhabit a media ecosystem saturated with voices claiming spiritual authority: social media prophets, viral "words from the Lord," self-published mystics, and influencers who frame personal inspiration as divine mandate. Jeremiah's diagnostic question is urgently practical: Does this voice draw me deeper into the Name of God — toward Scripture, the sacraments, the Tradition of the Church — or does it replace them with the excitement of a dream? The "straw vs. wheat" test can be applied concretely: Does this teaching feed me with the density of truth, or does it merely occupy space with impressive volume? Catholics are also called by this passage to take seriously the active power of Scripture itself. Rather than treating Bible reading as one spiritual technique among many, the image of fire and hammer invites us to approach God's Word expecting transformation — not comfort, but shattering. Pope Francis has consistently urged Catholics to carry the Gospel and read it daily (Evangelii Gaudium §174), not as a pious habit but as an encounter with a living force.