There is a scarecrow standing in a cucumber field, and Jeremiah cannot take his eyes off it. A post, driven into the ground. Someone has nailed a crossbeam to it, draped a garment around it, maybe set a hat on top. From a distance it almost looks human. The birds startle at it — the first few days. But it does not move, it does not speak, it goes nowhere; if the wind picked up it would fall over, were it not that they have staked it down. And that, says the prophet, is exactly what the nations worship. They fetch a tree from the forest, a craftsman works it with a chisel, they overlay it with silver and gold and fasten it with nails and hammers so it will not totter. Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, there they stand. Do not fear them, he says, for they can do no harm — and just as little good. And there is a detail here too good to pass over: they nail their god down so he will not fall over.
And against that nailed-down post Jeremiah sets the confession, and it comes out like a sigh of relief: there is no one like You, YHWH. You are great, and great is Your Name in might. Who would not fear You, King of the nations? For that is Your due. For among all the sages of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is no one like You. The contrast lands in a single breath: on one side a god whose maker must measure him out with a ruler and hold him upright with nails; on the other the King of all nations — even the nations that do not know Him, even Babylon that mocks Him — for whom the question is not whether you would fear Him, but how you possibly could not.
And then he sets the two kinds side by side, and it turns on one word: living. The idols, says Jeremiah, are a puff of breath, a nothing, a work of mockery; on the day they are called to account, they will perish. But YHWH is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. There it stands: the living God, against gods who have never once drawn breath. The venom sits in the Hebrew word underlying the idol — there is no breath, no spirit, no life in it. You can gild it until it gleams, but you will never get a breath into it. And what does not breathe can breathe nothing back: no word, no comfort, no rescue. Every goldsmith is put to shame by his image, says the prophet, for his cast image is a lie, and there is no spirit in it.
And when Jeremiah wants to show who this living God is, it turns into a storm. He made the earth by His power, established the world by His wisdom, and stretched out the heavens by His understanding. When He utters His voice, there is a roar of waters in the heavens; He makes the clouds rise from the ends of the earth, He makes the lightning for the rain and brings out the wind from His storehouses. It all plays out above that same cucumber field: the sky closing in, the thunder rolling over the land like a voice, the lightning tearing the clouds open, the wind rising out of a storehouse no one has ever seen — and in the middle of it all that motionless post with its gold plating, which cannot even stay upright when the wind blows. One god must be nailed down against the wind. The other God stores the wind in His own storehouse and lets it loose when it pleases Him. The king in this scene is not hard to point out.
Who would not fear You, King of the nations? It is a question that reaches further than Jeremiah could have known. For at the end of all things, when the last account is settled, the redeemed stand beside a sea of glass mixed with fire, and they sing — and it is almost word for word Jeremiah's sentence: who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify Your Name? By then the scarecrows have long since fallen; the dead wood has perished just as the prophet said. Only the living King still stands, and everything that breathes, breathes Him praise. For that is the end of every idol, however gilded: it falls the moment real wind comes. And that is the fate of the living God: He remains standing when every other throne has collapsed, and the last sound in history is not the crack of splitting wood, but a choir that fears His Name and sings it out for joy.
Expert"Who would not fear You"
Jeremiah uses two shapes of the incomparability back to back. First the denial, in an emphatic form: me-ein kamocha — "there is altogether no one like You" (10:6, 7). The prefix me- intensifies: not merely "no one," but "not from any side is there anyone who equals You." And then the rhetorical question that returns like a refrain: mi lo yira'acha, melech ha-goyim — "who would not fear You, King of the nations?" (10:7).
That second line has a long echo. At the close of the Bible, beside the sea of glass, the victors sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb, and its first line is precisely this question of Jeremiah's, now as the praise of the redeemed: "Who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify Your Name?" The word "fear" here means no cringing dread but awe — the trembling before something truly great, which does not paralyze but brings you to your knees. The scarecrow stirs a shallow fear that fades with familiarity. The living King awakens a deep awe that only grows with the years.
