It is not improbable that Jeremiah was almost a child when he spoke these words. Considering the time to which he lived, he must have been young in the thirteenth year of Josiah, young enough to make the most literal sense of the expression in the text a reasonable one. Jeremiah has a kind of feminine tenderness and susceptibility; strength was to be educed out of a spirit which was inclined to be timid and shrinking. Think of such a vision as being presented to a mind cast in that mould: "See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant."
I. The discoveries and revelations to the minds of the prophets became deeper in proportion as they approached nearer to some great crisis in their country's history. It was possible for the Israelite of an earlier time to think of the covenant which God had made with His people as an act of grace expressing, no doubt, the mind of a gracious Being, but still almost arbitrary. Isaiah was gradually educated to know that the covenant denoted a real and eternal relation between God and man in the person of a Mediator. If that truth is not brought out with the same force and distinctness in Jeremiah, if he is not in the same sense as the other the evangelical prophet, yet he had even a deeper conviction that a Divine Spirit was with him continually, a Spirit which was seeking to subdue his will all wills to Itself. That men should break loose from this gracious government, should choose to be independent of it, seemed to him the saddest and strangest thing in the world.
II. The greatest cause of dismay to Jeremiah was the falsehood of the priests and prophets. No doubt the official or personal self-conceit of the priests, which arose from their forgetfulness of their relation to the people at large, was one of their greatest offence's in his eyes. But these sins arose from their not confessing that they were called by the Lord to be witnesses of His sympathy: whenever they were not witnesses for Him, they were necessarily proud and self-seeking. Jeremiah could only be qualified for his work by feeling in himself every one of the evil tendencies which he imputed to the priests generally. He had to feel all the peculiar temptations of his tribe and class to vanity, self-glorification, self-indulgence, to feel how quickly they might fall into all the commonest, grossest habits of other men; while there is also a subtle, radical, internal wickedness that is nearer to them than to those whose offerings they present.
F. D. Maurice, Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament,p. 378.
Reference: Jeremiah 1:7-10. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 195.