Bible Commentaries

Three Shameful Possibilities In Human Life

Jeremiah 2:6-8

The second chapter of Jeremiah sets forth Almighty God as earnestly expostulating with his people. They had forgotten his mercies; they had trimmed their way so as to tempt idolatrous nations into alliance; they had not heeded the chastisements which were intended to bring them to repentance; and therefore God offers a remonstrance as tender as the appeal of a father, and, in the event of that failing to subdue the stubborn heart, he threatens to reject the confidences and to hinder the prosperity of Israel. Such is a general outline of the chapter. But following the order of the text, we are arrested by three considerations:

I. The possibility of dishonouring the great memories of life. "Neither said they, Where is the Lord, that brought us up out of the land of Egypt?" An event like that would fix itself in the memory for ever. Who could forget the Egyptian bondage, the sufferings, the groans, the horrors of a lifetime? Who could forget the joy of deliverance, the rapture, the ungovernable ecstasy of triumph? Yet ancient Israel was as little humbled and stimulated by divine mercy as if Egypt had never plagued it with intolerable oppressions. The dark night was forgotten, and Israel did not know who had lifted upon it the brightness and hope of morning.

The great memories of life are dishonoured (1) when the vividness of their recollection fades; (2) when their moral purpose is overlooked or misunderstood; (3) when their strengthening and stimulating function is suspended.

What would human life be without its hallowed memories? Man must have facts as well as hopes,—something to which he can go back with confidence; back to some place where he met God; to some bush that burned without being consumed; to some slaughtered lion, or overthrown giant of Gath; something about which he can say with confidence, God did this for me and it shall be holy to me for ever. There Jeremiah 2:8).

The most affecting of all subjects to contemplate Jeremiah 2:10-11

The text may be put into other words, thus: "Go over to the islands of the Chittim, the isles and coast lands of the far west; then go to Kedar, away in the eastern desert,—go from cast to west,—and ask if any heathen land has given up its idols (gods that are no gods), and you will find that no such thing has ever taken place; but whilst the heathen have kept to their gods as if they had real and strong love for them, my people, for whom I have done so much, whose names are on the palms of my hands, have turned away from me, and have given up their living and loving God for that which can do them no good."

There must be some way of accounting for conduct so clearly unreasonable and ungrateful. We may perhaps find our way to the secret step by step, if we notice one or two things that we ourselves are in the habit of doing. If, for example, a man shall say that he has a book in his hand, we who see the book will at once agree with him that such is the fact; but if he adds that it is a good book we shall wait until we have read it before we say anything about its value. Merely to say that it is a book is to secure unanimity; but to say that it is a good book is to open the way for difference of opinion. Jeremiah 2:14-37

This portion of the Book of Jeremiah is filled with penetrating questions. From the fourteenth verse to the end of the chapter inquiries are showered upon us. It would appear as if these verses were full of challenges and impeachments and accusations, subtly and delicately conveyed in the form of interrogation. Where there is not a positive statement made, there is a positive incrimination in the very form of the inquiry. These are what may be called argumentative questions. They are not inquiries asking simply which is the way, what is the hour of the day, what is the name of this or that individual or object,—innocent, pithless, all but needless inquiries: the questions are constructed upon a basis of argument and impeachment. What wonderful things can be done in a question! Is there any department of rhetoric or human utterance in which so much can be done with so little? It is difficult to print a question. Oftentimes the pith of the inquiry is in the tone of the inquirer. Here we are face to face with argumentative interrogations, and the interrogator is looking at us and looking into us and looking through us; it is a cross-examination of spears and darts and two-edged swords. In some places argumentative questions are deprecated; it is ruled by the authority of the occasion that such questions cannot be put, because they are too detailed and argumentative. In other places argumentative questions are constructed for the purpose of forcing the hand of those who for the time being hold the secret of policy and the destiny of empire; but the assemblies are very careful about the form in which the questions are put. Who shall challenge God's way of questioning? When he asks a question he pronounces a judgment; when he thrusts an interrogation upon an unwilling witness he delivers a verdict and a sentence.

Let us study the verses with these explanations in view. Take, for example, the fourteenth verse:—

"Is Israel a servant? is he a homeborn slave? why is he spoiled?" ( Jeremiah 2:14)

"The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his lane, waste: his cities are burned without inhabitants" ( Jeremiah 2:15).

