Jeremiah 16

1 “And you — do not take a wife, says the Lord, the God of Israel,”

2 “and no son or daughter will be born to you in this place.”

3 “For this is what the Lord says about the sons and the daughters born in this place, and about their mothers who bore them and their fathers who fathered them in this land:”

4 “By a death of disease they will die. They will not be mourned, and they will not be buried; they will lie as an example on the face of the earth, food for the wild animals of the land and the birds of the sky. They will fall by the sword and be finished off by famine.”

5 “This is what the Lord says: Do not go into their mourning feast; do not go to lament, and do not grieve for them, for I have taken my peace away from this people.”

6 “They will not beat their breasts for them; they will not make cuts on themselves, and they will not shave their heads.”

7 “No bread will be broken in their mourning to comfort anyone for the dead; no one will be given the cup of comfort to drink for his father or his mother.”

8 “And you will not go into a banquet house to sit with them to eat and drink.”

9 “For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Look, before your eyes and in your days I am bringing to an end in this place the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride.”

10 “And when you report all these words to this people, and they say to you, ‘Why has the Lord pronounced all this disaster against us? What is our wrongdoing? What is the sin we have sinned before the Lord our God?’ —”

11 “then tell them: Because your fathers abandoned me, says the Lord, and went off after foreign gods and served them and bowed down to them. They abandoned me and did not keep my law.”

12 “And you have acted worse than your fathers — look, each of you walks after what pleases his own evil heart rather than listening to me.”

13 “So I will throw you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your fathers have known, and there you will serve other gods, who will show you no mercy.”

14 “Therefore, look, days are coming, says the Lord, when they will no longer say, ‘The Lord lives, who brought the people of Israel up out of the land of Egypt,’”

15 “but, ‘The Lord lives, who brought the house of Israel up from the land of the north and from all the countries where they were driven.’ And I will restore them to their own land, the land I gave their fathers.”

16 “Look, I am sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they will fish for them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and every hill and out of the holes in the rocks.”

17 “For my eyes are on all their ways. And their wrongdoings have not been hidden from my eyes.”

18 “And I will pay back double for their wrongdoings and their sins, because they treated my land as common with the carcasses of their detestable things, and with their lawless deeds they wronged my inheritance.”

19 “Lord, my strength and my help and my refuge in the day of trouble — to you the nations will come from the end of the earth, and they will say: ‘How false were the idols our fathers acquired! There is no help in them.’”

20 “Can a person make gods for himself? Such things are not gods.”

21 “Therefore, look, this time I will show them my hand and make my power known to them, and they will know that my name is the Lord.”