“What is the burden of the LORD?”
The full verse · Jeremiah 23:33 · KJV
And when this , or the , or a , shall thee, , What is the of the ? thou shalt then unto them, What ? I will even you, the .
Asked by
Asked to
The collective audience of Judah who had mocked Jeremiah’s prophetic messages, including ordinary citizens, false prophets, and priests who used ‘burden’ sarcastically.
Why It Was Asked
The purpose behind the questionGod asks to strip away their sarcastic pretense and force confrontation with reality. The counter-question ‘What burden?’ refuses to play along with their mockery while simultaneously revealing that they themselves have become the unbearable weight He will remove.
The Response
What Scripture recordsThe text provides no recorded response from the people. God follows His counter-question immediately with the declaration ‘I will even forsake you, saith the LORD,’ indicating judgment rather than dialogue (Jeremiah 23:33).
The Bigger Picture
Where this fits in God's storyGod’s question ‘What burden?’ cuts through layers of sarcasm with surgical precision. The people had turned massa into a joke, now God turns it into a mirror. The rhetorical force lies in God refusing to dignify their mockery with the prophetic oracle they sarcastically requested. Instead, by questioning the question itself, He exposes their guilt while announcing their fate. Why ask rather than simply pronounce judgment? The question form forces recognition that they brought this on themselves. Their own mouths condemned them by trivializing divine warning. Theologically, this moment represents the terrifying transition from God’s patient pursuit to His judicial abandonment, when He stops burdening mockers with truth and removes Himself as their burden.
God sometimes answers your questions with questions that expose what you’re really asking. When the Judeans mocked God’s messages as burdensome, He turned the question back on them: they were the burden. This should stop us before we complain that following Jesus feels too hard or that conviction weighs too heavy. Jesus asked, ‘Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you?’ (Luke 6:46). The burden we resist may be the light yoke Christ offers (Matthew 11:30), while our sin is the crushing weight we’ve mistaken for freedom. Let God’s penetrating questions search your heart rather than defending your complaints. His rebukes are mercy before judgment falls.
Built from the biblical text and checked against trusted commentaries and lexicons. References & Sources
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