Homiletics Analysis: Jeremiah 9:23–26

Content & Intent

This Text — Content:

Jeremiah 9:23–26 divides into two closely related movements. The first (vv. 23–24) delivers one of the Old Testament’s most concentrated and theologically dense declarations: the LORD forbids boasting in wisdom, strength, or wealth — the three pillars of human self-sufficiency and social status in every culture — and redirects all legitimate boasting to one object alone: knowing Him. The ground of this redirection is not merely that the LORD is superior to those things, but that He is the God who practices hesed (steadfast love), mishpat (justice), and tsedaqah (righteousness) in the earth, and that He delights in these things. The boast-worthy God is not an abstraction but a God of active, covenant-defined character whose ways are on display in history. The second movement (vv. 25–26) shifts to a divine declaration of coming judgment that sweeps across circumcised nations — Egypt, Judah, Edom, Ammon, Moab, and the desert tribes — indicting them all as “uncircumcised in heart.” The juxtaposition is deliberate and jarring: the nations that possess the external sign of covenant relation are condemned as inwardly uncircumcised, while Judah is listed among the pagan nations without distinction. The implication is that external religious identity and ritual performance have become the Judahite form of “boasting” — a confidence placed in the wrong object.

This Text — Intent:

God is seeking to shatter every form of misplaced confidence — including religious misplaced confidence — and to reorient His people’s entire orientation of trust and boasting toward the living God who is known in covenant relationship. The intent is not merely to correct an intellectual error about what to value; it is to produce a reorientation of the whole person: what one glories in, what one trusts in, what one builds one’s identity upon. The passage functions as a call to conversion at the level of fundamental allegiance — away from every self-sourced or religiously-costumed substitute, toward the God whose character defines what real wisdom, strength, and justice actually look like. Verses 25–26 sharpen the intent by closing off the escape route of religious formalism: no external rite secures standing before this God. Only the heart that knows Him — trusts Him, clings to Him, is shaped by His hesed — possesses what the passage calls the only legitimate ground of boasting.

Subject Sentence: God dismantles every ground of human boasting and offers Himself — known in covenant love, justice, and righteousness — as the only legitimate glory.

Primary Claim: God is confronting every form of misplaced confidence — including the religious kind — and calling His people to find their entire identity, security, and boast in knowing Him alone; the God whose character of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness is the only thing in heaven or earth worth glorying in.

Interpretive Evaluation

The scope of “boasting” in verse 23: There is broad consensus across traditions that wisdom, strength, and riches in verse 23 are not condemned as inherently evil but as objects of misplaced confidence — things that become functional saviors when trusted in and boasted about. The Reformed reading goes further to identify this as an idol-structure: these three things represent the comprehensive human strategy for self-securing against vulnerability. Wisdom (cognitive mastery), strength (physical or political power), and riches (economic security) together constitute the full human portfolio of self-sufficiency. The text’s prohibition targets not possession but glory — what one stakes one’s identity and security upon. This reading is broadly shared and requires no significant qualification.

The meaning of “knowing God” in verse 24: This is the passage’s most critical and most frequently misread phrase. A Wesleyan or broadly evangelical reading tends to reduce “knowing God” to relational warmth or experiential intimacy — a feeling of closeness. A more intellectualist reading treats it as theological knowledge about God. The Reformed reading, grounded in the Old Testament covenant idiom, insists that yada (to know) in this context is covenantal knowledge: the kind of knowing that involves trust, submission, and conformity to the character of the one known. To know the LORD is to be in covenant allegiance with Him — which means the person who truly knows this God will begin to practice hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah in their own life, not merely affirm them as attributes. This reading is supported by the book of Jeremiah’s wider use of knowing God (cf. Jer. 31:31–34, where the new covenant is defined as all of God’s people knowing Him from the least to the greatest), and by the parallel in Hosea where lack of knowledge of God (da’at elohim) produces moral and covenantal collapse. The Reformed reading is preferred because it accounts for why knowing God is the only legitimate boast — it is not a superior achievement alongside wisdom and strength, but a fundamentally different category of orientation that transforms the whole person.

