Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy shame may appear.
Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face - rather, 'throw up thy skirts over thy face,' or head; done by way of ignominy to captive women and to prostitutes (Nahum 3:5). The Jews' punishment should answer to their crime. As their sin had been perpetrated in the most public places, so God would expose them to the contempt of other nations most openly (Lamentations 1:8).
Neighings - (Jeremiah 5:8) image from the lust of horses; the lust after idols degrades to the level of the brute.
Thine abomination on the hills - where, as being nearer heaven, sacrifices were thought most acceptable to the gods.
Wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be? - literally, 'thou wilt not be made clean after how long a time yet.' (So Jeremiah 13:23). Jeremiah denies the moral possibility of one so long hardened in sin becoming soon cleansed. (But see Jeremiah 32:17; Luke 18:27.)
Remarks:
(1) God had attached Israel as closely to Him as the linen girdle that Orientals wear upon their loins cleaves to the person of the wearer. The law and the covenant which He gave them, and all the tokens of His favour toward them, were so many ties of intimate union between Him and them; but, by their idolatry and unfaithfulness, they had buried their privileges, like the one talent hidden in the earth by the unprofitable servant; they had mingled with the pagan nations around, and had utterly lost the purity of their high calling in moral filthiness, so as to be like "a marred girdle, profitable for nothing" (Jeremiah 13:7). Let us remember, in the possession of our higher spiritual privileges, that only in so far as we come out from the ungodly world in spirit, and be separate, so as not to touch the unclean thing (2 Corinthians 6:17), do we fulfill the ends of our high calling in Christ, and are indeed that which God designed Israel to be, "a name of joy, a praise, and an honour unto the Lord," before all the world (Jeremiah 13:11; Jeremiah 33:9). But if we bury our souls in earthly fashions, aims, and pleasures, we lose our distinctive character as the people of the Lord, and can only look for the doom of the unprofitable servant-to be cast into outer darkness (Matthew 25:30). Just as salt which has lost its savour is thenceforth good for nothing but to be trodden under foot (Matthew 5:13); so, if inconsistent and carnal while making a high profession, we shall be despised by the very men whose favour we have preferred to that of God, even as apostate Israel was punished by the very world-power for whose sake she had sacrificed the favour of God.
(2) As the wine-bottle is adapted for being filled with wine (Jeremiah 13:12), so men's sins fit them, as vessels of wrath (Romans 9:22), to be filled with "the wine of the wrath of God, poured out without mixture" of mercy (Revelation 14:10). As wine takes away the reason, so God's judgment reduces the reprobate to that state of impotent distraction that they are, like potter's vessels, "dashed one against another" (Jeremiah 13:14), to their mutual destruction.
(3) Pride is the secret spring of the sinner's present obstinacy and ultimate ruin (Jeremiah 13:15; Jeremiah 13:17). He is too proud to humble himself before God - "give glory to the Lord" (Jeremiah 13:16) - by a penitent confession of sin, and a heartfelt repentance and supplication for mercy. Yet God lovingly still appeals to all such even now to turn to Him, while yet the day of grace lasts, and their feet have not yet stumbled into the bottomless abyss. Soon the darkness of eternal night shall close in over the lost: then shall they in vain "look for light," when God shall have turned it into "the shadow of death and gross darkness" (Jeremiah 13:16).
(4) Meanwhile the minister "weeps in secret" for those who will not weep for themselves (Jeremiah 13:17). He feels acutely what blessedness their pride robs them of now and hereafter, and what a terrible future is before them, unless they repent. A harsh and hard spirit toward the unconverted ill becomes those who remember how hard their own heart was naturally, before God of His infinite grace touched and melted it. Tenderness and compassion are the appropriate characteristics of the servants of that loving Saviour who wept over Jerusalem, the city which was so soon about to crucify Him. Like Christ, we should seek by love to gather men to Him, "as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings" (Matthew 23:37), rather than to scatter by a repulsive and denunciatory spirit.
(5) Those calamities are the hardest to bear which, as in the case of Israel's punishment the sinner brings on himself (Jeremiah 13:21). When professing Christians give themselves up to the world, what can they "say" but that God deals in righteous retribution when He assigns them their eternal portion with the worlds? just as Judah, having given herself up to Babylon, had her place of punishment assigned to her in Babylon. If the cause of punishment be asked, in either case the answer is the same - "for the greatness of thine iniquity" (Jeremiah 13:22).
(6) The sinner naturally has no more power to change his heart than the Ethiopian has power to change his skin, or the leopard his spots (Jeremiah 13:23). Sin is the spiritual blackness of the soul. Then habit or "custom" also confirms the wrong bias given by nature, binding the sinner in a twofold indissoluble bond. But Almighty grace can effect for us what we cannot for ourselves. Moral blackness of nature, confirmed by lengthened habit, forms no insuperable obstacle to the all-conquering Spirit. He can and will make the sinner who seeks Him through Christ "whiter than snow" (Psalms 51:7). Let none then despair. Let all repair to the "fountain opened for uncleanness."