That comes of going from home, leaving sacred discipline, taking life into one's own hand, assuming the mastership of one's own fortune and destiny. Woe betide the man who goes beyond the bounds which God has fixed! Immediately outside those bounds the lion waits, or the plague, or the pestilence, or the pit hardly hidden but deep immeasurable. Luther said: Who would paint a picture of the present condition of the Church, let him paint a young woman in a wilderness or in some desert place; and round about her let him figure hungry lions whose eyes are glaring upon her and whose mouths are open to devour her substance and her beauty. Is the Church in a much better condition today? That is the natural condition of the Church. The Church always challenges the lion, tempts the devourer, excites the passions of evil men. When an evil generation tolerates the Church, applauds its dogmas, and flatters its ministry, it is because that Church has surrendered her prerogatives and trampled, her functions in the dust. All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. That is not a historical statement limited chronologically; it is the eternal truth: wherever there is light it must fight the darkness; wherever there is holiness it must judge all evil, and make bad men afraid, and set them on the defensive, and extort from them the most vehement denunciations. Beware of a fictitious peace; beware of the flattery of bad men—it is because you are turning your eyes away from their false weights and scales and measuring-rods; it is because you wink when you pass by their revels and their orgies: it is because you are deaf when you hear their evil speeches and their cruel blasphemies. Know that the Church of the living God is alive, and is fulfilling her destiny, when ail round about her are men more cruel than ravenous beasts. Israel, the homeborn slave, who ought to have walked arm-in-arm with the son of the house, left the precincts of the family and plunged into the way of lions.

In the seventeenth verse is another illustrative instance:—

"Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, when he led thee by the way?" ( Jeremiah 2:17)

Ah, that is the point of the sword! Is not all ruin suicide? To be murdered must indeed be awful, but to have put the knife to one's own heart, to have torn down the divine image from the human soul, to have choked the throat that was praying, or to have forced out the prayer by some profanity, and to know at the end that this is our own doing,—surely this will bow down a man in the day of judgment, will bitterly and heavily afflict him in the hour of self-examination: he will not be able to say, See what a rent this dagger made, or what a thrust was given by that cruel hand; he cannot point to the gashes upon him and trace them to spears of enemies: when he looks upon his whole condition he will be compelled to say—I did it; this is my work; this is the fruit of my own sin; this comes of the policy that has in it no element of godliness and no gleam of virtue. Is there not a cause? Are not things related? Do not events belong to one another by primary and secondary sequences, often difficult to trace in all their outgoings and contact with the rest of this mystery which we call life? Do not our dead selves spring up in sudden and frightful resurrection when we least expected the reappearance? Does not the spectre come to the feast and sit down at the right hand and make the right side cold? or sit immediately opposite and dare us to drink the foaming wine and enjoy the sweet viands? Is there not a cause? Can a man sow, and not reap? Can a man fight against God, and be at peace with the universe? Can a planet detach itself from its centre and create an action of its own that shall be in rhythm with the march of the heavens? The suicide cannot be hidden; the blood marks cannot be obliterated.

"And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river?" ( Jeremiah 2:18).

Apply this to life, and who can live? Nevertheless, we must not lower the standard. Although we cannot always so control circumstances as to realise an ideal character, yet the ideal itself must be held up and magnified, and nothing must be allowed to becloud the glory of that idealism. But were it to be applied to life, the city would be revolutionised, houses of business would be opened no more, commerce would be driven into the sea and be buried in unpitied oblivion. The city is full of plagues. Life is thick-sown with snares and gins and traps. Our prayers have in them an accent of worldliness; our adoration sometimes furtively turns its eyes away from the uplifted majesty and throne of heaven, and fixes its longing gaze on trees forbidden and fields proscribed. Who can live? "Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe:" forbid that I should lower my ideal in order to excuse my shortcomings.

Now comes a solemn appeal—a repetition, indeed, of what is given in the seventeenth verse—

"Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the Lord thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord God of hosts" ( Jeremiah 2:19).

This is the appeal of experience. In detailing the Jeremiah 2:21).