The relationship between vv. 23–24 and vv. 25–26: Some commentators treat the circumcision passage (vv. 25–26) as a separate oracle with only loose thematic connection to vv. 23–24. A dispensational reading may focus primarily on the national/ethnic dimensions of the judgment list, noting Israel’s inclusion among the nations as a warning to ethnic Israel. The Reformed and redemptive-historical reading sees the juxtaposition as theologically intentional and essential: the nations condemned in vv. 25–26 have the outward sign but lack the inward reality — they are the living illustration of what happens when religious form becomes the object of confidence rather than genuine knowledge of God. Judah’s inclusion in this list is the rhetorical blade of the passage: even the covenant people can fall into the idolatry of trusting in their own religious identity. This reading should be preferred because it makes the passage a unified whole rather than two loosely attached oracles, and because it is confirmed by Paul’s direct quotation of v. 24 in 1 Corinthians 1:31 and 2 Corinthians 10:17 in precisely this covenantal/anti-formalist direction.

Paul’s use of verse 24: Paul’s quotations in 1 Corinthians 1:31 and 2 Corinthians 10:17 apply this text directly to boasting in Christ crucified over against human wisdom and religious status. Some interpreters treat Paul’s application as a creative appropriation or typological extension. The Reformed reading treats it as exegetically grounded: Paul is not importing a foreign meaning but drawing out what the text’s own logic requires in its new covenant fulfillment. If the boast-worthy God is known through hesed — covenant love displayed in action — then the cross is not a new addition to this claim but its definitive historical instantiation. Paul is not allegorizing Jeremiah; he is reading Jeremiah correctly.

Key Canonical Support

• 1 Corinthians 1:26–31 — Paul quotes Jeremiah 9:24 directly in his argument that God has chosen the foolish, weak, and low to shame the wise and strong, so that “let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” The canonical link is explicit; Paul treats the Jeremiah text as the hermeneutical key to interpreting the cross as wisdom and power.

• Jeremiah 31:31–34 — The new covenant promise defines full covenant membership as universal heart-knowledge of God (“they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest”). This is the positive fulfillment of the call in 9:24 — what it looks like for an entire people to have the kind of knowing-God that is the only legitimate boast.

• Hosea 6:6 — “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” The same hesed/da’at elohim vocabulary that underlies Jeremiah 9:23–24 appears here, confirming that this is not Jeremiah’s idiosyncratic emphasis but a sustained prophetic indictment of formalism over covenant knowledge.

• Philippians 3:4–11 — Paul’s autobiographical application of the Jeremiah principle: he catalogs his own wisdom, status, and religious pedigree, declares them all “rubbish” compared to “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” and reorients his entire boast and confidence to Christ. This is the clearest New Testament instantiation of what Jeremiah 9:23–24 requires.

• Romans 2:25–29 — Paul’s circumcision-of-the-heart argument draws directly on the logic of Jeremiah 9:25–26: external circumcision is worthless if the heart is uncircumcised; true circumcision is inward, of the heart, by the Spirit. This confirms that vv. 25–26 are not an appended judgment oracle but the pastoral application of vv. 23–24 to the specific failure of Judah.

Aim: To shatter the hearer’s confidence in every substitute ground of security — including religious identity and performance — and to call them to orient their entire boast and identity in the God who is known in covenant relationship through Jesus Christ.

Content Table

Divisions Table

Subject Sentence & Primary Claim (restated)

Subject Sentence: God dismantles every ground of human boasting and offers Himself — known in covenant love, justice, and righteousness — as the only legitimate glory.

Primary Claim: God is confronting every form of misplaced confidence — including the religious kind — and calling His people to find their entire identity, security, and boast in knowing Him alone; the God whose character of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness is the only thing in heaven or earth worth glorying in.

Applications (Five)

1. [Mind/Belief] Diagnose the boast beneath the behavior. The passage identifies three structural forms of misplaced confidence: wisdom (competence and cognitive mastery), strength (power and independence), and riches (economic security). Before applying the text outwardly, the hearer must be brought to see where their own internal boasting lives — not the surface behavior but the confidence structure beneath it. The person who works incessantly may not be boasting in riches but in competence; the person who avoids medical care may not be trusting God but boasting in physical resilience; the person who cannot stop managing outcomes may be boasting in their strategic wisdom. The text demands that the hearer identify the specific form their misplaced glory takes — not “I trust in things instead of God” as a generic admission, but “I trust in my ability to figure things out and that trust has become my identity and my security.”

