What is the Lord’s response to the exiles who say, “The LORD has raised up prophets for us in Babylon”?

The Lord continues his message to the exiles through the letter he has instructed Jeremiah to write to them (Jeremiah 29:1–2). Using the language of the covenant, the exiles have accepted the false prophets in Babylon as those whom the LORD has raised up…for us in Babylon (see Deuteronomy 18:15, Deuteronomy 18:18).¹ The Lord will address the issue of these prophets directly in Jeremiah 29:20–23, but first he speaks to the exiles concerning the future of those who had not been taken into exile and had remained in Jerusalem. On the king who sits on the throne of David (Zedekiah), and all the people who dwell in this city (Jerusalem), the Lord is going to send sword, famine, and pestilence. He will make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them. This is the well-known language of judgment in the form of war and invasion that Jeremiah has used in many sermons (see Jeremiah 6:10; Jeremiah 15:4;Jeremiah 18:16; Jeremiah 19:8;Jeremiah 24:9; Jeremiah 25:18). This drives home the message to the exiles that the Lord’s judgment of Jerusalem was not over with the exile of 597 BC.² The fact that there is still a king in Jerusalem and a population that was not taken into exile feeds into the false prophets' message that the Lord’s favour was with Judah, that judgment was over and the return from exile was imminent. But that is a lie. The reality is that the Lord will make those who remained in Jerusalem like vile figs that are so rotten they cannot be eaten. This takes the reader back to Jeremiah 24:1–10 where the Lord uses the image of bad and good figs to show that it is in fact those who went into exile who will ultimately experience the Lord’s covenant blessings and not those who escaped exile and remained in Jerusalem; they would instead experience further covenant curses. Judgment is still coming on those in Jerusalem says the Lord because they did not pay attention to my words. He had sent these words through his servants, such as Jeremiah, who were his true prophets as opposed to the false prophets whom he did not send. There is a warning for the exiles as well. They too would not listen to the Lord’s prophets.³ Even as they read this letter from Jeremiah they must listen to the Lord’s word and stop listening to the lies of the false prophets because Jeremiah’s message is the total opposite to what the false prophets were saying.