The questions still roll on, the interrogations fall from heaven with crushing power, the most mocking of all we find in the twenty-eighth verse: "Where are thy gods that thou hast made thee?" The Lord said in the twenty-seventh verse, "In the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and save us;" the cowards will yet come back again; they who have mocked me shall pray to me: but I will say to them in their prostration, "Where are thy gods that thou hast made thee?" That is the attribute of a false god, that he always forsakes his worshippers in trouble. What will our gods do for us if their names be Money, Fortune, Fame, Popularity, Luck, Chance, Success, Selfishness? They will not bear the stress of hard weather; they have no objection to laugh with us in a sunny hour, but they are useless when the wind blows from all the points of the compass, and the horizon charges itself with threatening thunders. Only truth can stand all tempests and all judgment. Christ says he will be with us even unto the end of the world; the sacred voice of the unseen Comforter says, "I will never leave thee nor forsake thee." The characteristic of idols is that they fall away when they are most wanted; the characteristic of Christ is that he is nearest to us when we need him most. Who can abide the day of the divine mockery? Who can stand before divine contempt? Surely there is no passage so terrible in all Holy Writ as the one which says that God will laugh at the calamity of the wicked, and mock when their fear cometh. These are words that bear no paraphrase; they affright us; they overwhelm us; they extort from us the cry, My soul, come not thou into that secret!

Finally, it is good for us to hear the divine questioning; it is healthy for us to submit ourselves quietly to the criticism of God. He will not ask questions that he can avoid asking that would give us pain or afflict us with humiliation; when he comes with the surgical knife it is that he may only amputate that which is mortified or useless; when he sits in judgment upon us it is only that he may take away the dross; when he burns us it is that he may test the gold of our nature and prove our quality. The questions are not always in words; the divine inquiries may be in events, in those mysterious occurrences which we designate by the name of Providence: the child is taken away, and the bereavement is a question; the property is all gone so that the rich man becomes poor, and the poverty is an inquiry; all the stratagem, and wit, and cunning, and skill of the old energetic time forsake the fruitful, fertile mind, so that he who was wise in counsel is dumb and without resource, and his speechlessness, his infertility of mind, is a question. A man should puncture himself with many a "Why is this?" "How is this?" The more we examine ourselves the less God will have to examine us. Spare not the judicial interrogation; it may bring a hopeful death—the death which precedes true life. When God asks us questions, may we be able to hide ourselves in Christ. His Cross is the answer to the questionings of the law. His righteousness is the answer to the impeachment of outraged virtue. His sacrifice is the answer to sin. His priesthood is the reply to Satan.

Divine Questions

Jeremiah 2:31-37

This appeal was addressed to the men who were immediately round about the prophet. It was therefore direct, personal, and was to be answered by the living voice. This is the kind of preaching we do not like. This preaching would empty any church in the world! Yet it is the only preaching that is worthy of attention. It is in vain that we refer to ancient history if we cannot apply it to modern instances. We are trifling with ourselves—that is to say, with our souls—if we think only of truths that are abstract and without immediate application to our own condition. The prophets thus spake to the men that were near at hand. In a sense, they seemed to arrest those; men, and put questions to them. Surely, if we will not allow others to arrest us, we ought to arrest ourselves, and put down plain answers to plain questions, without hurry, or din, or noise; and we ought to take both plain question and plain answer into religious solitude, and look at them until we burn with shame, renouncing every plea of self-excuse, and accepting the divine judgment as divine righteousness: then will come healing, then we shall get at the bottom of things, and be real: the cure is not from without, it is from above, and goes immediately to the core and root of all human wrong.

The people were required to answer two questions: "Have I been a wilderness unto Israel? have I been a land of darkness unto Israel?" Speak out. If God is chargeable with wrong, say so. Put your finger directly upon his errors, and say in plain terms, God is responsible for this: these are not human slips—trifling, petty mistakes, but the miscarriages of justice, the perversions of providence, the mistakes of God. Let us have plain language all round. We may lose ourselves if we begin to multiply words indefinitely. The question is—"Have I been a wilderness unto Israel?"—have I pinched and starved my people? have I led them amongst stony places? have I been inhospitable to the lives that looked to me for bread and security and nourishment? Say Jeremiah 2:32).

