9. A message to the prophets: I am very sad—my heart is broken. All my bones are shaking. Because of the Lord and his holy words, I am like a man who is drunk.
10. The land of Judah is full of people who commit adultery. They are unfaithful in many ways. So God cursed the land, and it became very dry. The plants are dried and dying in the pastures. The fields have become like the desert. The prophets are evil. They use their influence and power in the wrong way.
11. This message is from the Lord: “The prophets and even the priests are evil. I have seen them doing evil things in my own Temple.
12. I will stop giving my messages to them. They will walk in darkness. The road will be slippery for those prophets and priests, and they will fall in that darkness. I will bring disaster on them; I will punish them.” This message is from the Lord.
13. “I saw the prophets of Samaria doing wrong things. I saw them prophesy in the name of the false god Baal. They led the people of Israel away from me.
14. I have even seen the prophets of Jerusalem doing sinful things. They are committing adultery and living a life of lies. They support their fellow prophets and never stop doing evil. They have become like Sodom; they are all like Gomorrah.”
15. So this is what the Lord All-Powerful says about those Jerusalem prophets: “I will make them suffer. Their food will be bitter, their water like poison. I will punish them because they started a spiritual sickness that spread through the whole country.”
16. This is what the Lord All-Powerful says: “Don’t pay attention to what those prophets are saying to you. They are trying to fool you. They talk about visions, but they did not get their visions from me. Their visions come from their own minds.
17. Some of the people hate the real messages from the Lord, so the prophets give them a different message. They say, ‘You will have peace.’ Some of the people are very stubborn. They do only what they want to do. So the prophets say, ‘Nothing bad will happen to you!’
18. But none of these prophets has stood in the heavenly council. None of them has seen or heard the message from the Lord. None of them has paid close attention to his message.
19. Now the punishment from the Lord will come like a storm. His anger will be like a tornado. It will come crashing down on the heads of those wicked people.
20. The Lord’S anger will not stop until he finishes what he plans to do. When that day is over, you will understand this clearly.
21. I did not send those prophets, but they ran to tell their messages. I did not speak to them, but they spoke in my name.
22. If they had stood in my heavenly council, then they would have told my messages to the people of Judah. They would have stopped the people from doing bad things. They would have stopped them from doing evil.”
23. This message is from the Lord. “I am God, and I am always near. I am not far away.