Background: Having given several visions and messages to encourage the people in their rebuilding and to live differently than they had before the exile, God now addresses leadership in particular. The "shepherds" of Israel had especially let God and His people down in the demise of the Land. First Israel, the Northern kingdom, then Judah in the South had kings who sold out to foreign nations and their gods, forgetting Who it was who had given them the land and all its blessings. As their hearts turned cold toward God, they also became hardened to the needs of others; they treated their people as sheep that could simple be bought and sold, with no care for their well-being.
Key Verses: 9 So I said, “I will not be your shepherd. What is to die, let it die. What is to be destroyed, let it be destroyed. And let those who are left devour the flesh of one another.” 10 And I took my staff Favor, and I broke it, annulling the covenant that I had made with all the peoples. 11 So it was annulled on that day, and the sheep traders, who were watching me, knew that it was the word of the Lord. 12 Then I said to them, “If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them.” And they weighed out as my wages thirty pieces of silver. 13 Then the Lord said to me, “Throw it to the potter”—the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the Lord, to the potter. 14 Then I broke my second staff Union, annulling the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.
Thoughts: As Israel and her leaders continued down their path of disobedience and turning their backs on God, He had come to the point where He annulled the covenant he had made with them. Along the way He also divided the two nations, keeping Judah as pure as possible as long as possible before it too had to be punished and exiled. In this paragraph we see the passage quoted in the Gospels about the price Judas received for betraying the Great Shepherd, Christ. This, of course, was the ultimate rejection of God and His plan. Like Judas and the leaders of Israel, God was sending a warning not to fall back into the same state of affairs.
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