Jeremiah 15:15

15. Remember me, etc. Here we have another phase of Jeremiah’s complaint, for nothing is so eloquent or so exhaustless as the heart. It contains two elements: 1) The hard lot of having to predict the ruin of his country. 2) His own personal trials in executing this commission.

Revenge me In judging of such words we must not leave out of view the fact that the speaker has a consciousness of being in some eminent and peculiar sense the embodiment of God’s cause, and that the honour of that cause is bound up with his own personal fate. So, for instance, was it with Jonah in his complaint at the sparing of Nineveh. His bitter grief was not a merely low and selfish regard for his reputation as a prophet; were it so, he were a monster and not a man. But, in addition to any sense of personal defeat and dishonour he may have experienced, there was a shock to his faith, and a fear that the cause of Israel’s God had come to dishonour before his enemies. We are not, then, to interpret these words as a vindictive cry for revenge, but a prayer for vindication as a prophet of God.

In thy longsuffering Namely, that which spares the wicked. The prophet had come to feel that the issue was so joined, that to spare the wicked would be to destroy him who by God’s command had predicted their downfall. And so he bases his prayer upon this very longsuffering. He prays that He who deals so leniently with his enemies may mercifully consider his own servant.