Deedat doesn’t spell out what he is trying to say here especially with the Jeremiah 1:5 verse. Surely he doesn’t find it strange that the almighty God who is eternal – that is outside of time so that the future and the past and the present are all the same to him – could not have a plan for Jeremiah that predates Jeremiah. Prophets are called by God and it is nothing to the all knowing eternal God to call Jeremiah before he was born and even before he had created time.

 

With Jeremiah we can only assume he is bringing up God deceiving people argument again. This was dealt with in section 14f, but let us take a look at this example. If the passage is read we find that Jeremiah is complaining about what his life had become. He had just been beaten and put in the stocks for prophesying for God and his whole life as a prophet was hard. In that complaint he does complain against God. What he is saying is ‘you never made it known how much I would have to suffer to be a prophet of God’. This is strictly not true because he had the examples of the other prophets before him, but we can excuse him because of the great suffering of both body and mind that he was enduring. If we read the whole passage we see that he even goes as far as to curse the day of his birth “Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!”- Jeremiah 20:14, which happens to be a quote from Job when he himself was also in a terrible predicament. But interestingly he does praise God regardless in Jeremiah 20:13 “Sing to the Lord! Give praise to the Lord! He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of the wicked” and also declares that he is powerless to not proclaim God’s word in Jeremiah 20:9 “But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” So again we see again that context destroys Deedat’s argument.

What we have here is that Jeremiah is speaking out of his suffering but is still trusting in the Lord. This is a real relationship with God – He wants us to come to Him with our problems and complaints and talk to him about them but we do it out a heart of trust in God with a commitment to serve him, and an acceptance that God knows exactly what He is doing. Compare this to the relationship the Muslim has with his God who is cold and distant.