2. [Affections/Worship] Let the character of God become genuinely glorious to you. Verse 24 does not command the hearer to stop boasting as an act of self-denial alone — it offers an alternative object of glory and insists that the God who practices hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah is genuinely worthy of being boasted in. The applicational movement here is not mere prohibition but re-orientation of desire: the hearer is invited to meditate on what it means that the LORD delights in steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth — that the governing force of the universe is a God whose character is defined by these things, who exercises them actively, and who takes pleasure in their display. This is not a correction of bad habits; it is an invitation to find a new and better delight. The preacher’s task is to make the character of this God genuinely compelling — to preach hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah in such a way that the hearer’s affections are drawn toward this God as the most satisfying and trustworthy object available.

3. [Will/Behavior] Stop performing your religious identity as a confidence strategy. Verses 25–26 make the sharpest application: the people who had the most elaborate religious sign of covenant identity — circumcision — were indicted as uncircumcised in heart. The application for the contemporary hearer is direct: church attendance, doctrinal precision, ministry involvement, baptism, and family heritage are not themselves the knowing-of-God that the passage requires. The hearer who has organized their spiritual life around religious performance — who derives their security from being the right kind of Christian in the right kind of church holding the right kind of doctrine — must be confronted with the possibility that they are practicing a sophisticated form of the same formalism condemned in Judah. The behavioral application is concrete: stop treating your religious performance as the thing you trust in. If your confidence is shaken more by theological challenge than by the question of whether you actually know this God, your boast is in the wrong place.

4. [Mind/Belief] Understand that knowing God is a category different from knowing about God. The passage’s key phrase — “that he understands and knows me” — uses yada, the Old Testament’s most intimate verb of personal knowledge, the same word used for the covenant relationship between husband and wife. It is not a synonym for theological information-acquisition. Many hearers who could articulate correct doctrine about God’s hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah may not yet know God in the way this text means — where that knowledge has produced trust, submission, and a life being shaped by the character of the one known. The corrective is not to undervalue theological knowledge but to insist that the knowing-God which is the only legitimate boast is a full-person engagement: mind, affections, and will all oriented toward and transformed by the God who is known. The hearer who “knows about” steadfast love but has not found it sufficient — who still reaches for wisdom, strength, or riches as primary securities — has not yet arrived at what the passage calls knowing God.

5. [Affections/Worship] Bring your boasting to the cross, where this God is most fully known. Paul’s quotation of this text in 1 Corinthians 1:31 makes explicit what Jeremiah’s passage anticipates: the definitive display of hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah is the cross. The love that would not let sinners go (hesed), the justice that required full payment for sin (mishpat), and the righteousness that both condemned and provided (tsedaqah) all converge in Christ crucified. The hearer who wants to know this God — to know Him in the covenantal, full-person way the text requires — must be directed to the cross as the place where His character is most completely displayed. This is not a theological add-on; it is the passage’s own logic carried to its new covenant fulfillment. The application is doxological: train your heart to return to the cross when confidence slips toward its substitutes. When you feel the pull toward boasting in your wisdom, strength, or riches — including your religious achievement — return to the one place where God’s hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah are most undeniably on display, and let that reorder your glory.

Theological Importance

Theological Importance: This passage makes one of Scripture’s most concentrated and comprehensive claims about the nature of God and the nature of idolatry simultaneously. The LORD here is presented not as one object of trust among others but as the only object whose character is intrinsically boast-worthy — a God who actively practices covenant love, justice, and righteousness in the earth and who delights in these things. This is a God of defined character, not a generic divine force, and the passage insists that knowing this specific God in His specific character is the comprehensive solution to the human problem of misplaced confidence. The triad of hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah is not incidental — it defines what genuine knowledge of the LORD looks like in practice, both in His actions toward His people and in the fruit that knowledge produces in the one who truly knows Him. Theologically, the passage also establishes that external religious identity — the sign without the reality — provides no standing before this God; covenant membership is a matter of the heart, not the body.