Now the voice changes, and the element of accusation enters into it very sharply:—

"Why trimmest thou thy way to seek love? therefore hast thou also taught the wicked ones thy ways" ( Jeremiah 2:33).

Mark the hardening process of sin as referred to in the thirty-fourth verse:—

"Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor innocents: I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these." ( Jeremiah 2:34)

"Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria" ( Jeremiah 2:36).

Literally, Why all these shifting policies? why all these new alliances? why be performing a kind of moral conjuring? The bad man gads about, or walks about, from place to place, saying, "Where shall I settle next? what communion shall I take up with now? what novelty is there in the town today? Is there any new church built that I can go to, until I make the place too hot for myself by neglecting its institutions and turning my back upon its appeals? Is there anything new in Egypt? I am tired of Babylon: I lived a long time in Assyria, and now I have cast all that off, and I am looking in Egyptian directions for new alliances and new hopes." Is this only an ancient experience? Is it not a clear and simple reading of today's purpose and action? Are there not many people who are all things by turns and nothing long—men who are wanting in conviction and thorough persuasion of soul, incapable of enthusiasm, driven about by every wind of doctrine; men who have called at all the hovels cf heresy, and have never settled in the sanctuary of truth? We need not alter the terms; they are simple as our best-known mother tongue, and they will stand for the purposes of scrutiny all the while, not needing change or modification. Be something. Belong to somebody. Do not mistake roving at will for a safe dwelling at home. No Christian teacher will say, You must be this rather than that, so far as ecclesiastical relations are concerned; but every Christian teacher will say, Take advice: consider: come to conclusions, and be steadfast: prove all things; hold fast that which is good; in understanding be no more children, but be men.

What was the result of this trimming and gadding about, this changing between Assyria and Egypt?

"Yea, thou shalt go forth from him, and thine hands upon thine head, for the Lord hath rejected thy confidences, and thou shall not prosper in them" ( Jeremiah 2:37).

After all, having been in the houses we have mentioned, either as owners or as visitors—the houses of wealth, health, invention, pleasure,—we can now say soberly, with the quietness of unalterable conviction, There is only one altar that can be trusted—the altar of the living God—the Cross of God's own Son. Let us renounce our false confidences, put away our new tricks, and come straight back to the eternal thought—the love which was before the foundations of the earth. Men will continue to be betrayed by novelties; but at the last they will say, The novelties were in vain. There are those who are speaking from other books than the Bible; and they are intellectual men, able men; they are persons who are capable of treating great subjects in a great manner; they have turned away from Moses and the prophets, from the minstrels and the evangelists of the Bible, and have taken up with new sensations and new manners: but "the word of the Lord abideth for ever;" it says concerning these men, ""They have forgotten me days without number;" but in some night of storm, in some stress of weather, bitten by some tremendous wolf amid the snows of the new lands they have sought, they will come back to me; and I am a forgiving book, I will open on the page on which it is written, "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.""

Prayer

Almighty God, in the day of battle thou art a shield and buckler, in our great fear and in our last distress thou art as a shining light and a delivering hand; and when we come to the last river, broad and black and cold, thou dost speak to it, and the waters separate, and we pass through as on dry land. Thou hast not neglected our life either here or there; in its strongest hour thou hast taught it to pray, in its utmost weakness thou hast taught it to hope, and when the last scene of all has come, the farewell, thou hast then been near at hand to speak kind words, old gospels in new tones, reviving the heart, establishing and assuring the faith. When we were a-hungered thou didst find bread for us in unexpected places; under thy blessing flowers arise in the wilderness and great stretches of green pasture in the desert, yea, and water springs for us out of the rock, and honey is found where man never found it before. So then thou dost cover our whole life with thy care, thy Spirit provides for every want, answers every question, accompanies us through every step, nor leaves us until our weary wandering feet stand on the safe side of the river. All this knowledge comes to us in Christ, and through Christ, and for Christ's sake. This is his sweet Gospel, his delivering word, his message of emancipation, his good tidings of great joy. Enable us now to find our sufficiency in God and not in ourselves, and under all stresses, perils, and agonies of life may we hear a word behind us and round about us, and in us, coming from every quarter of heaven itself, mighty as thunder, gentle as the breeze that injures not the weakest flower, full of music, full of strength, My grace is sufficient for thee. Amen.