Jeremiah 2:9

"Wherefore I will yet contend with you, saith Jehovah, and with your children's children will I contend. For pass over to the isles of Kittim, and see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently; and see if there hath been such a thing. Hath a nation changed its gods, which yet are no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be ye horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith Jehovah. For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water."

Jeremiah 2:13 is the climax of this paragraph. The first verse (Jeremiah 2:9) uses legal terms that represent God as pressing a lawsuit against his people for doing a totally unheard of thing, namely, they had deserted the true God and gone after Baal. Furthermore, in all history it was never even heard of that even a pagan nation would forsake its ancestral gods!

Perhaps the reason why pagan nations had so generally clung to their ancient "no gods" was rooted in the fact that the worship of such nonentities was rooted in and designed to satisfy basic instincts and passions; whereas the higher religion of the true God was designed to lift man to a far more spiritual and exalted level.

"Kittim ... and Kedar ..." (Jeremiah 2:10). Kittim (Chittim in some versions) is the same as Cyprus. "Cyprus represents the West; Kedar (in N. Arabia) represents the East. Taken together they stand for the whole pagan world."[10]

"My people have committed two evils ..." (Jeremiah 2:13). Whereas the pagan nations were guilty of the one evil of worshipping their "no-gods," Israel was guilty of two evils: (1) forsaking the true God, and (2) going after worthlessness.

The foolishness and stupidity of Israel's dual crime is illustrated here by the imaginary action of a rancher or farmer stopping up a flowing spring of water and constructing cisterns in place of it. The cisterns soon cracked and could hold no water.

Sermons sometimes stress the stagnant waters of a cistern compared with spring waters; but the text states that such cisterns "could hold no water," not even stagnant water. This is indeed an apt illustration of the folly of men who turn away from the saving religion of God to build instead of it their own worthless systems of religion.