When people think prophecy, they think about the Spirit. After all, it’s the Spirit that does the inspiring, right? John was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day. Jesus read the prophet Isaiah to claim that the Spirit was upon him. Ezekiel was manhandled by the Spirit. Or at least Spirithandled. Well, when it comes to Jeremiah, the Spirit’s conspicuously absent. For Jeremiah, it’s all about the word of the Lord.

Andrew G. Shead’s volume on the Word of God in the words of Jeremiah provides a fully developed theology of the Word of God rooted in Jeremiah’s experience. For Jeremiah, it’s the word of God that inspires speech, is utterly compelling, and (in the brilliant language of Abraham Heschel) is shatteringly present. The Word “pleads, laments, denounces, declaims, suffers, exults, wonders, hopes, destroys, plants, feeds, transforms” (287).

Though Shead’s work is technical at times, it is logically laid out and full of insight. Read A Mouth Full of Fire and you’ll come away with not only a deeper understanding, but a more profound grasp of the passionate God who speaks through the prophets.

Where Scripture is carefully read and obediently heard, where it is joyously sung, prayed, studied and proclaimed, there God makes himself present in the living and transforming person of his Word, and there he fashions a forgiven people into the words by which his Word will speak to tear down this world, this city of death, and build the eternal city of God. (290)

Amen!

Shead, Andrew G. A Mouth Full of Fire: The Word of God in the Words of Jeremiah. InterVarsity, 2012. New Studies in Biblical Theology 29.