If you were to ask a group of people to take pencil and paper and sketch a portrait of an Old Testament prophet, many of them would come up with remarkably similar visions: an old gentleman of fierce demeanor with a long, unkempt, grey beard, dressed in flowing robes of coarse material, and perhaps with a gnarled wooden staff in his hand. It would probably look like Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments.

That would not be a bad picture. It would be fairly representative, but only "fairly" so because there is a very different picture in scripture of one of the best-known prophets of all — Jeremiah. To be sure, he may well have looked like that by the time his career was drawing to a close, but he was nothing like that at the beginning. You see, at the start of his ministry,…