What Does Jeremiah 18:23 Mean?

(23) **Yet, Lord, thou knowest all their counsel . . .**—Secret as their plots had been, they were not hidden from Jehovah, nor, indeed, as the words show, from the prophet himself. The words might seem, at first, to refer specially to the conspiracy of the men of Anathoth (Jeremiah 11:21), but by this time, as Jeremiah 18:18 shows, the hatred provoked by the warnings of the prophet had spread further, and united the priests and false prophets of Jerusalem in a common hostility against him. So afterwards, in the Gospel history, the conspiracies that began at Capernaum (Mark 3:6) were developed in Jerusalem (Matthew 27:1). **Deal thus with them.**—The interpolated word “thus,” intended to emphasise the prayer, really weakens it: *in the. time of Thine anger deal with them, *as implying that the day of grace was past, that nothing now remained but retribution. The prayer was the utterance of an indignation, not unrighteous in itself, yet showing all too plainly, as has been said above, like the language of the so-called imprecatory Psalms, the contrast between the Jewish and the Christian and Christ-like way of meeting wrong and hatred. For us such prayers are among the things that have passed away, and we have learnt to admire and imitate the nobler temper of the proto-martyr, “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60). The New Testament utterances of St. Peter against Simon the sorcerer (Acts 8:20), of St. Paul against Ananias (Acts 23:3), the Judaisers of Galatia (Galatians 1:9), and Alexander the coppersmith (2Timothy 4:14), present an apparent parallelism; but the words spoken in these cases have more the character of an authoritative judicial sentence. **Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission. **Bible Hub