Jeremiah 47: The Consciousness of Strength and Weakness

Compare with the original King James text

🔍 Explore Verse Ranges in Jeremiah 47

Quick Insights

A sudden flood represents an emergent emotional wave or collective impulse that overruns familiar boundaries and compels inner change.
The tumult of horses and chariots is the restless energy of imagination in motion, driving destiny when it is given charge from within.
Loss, stripping, and the demand to put away the sword reflect the ego's fall and the invitation to cease fighting and allow transformation.
Quiet that cannot be achieved by mere stillness points to an active inner appointment: consciousness has assigned an end to old allies and must face what remains.

What is the Main Point of Jeremiah 47?

The chapter centers on the principle that imagination and feeling are the formative waters that rise and reshape experience; when a charged inner picture surges, it carries away familiar supports and compels a reconfiguration of identity. This is not punishment from outside but the inevitable consequence of a mind that has entertained an unresisted image until it becomes reality. The drama of uprooting, of families no longer leaning on their accustomed hands, is the psychological truth that when foundational beliefs dissolve, dependency patterns collapse and new alignments are appointed by the inward law of assumption. The call is to recognize that the instruments of change are your own creative consciousness and to learn how to steward them rather than be carried helplessly by their momentum.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Jeremiah 47?

At the deepest level this passage speaks to the role of inner pressure and its purifying effect. Waters rising from the north are the unconscious currents that gather force until they overflow the conscious mind, revealing submerged content and demanding integration. Such floods can feel violent because they dislodge the props of identity—roles, loyalties, habits—that once seemed to protect you. Spiritual maturation occurs when these inundations force a choice: cling to the old, weakened supports or surrender to the redesign that imagination is already constructing. The imagery of weapons and the frustrated command to rest is really a portrait of the will encountering appointed change. The sword, once an active tool of defense and judgment, is told to sheathe itself because the transformation at hand is not enacted by aggression but by an internal reorientation. Quiet does not mean passivity here; it means aligning feeling and assumption so the creative agent within may complete its appointed task. The ruin of certain cities symbolizes the shedding of identities whose continuance would block the emergence of a more authentic scene. In living practice this is an invitation to observe which inner allies are being cut off and to imagine deliberately what is to remain.

Key Symbols Decoded

The overflowing flood signifies overwhelming feeling energized by imagination and directed thought; it is how inner conviction gathers the momentum to alter outer fact. The north, as the source, points to unseen origins within the psyche—those parts we tend to ignore until they become insistent. Horses, chariots, and wheels are speed and structure in consciousness: the patterns and habits that give motion to belief and propel it into manifestation. Fathers who cannot look back to their children evoke the collapse of intergenerational narratives and authority figures when they lose their binding power. Baldness and the cutting off of cities are the stripping away of vanity, false protection, and worn identities, revealing the naked field upon which new imagination must work. The sword of the lord is the faculty of decisive imagination; its rest is the paradox that creation often requires surrendering the aggressive clutch of effort. Quiet is not the absence of force but the harmonizing of impulse with appointed intention, an inner appointment that makes compounds of former fears and allies obsolete. In this reading, every geographic name and military image is a state of mind given voice so we may recognize the psychological process behind what appears as historical calamity.

Practical Application

Begin by noticing any rising flood within you: a sudden swell of feeling, obsession, or collective anxiety. Name the flood without amplifying it, then turn your imagination to the state you intend to inhabit. Rather than resisting the current, step into the position of the appointed mind that observes and directs. Envision, in sensory detail, the end scene where the old supports are gone and a new way of being stands firm. Feed that scene with feeling until it gains the inner momentum of horses and chariots, not as frantic energy but as sustained conviction. When the inner sword demands to act, practice sheathing it by shifting from combative thoughts to constructive assumption. Imagine the tools of the ego being retired with gratitude as they have served their time, and rehearse the new alliance you wish to hold with yourself. In daily life carry brief imaginal scenes that confirm the new arrangement: a quiet decision made and kept, an action taken from the state you have imagined. Over time the appointed change completes itself; the landscape of your life will reflect the inner flood transformed into a purposeful river that irrigates the ground of a remade identity.

The Inner Stage: A Psychological Drama of Conscious Creation

Jeremiah 47 reads like a short, concentrated psychological drama: the battlefield is the human mind, the invader is an imaginal surge, and the Philistines are inner attitudes—stubborn, habitual ways of seeing—that must yield to a higher creative act. Read as inner theatre, every place name and violent image becomes a state of consciousness and every movement of armies and waters becomes the motion of imagination reshaping perception. This chapter, then, is not a news report of external events but a map of inner transformation and the inevitability of creative consequence when imagination moves.

