It's getting off subject (of the first age) but in this chapter God is warning His children to straighten up and follow Him, "put away thine abominations". If they don't He warns, "My fury come forth like fire...".
In vs. 7 He warns "the lion is come up from his thicket. That was the king of Babylon when he took them captive but he was only a type for the the anti-christ, the destroyer who comes at the 6th trump. He warns us that he will come but He has given many examples of protecting His children. The big "If" attached to that protection is that we know who the fake is and that he comes first.
In vs.13 and 14 He tells us that anti-christ will come and he shows up in Jerusalem. God tells us what He did in the first age, how He shook the earth and split continents apart so by vs.18 we know to be aware of what He did to end the first age and be prepared for the end of the second.
That probably didn't make a great deal of sense to you in such a condensed version but it is much more than telling us about Jerusalem falling to the Babylonians. It is also our warning for end times which He compares to what He did to the first age (23-28).
I find the idea of an age before this one very plausible and it answers some difficult questions. We know we will have an age after this one - why couldn't there have been one before this one?
Well, then you have a motive for infusing your own ideas into the text...ideas which may or may not be correct. To be perfectly honest, I just don't know. By no means am I an expert on the Bible, but I just don't see what you see.
Right now, I'm reading the Acts of the Apostles, and when I finish the New Testament, I'll start reading the Old Testament. I don't really like to pick and choose chapters, since they in a lot of cases, there are cross references to understanding the text...although, from debating Biblical issues over the years, I'm quite familiar with the first few chapters of Genesis, and I've researched much of it in it's original language, and I envy those who are fluent in it.
My point is, I want to read the Bible diligently, and as a whole, and when I happen to come to Jeremiah, only then will I have a better understanding of things. If God so chooses to enlighten me before that comes to pass, then even better, but sometimes I tend to think that it is a sign of disrespect on my part to comment on those things I really no nothing about, and although google can be a good asset to research and analysis, it can never replace sitting down with the good book and giving it a good honest read, no matter how long it takes.
Yeah.....I never had a problem knowing that the Lord had no beginning (existed for all eternity) because time is a relative thing based on a physical reality. Whereas God exists in a spiritual realm where there is nothing to measure time....thus no beginning or end.
But, when told that this physical thing we call the universe is only 6000 years old......it makes me wonder why it took God so long to get around to creating it. Just what has He been doing in the ageless past?