21. How, in Jeremiah 8:18, 19, did Jehovah show that he had no heartfelt pleasure in bringing the national calamity?

²¹ Jehovah had no heartfelt pleasure in bringing this national calamity. So he gave due warning, foretelling the depopulating of the land of Judah and the deporting of most of the survivors to faraway Babylon. There the miserable deportees, surprised at Jehovah’s ‘strange work,’ would cry out to him for help.

Strange as that was back there, Christendom’s impending destruction will seem even stranger. Why it comes Jehovah shows in his answer to the cry of the Jewish exiles for help: “Why is it that they have offended me with their graven images, with their vain foreign gods?”​—Jer. 8:19b; Isa. 28:21.