The opening image—“waters rise up out of the north, and shall be an overflowing flood”—is the central psychological event. Water in the Bible often signifies feeling and imagination; the north suggests what is hidden, higher, or originating beyond ordinary sense. A rising flood from the north is an influx from deeper awareness or higher imaginative activity that overflows the conscious mind and washes over the settled mental landscape. It is the moment when a new vision, a conviction, or a creative insistence welling up within can no longer be contained. This flood will “overflow the land, and all that is therein”: not destroying for its own sake, but redefining what is taken for granted. In personal terms, this is the creative act in imagination that transforms identity by displacing old loyalties.

The reaction of the inhabitants—crying and howling—portrays fear and shock when familiar internal structures are threatened. The fathers who “shall not look back to their children for feebleness of hands” are the executive functions, parental principles, or the mind’s custodians who find themselves unable to sustain the old ways. Hands grow feeble when belief in old defenses and rational justifications is exhausted. The visible metaphor of parental incapacity points to a psychological reality: when the imaginal current strong enough to reconstitute reality flows, the guardians of the old order feel powerless to hold the past in place.

The “noise of the stamping of the hoofs of his strong horses, the rushing of his chariots, and the rumbling of his wheels” dramatizes the felt intensity of imagination in motion. Horses and chariots are not literal instruments but energized faculties—will, focused attention, dramatic visualization—charging forward with unstoppable momentum. The rumbling connotes the approach of a new interpretation that will be experienced as overwhelming because it carries with it kinetic force. In inner life, when imagination is active in a vivid, determined, and repeated way, it feels like an oncoming army; it drowns out complacent rationalizations and compels different outer results.

The target of the flood is the Philistines. As an inner symbol, the Philistines represent hardened resistance: habitual, worldly-minded attitudes, perhaps pride in material competence separated from spiritual insight. They are the parts of self that take pride in being practical, in controlling circumstances by external means—or that cling to a narrative of limitation. The declaration that “the day that cometh to spoil all the Philistines” has the ring of inevitability: once the imaginal flood has been allowed its full expression, these resistant aspects will be dislodged. Spoiling here is not moral punishment but the dismantling of old patterns that no longer belong to the emerging identity.

The mention of Tyre and Zidon—coastal centers of commerce—as helpers cut off points directly to reliance on external validation, reputation, and the marketplace of ideas. When imagination revises inner conviction, the external props of identity (status, reputation, alliances) fall away. Psychologically, Tyre and Zidon are the voices of public opinion and habitual approval that buttress the Philistine self. To be “cut off” is to lose dependence upon them; it is an invitation to rely instead upon the creative authority within.

“Remnant of the country of Caphtor” evokes ancestral habits—old inherited scripts and cultural assumptions. A remnant being “cut off” signals that even ancestral tendencies succumb to the imaginal sovereignty. The creative act of imagination reorders not only personal beliefs but the inherited narratives that once seemed permanent. When the interior flood flows, inherited tendencies that do not align with the new vision are naturally left behind.

The specific images of Gaza’s baldness and Ashkelon being cut off are vivid psychological portraits. Baldness here symbolizes humiliation, exposure, the loss of veneer. Gaza’s pride or protective covering is stripped. Ashkelon’s removal of status mirrors the internal experience of having one’s self-concepts pared down to essentials. The question “how long wilt thou cut thyself?”—a strange, painful image of self-mutilation—speaks to a familiar inner behavior: self-punishment through guilt, shame, or asceticism. The psyche often responds to the influx of higher vision not with celebration but with punitive measures, hoping to prove worthiness by deprivation. The prophetic voice asks this practice to stop: it is an appeal against needless self-flagellation, a call to let the divine current restore rather than be appeased by pain.

The “sword of the LORD” is perhaps the most intimate instrument in this drama. The sword represents decisive imagination—cutting through illusions and severing false identifications. It is called to action by the higher Self and then asked, rhetorically, “how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still.” The creative power, once wielded to correct and clear, must be allowed to rest when the work is accomplished. The instruction to sheath the sword is a psychological instruction to stop active struggle against the ego once the new pattern has taken root. Continuous aggression—ongoing negative will—only perpetuates conflict. The proper use of imaginative force is precise and purposeful; when its appointed task is done, peace must follow.

The text’s closing question—“How can it be quiet, seeing the LORD hath given it a charge against Ashkelon, and against the sea shore? there hath he appointed it.”—reminds us that imaginative force is not arbitrary. It is given a charge by the higher consciousness (the LORD) and appointed against those edge regions of mind (the seashore) where conscious and unconscious meet. The shore is the margin between known and unknown, where old stories cling and where new possibility can be fruitfully contested. The creative power acts there to displace the old story with a new state of being, to redefine boundaries and install a fresh identity.

