This is another autobiographical "confession."It is a personal lament or curse poem concerning the sorrow Jeremiah had experienced for most of his life because of the calling that the Lord had laid on him.
"In these verses Jeremiah plumbed the depths of bitterness and despair, revealing a depth of misery and agony surpassing any other cry of anguish recorded among his lamentations."294
20:14 Again Jeremiah cursed the day of his birth; he felt bitterly sorry that he had ever been born (cf. 15:10; Job 3:3-6).295He meant that his birth occurred on a day that God had cursed, and that accounted for his misfortune.
20:15 Jeremiah felt that it would have been better if his father had never received the news that he had a baby boy. Normally the birth of a male child was the best news a man could receive since the birth of a boy guaranteed the perpetuation of his family line. Jeremiah was similar to that messenger in that he thought he was bringing good news of escape from divine deliverance to the nation, but it turned out to be bad news of distress and battle cries.296
20:16-17 The messenger of Jeremiah's birth would have been better off, from the prophet's perspective, if he had been slain by the Lord, as when the Lord overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). He would have been well-advised to run for cover on that day. The messenger was the object of Jeremiah's curse because the prophet wished the Lord had slain him in his mother's womb rather than bringing him to birth.
20:18 Jeremiah bewailed the fact that he ever came out of his mother's womb since his life had been so full of trouble, sorrow, and shame.297
"What these curses convey . . . is a state of mind, not a prosaic plea. The heightened language is not there to be analysed [sic]: it is there to bowl us over. Together with other tortured cries from him and his fellow sufferers, these raw wounds in Scripture remain lest we forget the sharpness of the age-long struggle, or the frailty of the finest overcomers."298
"Jeremiah was discouraged because he was a man standing against a flood. And I want to say to you that nobody who is fighting the battle in our own generation can float on a Beauty Rest mattress. If you love God and love men and have compassion for them, you will pay a real price psychologically. . . .
"But what does God expect of Jeremiah? What does God expect of every man who preaches into a lost age like ours? I'll tell you what God expects. He simply expects a man to go right on. He doesn't scold a man for being tired, but neither does He expect him to stop his message because people are against him."299