Reformed Theological Significance

Reformed Theological Significance: Jeremiah 9:23–24 is one of the Old Testament’s most powerful canonical anchors for the Reformed doctrine of grace alone (sola gratia) — not as a soteriological abstraction but as a total reorientation of human boasting. The Reformation’s core insight was that human beings are constitutionally prone to locating their confidence in their own resources, including their religious resources, and that the gospel dismantles this at the root by insisting that the only legitimate ground of standing before God is God Himself known in grace. This passage grounds that Reformation instinct exegetically: it is not a New Testament novelty but the consistent prophetic indictment of every strategy by which human beings seek to secure themselves before God through their own wisdom, strength, or religious achievement. The circumcision indictment of vv. 25–26 anticipates Paul’s circumcision-of-the-heart argument in Romans 2 and the new covenant internalization of Jeremiah 31 — both of which are definitive for Reformed covenant theology. The passage also directly supports the Reformed understanding that true faith is not merely intellectual assent (notitia) but full-person covenantal trust (fiducia) — “knowing God” in the yada sense is what the Reformers meant by saving faith.

Main Takeaway

Your wisdom, your strength, and your wealth — and yes, your religious performance and your theological pedigree — are not the foundation you think they are. God is calling you to find your entire boast, your whole security, your complete identity in knowing Him — the God whose steadfast love, justice, and righteousness are on active display in the world and are most completely revealed in Christ crucified. Everything else you are tempted to stand on will fail you. This one will not.

Preaching/Teaching Pitfalls

• Reducing the text to an anti-materialism message. The three prohibitions in v. 23 are frequently preached as a warning against materialism or ambition — “don’t trust in money and success.” This is not wrong, but it is seriously incomplete. The passage’s target is the confidence structure, not the possession itself — and crucially, the passage applies equally to wisdom (intellectual pride, competence-worship) and strength (self-reliance, control-seeking), not just wealth. A sermon that focuses only on riches has preached one-third of the text and may leave hearers with the impression that poverty or intellectual modesty would solve the problem. The root issue is where one’s boast lives, not what one possesses.

• Separating verses 23–24 from verses 25–26 and losing the anti-formalism edge. Preachers who treat vv. 25–26 as an appendix or skip them for time reasons lose the passage’s most pastorally pointed movement. Verses 25–26 are the passage’s own application of vv. 23–24 — they show what it looks like to boast in a religious substitute rather than a secular one. Omitting them produces a sermon that confronts worldly self-confidence but leaves religious self-confidence untouched. This is precisely the error of Judah whom the passage condemns.

• Treating “knowing God” as only an experiential or emotional category. Evangelical preaching often applies v. 24 as a call to deeper devotional warmth — “knowing God personally,” in the felt-experience sense. This is not wrong, but it is insufficient. Yada in the Old Testament covenantal context involves submission, loyalty, and behavioral conformity to the character of the one known. A person who “feels close to God” but is not being shaped by hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah has not yet arrived at what the passage means by knowing God. The application of v. 24 must be full-person: cognitive, affectional, and volitional.

• Failing to connect the passage to Christ and the cross. Because vv. 23–24 are Old Testament wisdom literature in form and Paul’s quotations in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 Corinthians 10 are explicit, the preacher who does not trace this line has not finished preaching the passage canonically. The cross is where hesed, mishpat, and tsedaqah converge definitively; it is the event in which God most completely displays the character that is the only legitimate object of boasting. Not making this connection produces a sermon that is morally earnest (“boast in God, not yourself”) but not gospelically grounded (“the God in whom you boast gave everything at the cross to make that boasting possible”).

• Missing the idol-diagnosis function of the three prohibitions. Following the Keller diagnostic lens, the three categories — wisdom, strength, riches — are not simply bad things to trust. They are functional saviors: things that promise what only God can deliver (security, significance, sufficiency). A preacher who merely says “don’t trust in these things” has not done the diagnostic work the text enables. The text should be used to help hearers identify the specific savior-substitute they are running to — the form their misplaced boast takes in their own life. Wisdom-boasting looks different from strength-boasting, which looks different from riches-boasting; each has its own symptom pattern and its own pastoral response.

• Applying the circumcision indictment only to other religious traditions. It is tempting to preach vv. 25–26 as a warning about Roman Catholic sacramentalism, or about “nominal Christianity,” in a way that lets the actual congregation off the hook. The text addresses the covenant people directly — Judah is on the list. The application must land in the room: the Reformed congregation with its doctrinal precision, the baptized family with its church heritage, the longtime elder with his institutional investment — these are the contemporary equivalent of the circumcised Judean, and the passage’s indictment is aimed exactly here.