The psychological teaching here is practical and specific: transformation is not a passive moral occurrence but an imaginal event. The flood will come if imagination is allowed to rise; the old guardians will wail because their authority is ending. The work of the inner sword is both surgical and ordained: it removes the elements that resist the higher vision. Once the new identity is established, the sword rests—there must be a period of integration when the new reality is accepted without continued combat. There is also a caution: do not confuse necessary correction with cruelty. The “cutting off” of allies and the stripping bare of vanities are functions of reorientation, not vindictive obliteration. They are corrective acts of an inner surgeon whose aim is wholeness.

Applied, this chapter invites the reader to recognize when a flood of inner conviction is rising and to welcome it. Do not attempt to prop up obsolete certainties with the commerce of public opinion; do not engage in destructive self-punishment when the old identities dissolve; wield decisiveness with imagination when change calls, and then put the sword away. In short, let imagination do what imagination does best: create new form from newly authorized feeling and thought. The world you call external will answer as naturally as the river answers the rising headwaters: it will conform to the imaginal act.

Thus Jeremiah 47, as psychological drama, is an elemental sermon on creative consciousness. It tells of an inevitable overthrow of outworn parts of self by a rising inward current, the necessary loss of external props, the surgical action of directed imagination, and the wise stillness that must follow victory. Read inwardly, it reassures that upheaval is the sign of formation, that the “invader” is the very power of creativity arriving to reconstitute identity, and that the final injunction is to let the newly created world stand.

Common Questions About Jeremiah 47

Does Jeremiah 47 teach judgment or inner change according to Neville Goddard's metaphysical readings?

Jeremiah 47 reads as an account of inner change rather than mere external punishment when seen metaphysically; Neville Goddard would interpret the calamity language as the Law of Consciousness correcting erroneous identity. The 'sword' and the 'appointed' force describe imagination's power to cut away false assumptions, and the people's flight dramatizes the removal of limiting beliefs. The injunction to be still is the practice: cease striving externally, enter the state that reflects the desired outcome, and allow the inner movement to manifest outwardly (Jeremiah 47). Thus the passage functions as corrective, not vindictive, urging transformation of the heart and mind.

Where can I find Neville Goddard-style commentary or a PDF applying Jeremiah 47 to the law of assumption?

If you seek a Neville Goddard-style commentary applying Jeremiah 47 to the law of assumption, begin with Neville's recorded lectures and his books such as The Law and the Promise and Feeling Is the Secret, then search for transcribed talks and study notes labeled 'Jeremiah 47' or 'prophecy as imagination.' Many students compile PDFs of lecture transcripts, guided meditations, and scripture applications; check reputable archives, university libraries, or community scripture-study groups for downloadable compilations. Also compare the biblical context with commentary that reads prophecy as states of consciousness and practice the mental techniques offered. Use discernment: prefer sources that show how to assume the end and dwell in the fulfilled state.

What practical imaginal exercises can be drawn from Jeremiah 47 using Neville Goddard's 'feeling is the secret'?

Using 'feeling is the secret' as a method, begin by choosing a single image from Jeremiah 47—the rising waters or the tramping horses—and rehearse a short evening scene in vivid sensory detail. Enliven the scene until you can feel the flood as cleansing or the chariot's rhythm as confidence; allow bodily sensations of peace, safety, and accomplishment to dominate. Repeat the scene until sleep, or use a five-minute seated practice in the day, holding the end-state as already true. If fear or doubt appears, observe it as a passing tide and return to the felt reality. Consistency of feeling, more than intellectual effort, produces inner change.

How can I use the images of the sea and fleeing people in Jeremiah 47 as guided visualizations for transformation?

Begin by settling quietly and holding the scene of the sea rising and people fleeing from Jeremiah 47 as an inner drama of change, not an external catastrophe. Visualize the water as a cleansing current that dissolves specific fears and false self-images, notice its sound, temperature, and movement, and feel how each wave carries away a named limitation; see the people as aspects of yourself that step toward the shore and disappear, relieved and free. Anchor the image with bodily sensations of lightness and calm, then rest in the assumption that the change is accomplished and act from that inner conviction upon waking. Repeat nightly until the new state feels natural.

How would Neville Goddard interpret Jeremiah 47's prophecy against the Philistines for modern manifesting practice?

Modern manifesting practice reading of Jeremiah 47 treats the prophetic images as states of consciousness rather than external doom. Neville Goddard would say the rising waters, the stamping horses and the panic of the people portray an inner overturning when the imagination is awakened; the flood is the feeling that overwhelms old identity and the chariots are the momentum of sustained assumption. The repeated command to "rest, and be still" invites you to assume the fulfilled state and persist in it until outward circumstances reflect that inner reality (Jeremiah 47). Practically, this passage teaches enter the scene mentally, feel the end accomplished, then remain quietly convinced.