ExcursusYou become what you worship
Jeremiah says it, and the psalms echo it: whoever worships a dead image comes to resemble it. "They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear; those who make them become like them, everyone who trusts in them." Worship is never neutral; it shapes the worshiper into the image of what he reveres. Bow to something dead, and something in you dies — you grow hard, mute, seeing but blind. Bow to the living God, and something begins to live — your eyes open, your ears wake, you begin to breathe.
That makes the choice between the gods not a matter of taste but of life and death. Modern man no longer casts his images in bronze, but he still casts them — out of numbers, out of screens, out of applause — and the law has not changed. Whoever hangs his heart on something that does not breathe, loses, in time, his own breath to it. Only the living God gives life back to whoever bows before Him, because He is the only object of worship who is Himself alive.
HeartThe awe that sets you free
We have grown afraid of the word "fear." It sounds like a God with a raised finger, like the dread that keeps you small. But the fear Jeremiah sings of is the opposite of being kept small; it makes you great and free. For whoever truly fears the living King need fear nothing else. All the small gods before whom we bow daily — the opinion of others, the number on the scale, the question of whether we are enough — lose their grip the moment One comes into view who truly deserves awe. They turn out to be scarecrows: threatening from a distance, powerless up close.
There is a strange freedom in kneeling before the only One worth it. Whoever kneels before Him stands upright before everything else. The scarecrows in your cucumber field — the things that keep you awake at night, that try to steer you with fear — can do neither harm nor good; they only stand there, nailed down, until the first real wind comes. And the living King, before whom you tremble, is the same One who bends down to you like a Father. That is the secret: His greatness does not frighten, it frees, for it is the greatness of Someone who stands on your side.
A note on the source text. The idol as scarecrow, fastened with nails — Jeremiah 10:2-5. "There is no one like You … who would not fear You, King of the nations" — 10:6-7. The living God against the dead, breathless image — 10:10, 14-15. The Creator-hymn (the stretched-out heavens, the voice like a roar of waters, the wind from the storehouses) — 10:12-13. "Who would not fear You" beside the sea of glass — Revelation 15:3-4. "Those who make them become like them" — Psalm 115:4-8; 135:15-18. The divine Name as YHWH.
There is a scarecrow standing in a cucumber field, and Jeremiah cannot take his eyes off it. A post, driven into the ground. Someone has nailed a crossbeam to it, draped a garment around it, maybe set a hat on top. From a distance it almost looks human. The birds startle at it — the first few days. But it does not move, it does not speak, it goes nowhere; if the wind picked up it would fall over, were it not that they have staked it down. And that, says the prophet, is exactly what the nations worship. They fetch a tree from the forest, a craftsman works it with a chisel, they overlay it with silver and gold and fasten it with nails and hammers so it will not totter. Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, there they stand. Do not fear them, he says, for they can do no harm — and just as little good. And there is a detail here too good to pass over: they nail their god down so he will not fall over.
And against that nailed-down post Jeremiah sets the confession, and it comes out like a sigh of relief: there is no one like You, YHWH. You are great, and great is Your Name in might. Who would not fear You, King of the nations? For that is Your due. For among all the sages of the nations and in all their kingdoms, there is no one like You. The contrast lands in a single breath: on one side a god whose maker must measure him out with a ruler and hold him upright with nails; on the other the King of all nations — even the nations that do not know Him, even Babylon that mocks Him — for whom the question is not whether you would fear Him, but how you possibly could not.
And then he sets the two kinds side by side, and it turns on one word: living. The idols, says Jeremiah, are a puff of breath, a nothing, a work of mockery; on the day they are called to account, they will perish. But YHWH is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. There it stands: the living God, against gods who have never once drawn breath. The venom sits in the Hebrew word underlying the idol — there is no breath, no spirit, no life in it. You can gild it until it gleams, but you will never get a breath into it. And what does not breathe can breathe nothing back: no word, no comfort, no rescue. Every goldsmith is put to shame by his image, says the prophet, for his cast image is a lie, and there is no spirit in it.
