Jeremiah 21:8

By the civil message which the king sent to Jeremiah it appeared that both he and the people began to have a respect for him, which it would have been Jeremiah's policy to make some advantage of for himself; but the reply which God obliges him to make is enough to crush the little respect they begin to have for him, and to exasperate them against him more than ever. Not only the predictions in the foregoing verses, but the prescriptions in these, were provoking; for here, I. He advises the people to surrender and ??desert to the Chaldeans, as the only means left them to save their lives, Jer 21:8-10. This counsel was very displeasing to those who were flattered by their false prophets into a desperate resolution to hold out to the last extremity, trusting to the strength of their walls and the courage of their soldiery to keep out the enemy, or to their foreign aids to raise the siege. The prophet assures them, "The city shall be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall not only plunder it, but burn it with fire, for God himself hath set his face against this city for evil and not for good, to lay it waste and not to protect it, for evil which shall have no good mixed with it, no mitigation or merciful allay; and therefore, if you would make the best of bad, you must beg quarter of the Chaldeans, and surrender prisoners of war." In vain did Rabshakeh persuade the Jews to do this while they had God for them (Isa 36:16), but it was the best course they could take now that God was against them. Both the law and the prophets had often set before them life and death in another sense - life if they obey the voice of God, death if they persist in disobedience, Deu 30:19. But they had slighted that life which would have made them truly happy, to upbraid them wit…

21:8-10 Although the Lord had decided to destroy the city of Jerusalem regardless, individual people still had a choice between life, probably as slaves in Babylon, or death by Babylonian swords (cp. Deut 20:10-13).