And when Jeremiah wants to show who this living God is, it turns into a storm. He made the earth by His power, established the world by His wisdom, and stretched out the heavens by His understanding. When He utters His voice, there is a roar of waters in the heavens; He makes the clouds rise from the ends of the earth, He makes the lightning for the rain and brings out the wind from His storehouses. It all plays out above that same cucumber field: the sky closing in, the thunder rolling over the land like a voice, the lightning tearing the clouds open, the wind rising out of a storehouse no one has ever seen — and in the middle of it all that motionless post with its gold plating, which cannot even stay upright when the wind blows. One god must be nailed down against the wind. The other God stores the wind in His own storehouse and lets it loose when it pleases Him. The king in this scene is not hard to point out.
Who would not fear You, King of the nations? It is a question that reaches further than Jeremiah could have known. For at the end of all things, when the last account is settled, the redeemed stand beside a sea of glass mixed with fire, and they sing — and it is almost word for word Jeremiah's sentence: who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify Your Name? By then the scarecrows have long since fallen; the dead wood has perished just as the prophet said. Only the living King still stands, and everything that breathes, breathes Him praise. For that is the end of every idol, however gilded: it falls the moment real wind comes. And that is the fate of the living God: He remains standing when every other throne has collapsed, and the last sound in history is not the crack of splitting wood, but a choir that fears His Name and sings it out for joy.
Expert"Who would not fear You"
Jeremiah uses two shapes of the incomparability back to back. First the denial, in an emphatic form: me-ein kamocha — "there is altogether no one like You" (10:6, 7). The prefix me- intensifies: not merely "no one," but "not from any side is there anyone who equals You." And then the rhetorical question that returns like a refrain: mi lo yira'acha, melech ha-goyim — "who would not fear You, King of the nations?" (10:7).
That second line has a long echo. At the close of the Bible, beside the sea of glass, the victors sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb, and its first line is precisely this question of Jeremiah's, now as the praise of the redeemed: "Who would not fear You, Lord, and glorify Your Name?" The word "fear" here means no cringing dread but awe — the trembling before something truly great, which does not paralyze but brings you to your knees. The scarecrow stirs a shallow fear that fades with familiarity. The living King awakens a deep awe that only grows with the years.
ExcursusYou become what you worship
Jeremiah says it, and the psalms echo it: whoever worships a dead image comes to resemble it. "They have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear; those who make them become like them, everyone who trusts in them." Worship is never neutral; it shapes the worshiper into the image of what he reveres. Bow to something dead, and something in you dies — you grow hard, mute, seeing but blind. Bow to the living God, and something begins to live — your eyes open, your ears wake, you begin to breathe.
That makes the choice between the gods not a matter of taste but of life and death. Modern man no longer casts his images in bronze, but he still casts them — out of numbers, out of screens, out of applause — and the law has not changed. Whoever hangs his heart on something that does not breathe, loses, in time, his own breath to it. Only the living God gives life back to whoever bows before Him, because He is the only object of worship who is Himself alive.
HeartThe awe that sets you free
We have grown afraid of the word "fear." It sounds like a God with a raised finger, like the dread that keeps you small. But the fear Jeremiah sings of is the opposite of being kept small; it makes you great and free. For whoever truly fears the living King need fear nothing else. All the small gods before whom we bow daily — the opinion of others, the number on the scale, the question of whether we are enough — lose their grip the moment One comes into view who truly deserves awe. They turn out to be scarecrows: threatening from a distance, powerless up close.
There is a strange freedom in kneeling before the only One worth it. Whoever kneels before Him stands upright before everything else. The scarecrows in your cucumber field — the things that keep you awake at night, that try to steer you with fear — can do neither harm nor good; they only stand there, nailed down, until the first real wind comes. And the living King, before whom you tremble, is the same One who bends down to you like a Father. That is the secret: His greatness does not frighten, it frees, for it is the greatness of Someone who stands on your side.
A note on the source text. The idol as scarecrow, fastened with nails — Jeremiah 10:2-5. "There is no one like You … who would not fear You, King of the nations" — 10:6-7. The living God against the dead, breathless image — 10:10, 14-15. The Creator-hymn (the stretched-out heavens, the voice like a roar of waters, the wind from the storehouses) — 10:12-13. "Who would not fear You" beside the sea of glass — Revelation 15:3-4. "Those who make them become like them" — Psalm 115:4-8; 135:15-18. The divine Name as YHWH.